[HN Gopher] DuckDuckGo was down
___________________________________________________________________
DuckDuckGo was down
Author : jshupe
Score : 163 points
Date : 2024-05-23 06:03 UTC (16 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (duckduckgo.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (duckduckgo.com)
| allanrbo wrote:
| not down for me.
| jshupe wrote:
| site responds but search results are down on my phone wifi, and
| LTE, and desktop
| kbrkbr wrote:
| Same here still
| kernelsanderz wrote:
| down for me. doesn't get search results
| pcvarmint wrote:
| It started failing on searches 1-2 hours ago.
| secondary_op wrote:
| bing.com also down, looks like duckduckgo is frontend to bing
|
| at least bing images,
| https://www.bing.com/images/search?q=katrina
| secondary_op wrote:
| > It's not you, it's us
|
| > Bing isn't available right now, but everything should be back
| to normal very soon.
|
| > https://www4.bing.com/bingparachute/panda.png
|
| > https://www4.bing.com/bingparachute/bing_logo.png
| FriedrichN wrote:
| It seems that https://www.startpage.com also uses Bing for its
| images.
| hilux wrote:
| 22-May-2024 ... the day privacy (finally) died.
| secondary_op wrote:
| Presume that duckduckgo is not private or otherwise
| compromised.
|
| For example many things I search trough duckduckgo later that
| day showed up in my twitter/x.com algorithmic feed, coincidence
| ? don't think so.
| n_ary wrote:
| Or it could be that, when you search something, you also
| click through to some of the results, where FB/AdWords and
| other trackers are present.
|
| Alternatively, there was a fallacy of human mind(forgot the
| name), where if you think of something, your brain will start
| focusing on the random occurrences of that things in all
| places. So, those ads were always there, your brain just
| started focusing suddenly on those as you were thinking of
| those things.
|
| Note: Not affiliated with DDG.
| 256_ wrote:
| It's called the Baader-Meinhof effect.
| secondary_op wrote:
| Yes, in this case only way to not be spied on is to not go
| on the internet
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frequency_illusion
| weberer wrote:
| There's also the likelyhood that the pages you landed on sent
| your info to their "ad partners"
| logtempo wrote:
| duckduckgo don't prevent website to track you or deposit
| cookies etc. Once you're on a website, let's say twitter,
| duckduckgo does nothing.
|
| > When you view Twitter content such as embedded Tweets,
| buttons, or timelines integrated into other websites using
| Twitter for Websites, Twitter may receive information,
| including the web page you visited, your IP address, browser
| type, operating system, and cookie information.
| (https://developer.x.com/en/docs/twitter-for-
| websites/privacy)
|
| So, if you visit a news paper that have embedded twitter post
| in it, twitter might know you passed by this website.
| naitgacem wrote:
| I just experienced this as well. I had a giggle when I opened a
| new tab and searched "is duckduckgo down" and the default search
| engine is ... duckduckgo.
|
| Still no results .. strange :P
| ffpip wrote:
| What a coincidence!
|
| I used it after 3-4 months and it didn't show any search results.
| Thought I had forgotten how to use their !bangs feature. Turns
| out it is down
| alentred wrote:
| https://www.bing.com/ is down too at the moment.
|
| Curiously I cannot find a "health" or a "status" page for either.
| kuro_neko wrote:
| Does it vary by region? Mine works fine for bing.
| pcvarmint wrote:
| Bing is sluggish but seems to work sometimes now.
|
| I wonder if it's a DDoS attack on Bing.
| Iulioh wrote:
| ....can you really DDoS Bing?
| wannacboatmovie wrote:
| Maybe today's the day we find out DDG is just a UI to an Amazon
| Go-style backend: a room full of workers in India typing the
| queries into Bing and copy/pasting the results back to you.
| tgv wrote:
| DDG runs on bing, so that squares. Apparently, MS uses Bing for
| their portal, because I can't search inside Azure portal
| neither.
| ErrrNoMate wrote:
| like a very large number of things we are pitched as search
| engines: https://www.searchenginemap.com/
| windowshopping wrote:
| works for me 8 minutes later, idk
| mrweasel wrote:
| The lack of status pages is annoying. Neither Bing, Ecosia or
| DuckDuckGo have one.
| beretguy wrote:
| https://xkcd.com/2347/
| danesparza wrote:
| Wow. This.
| 1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote:
| It has not been down for me.
| hpeter wrote:
| same. I just noticed it too, about 30 minutes ago
| mrweasel wrote:
| It seems to be all search engines powered by Bing. Ecosia isn't
| working either, and they also don't have a status page.
| opem wrote:
| yep
| anoplus wrote:
| Started about an hour ago (~1716454800000)
| camiat wrote:
| Yup, I am also running into the same issue where duck duck go is
| returning the error message:
|
| > Sorry, we ran into an error displaying these results. Click
| here to try again.
|
| I thought it was just duck duck go, but I tried searching with
| bing, and was met with:
|
| > It's not you, it's us
|
| > Bing isn't available right now, but everything should be back
| to normal very soon.
