I think it's more coincidental than ironic.

Ironically, Bing (powering DDG) is not mentioned in the article at all.

Yes it was?

“Today, DuckDuckGo combines data from more than 400 sources into its search results: Microsoft’s Bing is predominantly used to surface relevant pages, but Wikipedia, Apple Maps, TripAdvisor and DuckDuckGo’s own web crawler also contribute.”

Ironically, Bing Rewards is one of very few tools moving towards Lanier's glorious vision of paying people for their data.

I was wondering why my search queries were returning no results.