I get what you’re saying, but in that case the google.com interface isn’t a search engine; nor the load balancers and proxies between it and the search application backend. And then, maybe those don’t count because there is some special sauce in database procedures that are the real workhorses.

Pedantry all the way down.

DDG has been superb for me for a few years now often returning results I prefer over Google. I’m really pleased with it.