| DeathArrow wrote:
| Maybe it was acquired by Google?
| teekert wrote:
| Yes, seeing it too, for about an hour already! Came here to
| check. Nothing on their xitter page but this thing is spiking:
| https://downdetector.com/status/duckduckgo/
| 256_ wrote:
| If you look up "hacker news", it at least shows you an insert
| from the Wikipedia article, even if there are no normal results:
| https://html.duckduckgo.com/html?q=hacker+news
| meonkeys wrote:
| I love this low-tech DDG interface! Made my day, thanks. (aha,
| https://duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/features/non-ja...
| mentions the "HTML" and "Lite" versions)
|
| Also, why is your username green?
| bun_terminator wrote:
| They lost all relevance after they gleefully announced their
| manipulation of search results 2 years ago
| rurban wrote:
| Still better than Google
| beretguy wrote:
| Still there are better alternatives to ddg. I use Brave and
| Kagi.
| rurban wrote:
| But not free. I use Fennec with ddg. Loved Kagi, but too
| expensive for my German income
| em-bee wrote:
| brave search is free.
| beretguy wrote:
| Yes, Kagi is expensive. But it also has useful features
| other search engines don't. It's nice if you can afford
| it.
| CTOSian wrote:
| bing as well
| pierrebeucher wrote:
| Same problem, encountering similar problems with Qwant (though
| not always)
| WCSTombs wrote:
| Bing is up now, but DDG is still down.
| worik wrote:
| Comes and goes for me
| mgoetzke wrote:
| down right now.
| n_ary wrote:
| My conspiracy mind tells me, may be bing changed their search api
| with breaking changes or suddenly introduced massive
| billing(think Twitter API, reddit API et al.) hence all search-
| engines pulled an immediate break without having time to
| fix/update.
| hi-v-rocknroll wrote:
| Yup. Maybe it's a NS, LB, or IPv6 only problem because it works
| eventually.
| nirse wrote:
| Is it just me, or has DDG been having trouble often lately? Or is
| it just a combination with some outage + degradation of search
| results lately that makes me g! regularly these days? Didn't use
| to need that.
| epolanski wrote:
| Bing's been working oddly for few days now for me.
|
| I guess it impacts the other engines that are based on it.
| blackeyeblitzar wrote:
| Ecosia is also down. I think all of these use Bing under the
| covers? If it is actually a Bing problem, it is pretty incredible
| that MS has an outage this long. Makes me think twice about the
| stability of Azure.
| whitehat33 wrote:
| DDG Site responds, but gives and error and is not showing search
| results.
| pluto_modadic wrote:
| Hmmm... Is having a status page a sign of engineering maturity?
| DANmode wrote:
| Engineering _excellence_ , maybe.
|
| And then the curve ends back on the ground,
|
| with manual updates being swapped back into the same previously
| automated status pages,
|
| because money.
| mnuu wrote:
| DDG down here
| jollyca wrote:
| Same here - it used to work intermittently this morning (1 out
| of 3 searches), but now I get the same error every time
| maryShap wrote:
| Get the same error with both Firefox and Edge. Very frustrating.
| loloquwowndueo wrote:
| The site is having trouble, a different browser is not going to
| help.
| spaniard89277 wrote:
| keyword !brave works though
| ikt wrote:
| I duno how this isn't getting more views tbh
|
| Ecosia and Duckduckgo and Bing are down, there's at least 5% of
| the search engine market (the non-google part) down at the moment
| beretguy wrote:
| Man, can you imagine if this happened to Google! I'm so curious
| now.
| hhh wrote:
| because not that many people use search engines other than
| google
| dzhiurgis wrote:
| which is surprising given how unbearable google has gotten
|
| it's a bit like sticking to using windows in 2010
| throwaway290 wrote:
| It's not surprising given how much better it is than
| everything else
| loloquwowndueo wrote:
| lol what? Google or Windows? Got a chuckle out of this
| either way.
| throwaway290 wrote:
| who said anything about windows?
| ohthatsnotright wrote:
| I've been migrating away from google with their recent
| changes because it's gotten less and less useful in
| getting me the answers. DDG has done better, but it's not
| as good as Google used to be before it was taken over by
| MBAs.
| throwaway290 wrote:
| DDG is Bing. Using DDG is supporting Microsoft. Even if
| Bing was better than Google I wouldn't do it on principle
| adamomada wrote:
| It's not surprising. For approximately everyone there are
| only two search engines: Chrome and Edge
| hawk_ wrote:
| I know ecosia relies on bing but why does this affect DDG? Do
| they internally use bing as well?
| bdcravens wrote:
| https://duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/sources
|
| "Of course, we have more traditional links and images in our
| search results too, which we largely source from Bing."
| secondary_op wrote:
| That's it, ddg is gone from my Firefox and hopefully from my
| browsing habits.
