Instead of 3rd party APIs, why not team up with the Gigablast guy who has his own crawling technology that seems to have the potential of Google's someday with the right funding.
DuckDuckGo has front-end with weak backend, Gigablast has backend with weak front-end. It's a perfect match.
It's interesting that Gabriel is complaining about lack of support. Does he really expect support at 4am for a free service?
So far he's had it good: he's built a not-bad quite successful - if niche - search engine off the back of a multi-billion dollar company who have so far provided their search api for free. To complain about the lack of support seems trite.
My intention was certainly not to complain, and so I added the following update to the post.
Update: in hope that this post does not come across as complaining, I want to add that I'm very grateful for the BOSS platform. I don't know where I'd be today without it. At the same time, I'm in a somewhat unique position to comment on it, and I think the above are valid concerns with regards to charging for it that could benefit from more public discussion.
For example, if I were to be solely relying on BOSS, the recent 24hr downtime would have cost DuckDuckGo many users. While I am certainly grateful for the platform, the reality is that if you want to build a serious search engine on it, you need reliability because users require their search engines to be highly available.
While my query volume is certainly lower at night (in the US), it is not by any means zero as DDG has users worldwide. And I'm sure for other international BOSS users, their query volume may peak in those CA off-hours.
DuckDuckGo has front-end with weak backend, Gigablast has backend with weak front-end. It's a perfect match.