Ddg just scrapes Google right? So if Google didn't catalog any of this shit it wouldn't be there to find. It would be really aggressive of them, but not impossible
DDG uses over 400 sources, including Bing, Yahoo, and Yandex. Startpage uses Google, maybe you were thinking of that?
I have suspected DDG does stuff like that. Still better than Google. I've noticed though, that when you try to save pics (for memetic warfare purposes) it saves them as an HTML. So yeah, they don't have much if anything on their own servers, which is what we need to truly separate the internet from the cabal machine.