|
| Speaking about Firefox, it is insane how needlessly complicated
| it is to add new search engine to Firefox [1]
| 1. Open a new tab and type about:config in the address bar
| 2. In the search box type:
| browser.urlbar.update2.engineAliasRefresh 3. Click on the
| little + symbol on the right. It should look like after you
| pressed it: boolean true value 4. Go to firefox Settings
| - Search. Or enter this in the address bar:
| about:preferences#search 5. In the "Search Shortcuts"
| section you should notice a new "add" button. search add button
| 6. Press the add button and fill in the name, search engine url
| and a keyword(optional). 7. Go to the "Default Search
| Engine" section and select the engine you just added.
|
| [1] https://superuser.com/questions/7327/how-to-add-a-custom-
| sea...
| joveian wrote:
| Neat, I kept thinking there should be a way to add keywords to
| that list and now I know how to do it (execept for some reason
| you can only add a new engine with a keyword there and not add
| a keyword to an existing engine :( ). I use mozlz4 and aeson-
| pretty to look at the search.json.mozlz4 file.
|
| https://github.com/jusw85/mozlz4
|
| https://github.com/informatikr/aeson-pretty
|
| To be fair you can also just right click on the URL bar when on
| a page that advertises having a search and click Add <name of
| search>. Or if you want to search by keyword you can right
| click on most search boxes and click "add a keyword for this
| search". Mycroft Project has a bunch of random search engines
| ready to add to Firefox (via right clicking on the URL bar when
| on the search entry page):
|
| https://mycroftproject.com/
|
| If you use more than one search engine, I like the Right Click
| Search addon to be able to search highlighted text with
| multiple engines easily (unfortunately not monitored by Mozilla
| but you can look over the code before installing and turn off
| updates since it is quite simple and requires no permissions):
|
| https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/right-click-
| search/
|
| The most privacy friendly way to search is to search the site
| you want to end up on when you know what site that is and they
| have a usable search.
|
| For general search engines, I suggest giving Metager a try, it
| is a non-profit metasearch.
|
| https://metager.org/
| mrweasel wrote:
| > For search engines, I suggest giving Metager a try
|
| Cool, might as well give it a go while Ecosia is down.
| Thanks.
| cbovis wrote:
| Non-Google recommendations in the interim?
| beretguy wrote:
| Kagi
| sumosudo wrote:
| searx.org
|
| public instances https://searx.space
| em-bee wrote:
| https://search.brave.com/
|
| using that as my default search engine on firefox since last
| year. quite happy with the quality of results.
| shiandow wrote:
| It's fairly quick and supports !bangs, and it actually works
| right now... I'll give it a try.
| cbovis wrote:
| Looks great thank you. I see there's a !brave bang for
| duckduckgo too so no need to change up browser defaults.
| ColinHayhurst wrote:
| https://seirdy.one/posts/2021/03/10/search-engines-with-own-...
| BubBob wrote:
| In the meantime you can try KARMA, the first search engine
| dedicated to protecting animals and biodiversity! It's powered by
| Brave Search so it's privacy friendly and independent from the
| GAFAMs. You can check it out here: https://karmasearch.org
| maryShap wrote:
| Duckduckgo doesn't work on Windows 11 but does work on Windows 10
| beretguy wrote:
| I... don't understand how that's possible.
| bitnasty wrote:
| Serving different resources based on reported user agent
| data.
| RegW wrote:
| I'm using 10 - it doesn't work for me.
| Mountain_Skies wrote:
| DuckDuckGo also is unable to provide search results, which seems
| to confirm they use Bing as a base for their searches.
| riffraff wrote:
| ditto for Ecosia.
| adamomada wrote:
| Startpage too, but only on mobile (???)
| deliriumchn wrote:
| Yes, they use bing https://duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-
| pages/results/sources...
| the_70x wrote:
| DuckDuckGo is just a search proxy
| beretguy wrote:
| I also sometimes get 500 on Brave Search, but not always? Kagi
| works fine. Yeah, something is wrong with bing. That's what you
| get when you rely on others instead of building your own. A jenga
| tower. https://xkcd.com/2347/
| pythux wrote:
| Please see my answer to another similar message of yours here:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40452726
|
| Brave Search is fully independent and does not rely on Bing
| whatsoever so any 500 is unrelated to this incident.
| dvh wrote:
| It was me. I asked it which pigeon has orange beak and it crashed
| it.
| saikatsg wrote:
| Let me help you ;) https://unsplash.com/photos/blue-and-white-
| bird-with-orange-...
| dvh wrote:
| That's him. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_wood_pigeon
| linker3000 wrote:
| Actually, I think it was me asking "Show me an example of a
| major systems outage at Microsoft."
|
| /Bets on "If it's not DNS, they'll be rolling back a poorly-
| tested patch they just installed."?
| jmcnulty wrote:
| They're aware of the problem.
