How do scammers manipulate content of search results in Duckduckgo?

[mediclaser]

I've got a friend who almost got scammed due to manipulated results of a Duckduckgo search. He was trying to find the phone number of a local car dealership in his city. But the DDG results gave him numbers which are no longer in service, so he tried Google and got results with the correct phone number.

Apparently, those wrong numbers found in the DDG search results belonged to scammers. How do scammers do this? It's the typical results in a DDG search that include a small map and pinpoint of the business address.

[gittiest personITW]

It isn't really realistic that a scammer manipulated search results on a minor search engine to pretend to be a small business.
If it really was a scammer (rather than the business changing their phone number or contact details or was taken over by another company) then if you look hard enough you'd find that same scammer details on Bing or Google.
They all send out bots to look for keywords/phrases on their search engines. If you look at the bottom of this page you might find the name of a few users and a search engine bot.
Your friend was probably just a bit unlucky.... or the alleged scammer purchased advertising on DDG (yes you too can purchase advertising on DDG).
https://spreadprivacy.com/duckduckgo-revenue-model/

[Portreve]

Great. Now I know where to list my de-aging (some might call it regeneration?) pills for just $49.99 + $10 free shipping.