Not all of us can be on board with the worlds largest ad-server.
I quit Google when it purchased Doubleclick back in 2008.
We used to write Doubleclick out via .htaccess back in the day because of it's nefarious intrusions on our servers - Google = Good, Doubleclick = Bad.
Google gave up on it's goodness with the purchase of Doubleclick. Google chose to join them rather than beat them and the rest was history.
Since the acquisition of Doubleclick, Google proceeded to go down that road.
A heads up to webmasters -- Google can now inject ads into your web pages just like Doubleclick tried to do way back in the day. Funny how everybody blocked Doubleclick when it tried to do that, but nobody bothers trying to block Google when it tries to do that today ... the intrusions are actually quite welcome now because ... you know ... Google.
Index results on Google stopped making perfect sense after 2008.
I had a habit of searching things like University white papers on various research subjects back in the day, and after the incorporation of Doubleclick suddenly I was encouraged to buy brown shoes from Indonesia -- It was a total disaster.
Google killed off keyword search and chose to instead use the spyware tactics of Doubleclick. It took a few years for Google to get it's head wrapped around all of the new telemetry data that Doubleclick sent back.
During that period, Google managed to stay in the game by purchasing loyalty with introducing free stuff for it's end users.
There have only been 3 great search engines since 1995 -- Ixquick, Alta Vista, and Google. Start Page ruined Ixquick by caving to Google pressure when it began to use the Google index for it's results instead of using their own - Alta Vista was killed off by Yahoo when it started using the Yahoo index for it's results. Google was killed off when it purchased Doubleclick and became the largest ad-server on the planet.
Even though DuckDuckGo pulls it's results from the Bing index and sends all of it's telemetry to Microsoft, I'll still use it. There simply isn't any other choice really -- You'll either be using Bing or Google simply because it's just much too cost effective and tempting to siphon off of the largest indexes -- There's no money to build any more large indexes that are truly independent from Bing or Google so we're all pretty much stuck with what we have.
Modern search isn't designed to help you find stuff like it was back in the day -- Modern search is designed to show you things that you've already been looking at. This is why things like telemetry and following you around on the internet is so important to companies like Google and Microsoft.
White label search is what it is.
Off brand search like DDG or Brave, or whoever else is only going to purchase what they're able to afford. Paying for API access isn't anything new at all. Off brand search like DDG, for instance, does have it's own smaller index (DDG has the largest private index and is 3rd only to Bing and Google) but it still has to purchase API access from Bing in order to pay the bills.
DDG protects your privacy, this is true (you'll never find telemetry data on DDG servers) -- But your privacy stops where Bing's API begins.
The reults on the white label, or off brand search, are totally dependent on just how much of a % of the telemetry/data/index they are willing to purchase. If for instance .. the more money the off brand has, the better the results are going to be, because they can pay for more access to whoever they're doing business with. Some of those who can access the Google API may not show ads on their results because they don't have #1 enough money to do that, or #2 the percentage that Google want's from the ads shown are too high. Off brand search also may not be able to show their own ads because if they did, Google would cut off their API access because suddenly the off brand became a competitor and Google certainly couldn't have that.
Both Google and Bing control the results, either a little or a lot, on all of these white label search entities.
.In China I think Bing is the best.