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/duckduckgo/comments/1cynfft/duckduc...
| mrweasel wrote:
| It's disappointing that a "meeh" Reddit post is total sum of
| communication from Bing, DuckDuckGo, Ecosia and others.
| farmdve wrote:
| While we are on the subject of search engines, which search
| engines still show you like blogs, forum posts and stuff like
| that? Most of the blogs for obscure projects or problems are no
| longer even discoverable.
| fp64 wrote:
| You're supposed to get your information from big platforms
| exclusively, otherwise how would you be able to see all the
| nice ads and "curated activism"?
| qwertox wrote:
| "Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological
| battle. That tramples curiosity" [0]
|
| [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| fp64 wrote:
| I'm sorry, I did not realize that complaining about big
| corporations using their monopoly was considered political
| and ideological now, but I suppose it makes sense. Please
| excuse my previous comment, I agree it's not helpful, and I
| should have resisted the urge to voice my frustration with
| the direction I see the internet heading
| UI_at_80x24 wrote:
| FWIW, I agree with your post and disagree that it
| violates the rules.
| __jonas wrote:
| https://search.marginalia.nu/
|
| https://blog.kagi.com/small-web
| pooper wrote:
| I tried marginalia with site: for my blog.
|
| > This website is not known to the search engine. To submit
| the website for crawling, follow these instructions.
| __jonas wrote:
| Yes, it's not a massive index that already includes every
| known website, that's not the goal of it at all.
|
| Is there something wrong with these instructions?
| ramenbytes wrote:
| Kagi. They actually have a filter setting to only show forum
| results. They have one for the "smallweb" as well. Also a
| "smallweb" landing page designed to help you discover niche
| creators like you mentioned. Here: https://kagi.com/smallweb/
| 123yawaworht456 wrote:
| this is cool as fuck
| ColinHayhurst wrote:
| Mojeek, fully independent index. self-disclosure: CEO
| renegat0x0 wrote:
| That is exactly why I scrape internet. I maintain all found
| domains in github:
|
| https://github.com/rumca-js/Internet-Places-Database
|
| I wanted to have all links about amiga, or commodore, chiptune.
|
| It is not a search engine. For now, it is only data.
|
| Maybe this will help somebody, or somebody will be able to use
| this data better.
|
| I have a demo app running on rpi. It may be immediately broken
| if top many ppl accessed it.
|
| https://renegat0x0.ddns.net/apps/places
| 1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote:
| How about providing an example of a blog for an obscure project
| or problem that is no longer discoverable.
| PascLeRasc wrote:
| Google with the udm-14 flag: https://udm14.com/
| niutech wrote:
| Brave Search Goggles to the rescue:
| https://search.brave.com/goggles/discover
| voidUpdate wrote:
| DDG relying on bing for doing searches is... strange to me. I
| feel like I've seen its own web crawler in my access logs
| WhereIsTheTruth wrote:
| NSA needs backup, when people wants to remain "private" ;)
| NikkiA wrote:
| It's other ! commands still work though, so !g will work as a
| backup or even !yandex if you feel that way inclined (and don't
| mind answering endless captchas
| gitaarik wrote:
| yeah of course that works because that just redirects to to
| another site
| beretguy wrote:
| Yeah, I knew they rely on Bing but didn't know this much. This
| really makes me not want to use ddg anymore. I'm seriously
| considering just paying $108/year to Kagi.
| biglyburrito wrote:
| You don't have to go straight to the Professional ($108/year,
| unlimited searches) plan. There's also the Trial (free, 100
| searches one-time) and Starter ($5/month, 3600 searches per
| year) plans, to help you figure out if it's worth spending
| for the unlimited plan.
|
| Once I hit 3600 searches & was faced with the prospect of
| either going back to DuckDuckGo & Google to provide inferior
| search results -OR- paying $108/year for Kagi, it made the
| choice pretty simple. But it took me a few months to get to
| that point, and I don't think I spent more than $15 in that
| time figuring out if Kagi was right for me.
| beretguy wrote:
| I am already on $5 plan and it's definitely worth it. I was
| able to find things that neither ddg nor brave could.
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| Most alternative search engines are backed by either Google or
| Bing. Some have their own indexes as well, but it's rare to see
| a fully independent search engine.
| biglyburrito wrote:
| Kagi is indie & works just fine, because it doesn't leverage
| either Google or Bing. IMO it works as well as Google used
| to, back when it didn't serve up SEO-tuned garbage or
| straight-up malware sites in its first pages.
|
| https://kagi.com
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| That isn't true at all, it uses a bunch of different
| providers (including my own search engine).
|
| "Our search results also include anonymized API calls to
| all major search result providers worldwide"
|
| - https://help.kagi.com/kagi/search-details/search-
| sources.htm...
| Kye wrote:
| DuckDuckNoGo
| pooper wrote:
| What makes me sad is that even the url decode function of duck
| duck go failed :(
|
| I'd have thought at least that part would work.
| SSLy wrote:
| at least the !bangs still work, they probably are implemented
| at their load balancers
| ekianjo wrote:
| ah thats why ddg was down too?
| IceWreck wrote:
| Yes, ddg is just a bing frontend which anonymizes results before
| sending them to MS.
| pixxel wrote:
| Bing wrappers exposed.
| maelito wrote:
| So, Kagi's not relying on Bing ?
| mgoetzke wrote:
| Teamviewer also seems to have issues. No one in our company can
| even log in, not even get past the email screen in their own web
| app
| mrweasel wrote:
| Is it just me or is it really weird that neither Microsoft, or
| ANY of the search engines that uses Bing on the backend has
| posted anything about this?
|
| DuckDuckGo and Ecosia has not been working all morning (CET) but
| there is zero indication on their sites that they are even aware
| of the problem. DuckDuckGo has a single Reddit posts and that's
| it.
| beretguy wrote:
| I kind of hope it's something to do with AI, like, I don't
| know, AI coming to conclusion that internet is bad for humanity
| and so it's trying to shut down a search engine, or something
| mildly dystopian like that.
| beAbU wrote:
| I went looking for a DDG status page this morning before seeing
| this link on HN. Google found a tweet from them earlier today
| with an announcement [1]
|
| I'm pretty surprised that I'm unable to find a dedicated status
| page for DDG - kinda horrible that I need to rely on
| twitter/reddit in order to know that they are having issues.
|
| I'm also a little tickled by the fact that I need to search
| "Duck Duck Go status !g" in order to be directed to Google,
| because searching for DDGs status on DDG does not, well, work.
|
| 1 - https://x.com/DuckDuckGo/status/1793557968027570527
| mrweasel wrote:
| That statement in that tweet is also strange, but it's the
| same for Qwant and Ecosia now. I wonder if they are
| contractually not allowed to state that there are issues with
| Bing, or if others are correct in that they really don't want
| to be to public about the Bing dependency.
| ricardo81 wrote:
| Because DDG markets itself as privacy focused, yet is hosted on
| MS servers.
|
| Ecosia make a lot about their green credentials but it's not
| obvious if they factor in the CO2 output of what Bing requires
| to product results.
| beretguy wrote:
| I don't see anybody mentioning Brave Search. I'm getting 500.
| Anybody else?
| Aaargh20318 wrote:
| One of the interesting things about this downtime is that it
| has highlighted how many 'alternative' search engines are
| really just a front-end for Bing.
| beretguy wrote:
| Not sure why your text is grey. I mean, yeah, "Dependency"
| xkcd exists for a reason: https://xkcd.com/2347/
|
| Except that in this case instead of a "random person in
| Nebraska" we have a multi billion dollar corporation.
| dewaldr wrote:
| Wait until the ChatGPT API goes down one day and see how just
| about all startups from the last 12 months are just wrappers.
| eskibars wrote:
| You don't need to look hard to find this happen. OpenAI has
| had several API outages this year
| pythux wrote:
| Hey, Brave engineer here. Brave Search is up and running
| (thanks to our fully independent index and no reliance on Bing
| whatsoever). Any 500 error is unrelated to the Bing incident.
|
| Would you be able to share a query if the 500 happens
| consistently? We'll look into it.
|
| Thanks for your help, I hope that helps,
| beretguy wrote:
| Test - works
|
| Test one - works
|
| Test one two three - got 500
|
| Feels strange.
|
| Edit:
|
| Hello - works
|
| Hello world - 500 again
|
| It's like, if you type in more than 1-2 words it gives you
| 500.
|
| Edit:
|
| Test one two - just gave me 500 this time. It's not very
| consistent. Maybe it's something on my end. I wonder if
| anybody can reproduce it. I made a screen recording to proof
| I'm not too crazy, if necessary.
| pythux wrote:
| Thanks! At the moment we are not observing any 500s on our
| end so it would definitely be very useful to get a screen
| recording so that we can pin-point any issue that you are
| facing.
| SushiHippie wrote:
| According to the comments on this lemmy post [0] Bing,
| DuckDuckGo, Ecosia, StartPage, Qwant are/were affected
|
| [0] https://lemmy.world/post/15708430
| datenyan wrote:
| Looks like it's affecting anything Bing-related, at least over
| here in Australia. Same symptoms for Bing and Ecosia.
| tu7001 wrote:
| Yep, (typing from Poland)
| tetris11 wrote:
| Same, Germany
| nobody9999 wrote:
| Yes. It certainly appears so, and has been down for at least a
| couple hours.
| nobody9999 wrote:
| This appears to be covered by the following HN submission which
| already has a dozen comments. Please redirect your interest
| there:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40451490
| drpossum wrote:
| If you still want to search with bing you can use this URL
|
| https://www4.bing.com/
| beretguy wrote:
| I don't, but I'm still curious what difference does that "4"
| make?
| drpossum wrote:
| It's one more than 3 (I think that host just doesn't have AI
| stuff associated or whatever is bringing it down)
| CassisW wrote:
| Hillarious! I was debugging a python script and didn't get
| results from duckduckgo and I was checking ANYTHING else first
| before checking their page manually.
|
| Then checking if my IP perhaps is blocked.
|
| Nope, down in general, no search results
| h2onock wrote:
| Perhaps it's time to give Mojeek a try if you haven't already.
| throwaway211 wrote:
| Unfortunately I tried to DDG 'mojeek', but that didn't work!
|
| https://www.mojeek.com/
| nazgulsenpai wrote:
| I have been meaning to check out Brave search anyhow.
| rendall wrote:
| Bangs still work e.g.
| https://duckduckgo.com/?q=duckduckgo+search+not+working+!g
| mhuffman wrote:
| Can't wait to find out what happened here. This seems to be a
| massive outage. Interesting how fragile things become when so
| much technology is concentrated into just a few companies.
| theshrike79 wrote:
| It's always DNS.
| jeffrallen wrote:
| Unless it's Nagle. (Sorry animats.)
| onion2k wrote:
| Or BGP
| us0r wrote:
| My money is on expired domain somewhere or security
| certificate.
| jraph wrote:
| A Windows update restarted a critical server automatically. A
| core service is blocked from starting by a Candy Crush ad
| installed by the update. The Crandy Crush ad is somehow
| expecting a Copilot key to be pressed on the keyboard to let
| the system keep going.
|
| MS engineers are waiting for an online purchase of a new $400
| keyboard with the Copilot key to complete and planning to run
| to the data center to plug the keyboard.
|
| However, the Bing outage is preventing the purchase to go
| through, because the payment somehow relies on Bing
| suggestions to load for obscure reasons.
| Kerbonut wrote:
| No way Microsoft could be this inept... could they?
| exikyut wrote:
| Very very technically, if RDP is enabled and working, this
| could be fixed by rdesktop-ing to the machine from a Linux
| box and using xdotool to experiment with typing raw
| keyboard scancodes through the RDP session in the hope you
| figure out the encoding of the Copilot key.
| r2_pilot wrote:
| The Copilot key is actually Left-Shift + Windows key +
| F23
| adamomada wrote:
| And you can remap it but can't use it as a modifier key
| https://www.tomshardware.com/software/windows/windows-
| copilo...
| jraph wrote:
| Neat answer :-)
|
| I also appreciate that you prevented me from countering
| using a guard like "if RDP is enabled and working", and
| that a follow up answer actually provides the missing
| piece xD.
| rchaud wrote:
| Update: the payment gateway is Stripe, which is not
| processing any transactions associated with the MS account.
| A developer has posted the issue to HN in the hope that a
| Stripe employee will see it and escalate the issue. /s
| manuelmoreale wrote:
| I love that you had to include the /s because someone
| might actually believe that is indeed the case. What a
| bizarre world we live in.
| adamomada wrote:
| Poe's Law is pretty old by now
| manuelmoreale wrote:
| I get that but still. I found it amusing.
| ornornor wrote:
| MS knows better than to run windows on their servers.
| They've famously been running Linux on their public web
| facing stuff for years, including when they were publicly
| discrediting Linux (because IIS and MS server were so good
| they couldn't run their web services reliably and
| securely).
| radiorental wrote:
| Genuine question, are distributed systems naturally more
| resilient?
|
| I can see arguments for both sides. Your point and then the
| hidden failure modes without central observability and
| ownership. Nothing exists in isolation.
| Dalewyn wrote:
| >are distributed systems naturally more resilient?
|
| All else being equal: Yes.
|
| It's like asking if a RAID1 is more resilient than a single
| drive.
| CWuestefeld wrote:
| To the GP's point - if you lose the RAID controller, then
| you've lost a whole lot more than just a single drive
| failure.
| Dalewyn wrote:
| Yes, RAID isn't a backup, but it is resilient.
|
| You will have a better chance at uptime with a RAID than
| a single drive so you hopefully don't have to climb up
| ventilation ducts, walk across broken glass, and kill
| anyone sent to stop you on your quest to reconnect those
| cables that were cut.
| Gormo wrote:
| The controller isn't stateful; it's just an interface to
| the disks. If the controller fails, but the disks
| haven't, then all you've lost is the time it takes to
| plug the disks into a new controller.
|
| With RAID1, there's also nothing specific to the RAID
| configuration inherent in the way the data is encoded on
| the disk. You might have to carefully replicate your
| configuration to access the filesystem from a failed
| RAID0 array, but you can just pull and individual disk
| out of a RAID1 array and use it normally as a standalone
| disk.
| steve1977 wrote:
| RAID1 is mirrored. That is not what I would call a typical
| distributed system. It is a very redundant system. Like a
| cluster.
|
| A distributed system _without_ redundancy would rather be
| something like data stripped across disks _without_ parity.
|
| And that actually makes it less resilient, because failure
| of one component can bring down the whole system and the
| likelihood of failure is statistically higher because of
| the higher number of components.
| Gormo wrote:
| When I think of distributed systems, the RAID1 analogy
| seems much more applicable than RAID0.
|
| The term "distributed" has been traditionally applied to
| the original design of the TCP/IP protocol, various
| application-layer protocols like NNTP, IRC, etc., with
| the common factor being that each node operates as a
| standalone unit, but with nodes maintaining connectivity
| to each other so the whole system approaches a
| synchronized state -- if one node fails. the others
| continue to operate, but the overall system might become
| partitioned, with each segment diverging in its state.
|
| The "RAID0" approach might apply to something like a
| Kubernetes cluster, where each node of the system is an
| autonomous unit, but each node performs a slightly
| different function, so that if any one node fails, the
| functionality of the overall system is blocked.
|
| That second approach seems more consistent with what we
| traditionally label as "distributed" -- for example, the
| original design of the TCP/IP protocol, along with lots
| of application-layer protocols like NNTP and IRC, have
| each node operating autonomously but synchronized to
| other nodes so the whole system approaches a common data
| state. If one node fails, the other nodes all continue to
| operate, but might cause the overall system to become
| partitioned, leading to divergent states in each
| disconnected segment.
|
| The CAP theorem comes to mind: the first approach
| maintains availability but risks consistency, the second
| approach maintains consistency but risks availability.
| But the second approach seems like a variant
| implementation strategy for what is still effectively a
| centralized system -- the overall solution still exists
| only as a single instance -- so I usually think of the
| first approach when something is described as
| "distributed".
| bradjohnson wrote:
| You're assuming a stateful system where the state is
| distributed throughout the components of the system. For
| a stateless component of a distributed system, you don't
| need redundancy to recover from an outage.
|
| >likelihood of failure is statistically higher because of
| the higher number of components
|
| Yes, absolutely true, but resiliency for a distributed
| system is not necessarily like your example of data
| stripped without parity, unless we're specifically
| talking about distributed storage.
| _heimdall wrote:
| Distribution alone doesn't make a system resilient. A
| distributed system can help with resilience for anything
| related to network or hardware failure, but even then you
| need to make sure the different resources don't have a hard
| dependency on each other.
|
| If you want a resilient system redundancy and automatic
| failover systems are really important, along with solid error
| handling.
|
| Think about a distributed data store for example. You may
| spread all your data across multiple distributed areas, but
| if each area is managing a shard of data and they aren't
| replications then you still lose functionality when any one
| region goes down. If you instead have a copy complete copy of
| data in each region, and a system to automatically switch
| regions if the primary goes down, your system is much more
| resilient to outages (though also more complex and
| expensive).
| Timshel wrote:
| It does not garanty resiliency but it does increase it.
|
| If tomorow mastodon.social disappear the network might lose
| 80% of it's content but recovery could be possible even if
| the server never come back.
| _heimdall wrote:
| My point was just that resilience still depends on _how_
| a system is distributed and what else is done.
|
| Distribution alone doesn't really make a difference,
| though pairing it was redundancy and failovers is going
| to get pretty far.
|
| The case of mastodon.social is really a question of
| whether the value there is the network and protocol
| itself or the user created content posted there. If its
| the user content, the value is lost when the one host
| goes away. If the value is the network and protocol then
| yes, the value of the network is still there even though
| the data is gone. It does raise an interesting question
| of whether Mastodon is really considered distributed or
| not, the network is and hosts are using a shared protocol
| _but_ the data isn 't really distributed.
| Timshel wrote:
| Yes there is the question of network vs data :). And as
| you mention while some data end-up being distributed with
| Activity Pub the protocol is not made to allow
| restoration.
|
| One point I find interesting too is that distributed
| network often allows more agency to external actors. For
| example if you believe that the resiliency of the
| mastodon.social instance is not enough for you then you
| can decide to host you own server with your preferred
| criteria.
| _heimdall wrote:
| That's really where ActivityPub starts to rub me the
| wrong way. Server admins really need moderation power
| since everything is hosted on their hardware, but it also
| is a poison pill for decentralization.
|
| I can host my own server and make my own rules, but every
| other admin can just ban my instance.
| lxgr wrote:
| I feel like that's actually a counterexample. At least
| most people with mastodon.social as their home server
| will probably not have a backup of their
| followed/following graph and never be able to recover.
| zevv wrote:
| Not distributed per se, but _diversity_ makes a huge
| difference in resilience.
|
| When everybody is using the exact same tech, the fall out of
| an incident can be huge because it will affect everybody
| everywhere at the same time. Superficially it might seem
| efficient and smart, but the end result is fragility.
|
| Diversity of species is what nature ended up with as the
| ultimate solution: the individual species do not matter, but
| life as a whole will be able to flourish. With technology,
| we're now moving the other way: every single thing gets
| concentrated into one of the few cloud providers. Resilience
| decreases, fragility increases.
| salawat wrote:
| I prefer heterogeneity rather than diversity. Different
| implementations of similar processes fenerally make
| different tradeoffs, incurring different bottlenecks, and
| resulting in an ecosystem with a higher statistical
| probability that one relative Black Swan won't wipe out a
| key structural function in it's totality.
|
| It's actually a hallmark of building fault tolerant systems
| and ecosystems. Pity the economists and MBA's can't be
| convinced of it. Otherwise there'd be less push to create
| TBTF institutions.
| halfcat wrote:
| Not exactly "more resilient", but rather, "the only way to
| gain more resiliency over a single system".
|
| A distributed system can be more resilient, but it also adds
| complexity, making it (sometimes) less _reliable_.
|
| A single system with a lot of internal redundancy can be more
| reliable than a poorly implemented distributed system, which
| is why at a smaller scale it's often better to scale
| vertically until a single node can't handle your needs.
|
| Distributed systems are more of a necessity than "the best
| way". If we could just build a single node that scaled
| infinitely, that would be more reliable than a distributed
| system.
| oefrha wrote:
| With a large number of small providers, more often than not
| some of them will fail on any given day, but stars need to
| align really well to get a half-of-the-internet-is-down kind
| of failure caused by AWS or Cloudflare.
| steve1977 wrote:
| Distributed systems with tight coupling and no redundancy are
| less resilient. It's not so much a question about
| distribution but more about redundancy and coupling.
| re-thc wrote:
| Used a Co-pilot enabled PC.
| the_biot wrote:
| Not necessarily massive. Given that Bing works again now, this
| seems more like an API frontend failure, or an internal routing
| failure at some level.
|
| Note they seem to have managed to fix the Bing frontend hours
| ago, but DDG is still dead in the water. Priorities... :-)
| pythux wrote:
| Bing does not work me at the moment (maybe they can service
| partial traffic? Unclear if it's better/worse than a few
| hours ago when the outage started)
| simias wrote:
| My subjective impression as a web user since the late 90s is
| that now things break relatively rarely (I think it's the first
| time I have any such issue with DDG for instance) but when they
| do a huge chunk of the web becomes unreachable.
|
| Back when things were more decentralized individual websites
| and services would have issues much more regularly because the
| individual software and hardware stacks weren't as robust and
| fault-tolerant, but then usually the problem would always be
| limited to a single website/service.
| AbstractH24 wrote:
| And America only uses the term "Too Big Toto Fail" when it
| comes to banks.
| lelanthran wrote:
| > And America only uses the term "Too Big Toto Fail" when
| it comes to banks.
|
| And only when they're not in Kansas, anymore.
| josemanuel wrote:
| DDG has been down all morning (UK) on safari mobile and chrome on
| windows 10.
| feb wrote:
| Actually Qwant.com uses bing API too and has a warning at the top
| of their homepage.
| lioeters wrote:
| Yeah I saw this too. DDG was down, so I searched (on
| Wikipedia!) for another search engine. Tried Qwant for the
| first time, and it's also down.
| devnonymous wrote:
| Huh, of all those, ddg seems the odd one. I thought it used its
| own search service, didn't realise it was bing underneath. Even
| if that's not entirely true the fact that the home page is down
| due to the same reason that bing is down doesn't look good.
| enkrs wrote:
| When the outage started, for me duckduckgo.com just returned no
| results with the searchbar visible. The ddg homepage was still
| working. I've been using "my search term !g" for now and ddg
| just redirects my search to Google, so I don't have to change
| search provider in browsers.
| misnome wrote:
| It's been many hours now. They could have at least added a page
| saying "We are having an outage" rather than "There was an
| error displaying the search results. Please try again."
| altdataseller wrote:
| Maybe this forces DDG and ChatGPT to make their own search engine
| index and corpus. Sure it might be a few years too late for the
| former, but thats probably what they said 5 years ago too.
| bogtog wrote:
| Do DDG and ChatGPT believe that they could do a better job of
| uptime than Microsoft?
| altdataseller wrote:
| Its not just a question of uptime but dependencies too. The
| moment it doesnt make strategic sense to have an open Bing
| API for Microsoft, anyone reliant on them is in for a world
| of hurt. Especially if its the core feature of your product
| (ie DDG)
| pityJuke wrote:
| Brave is genuinely impressive here in having their own index
| (granted, that's the result of an acquisition rather than their
| own volition).
| BirAdam wrote:
| Yeah. I like Brave Search. In my own usage it seems to offer
| far more useful results rather than 5 pages of ads.
| Operyl wrote:
| With how aggressively Anthropic is crawling the internet right
| now, they might not be far behind. They're hitting some web
| properties I oversee at 50 RPS in some cases and it's
| frustrating.
| ColinHayhurst wrote:
| Another option is to use multiple sources. For example Kagi who
| use Mojeek (self-disclosure) and others; "Our search results
| also include anonymized API calls to all major search result
| providers worldwide"
| siva7 wrote:
| A rare outage should cause an executive to think "let's make
| our own search engine index"? If for every partner outage i
| would go "let's do it ourselves' i would be long out of
| business
| altdataseller wrote:
| It should remind them their entire livelihood is dependent on
| one single company. They arent partners at all. Its more like
| one is sustenance/oxygen for the other
| dextro42 wrote:
| But are they? Not asking for the contract side here but for
| the technical aspect.
|
| If DDG relies mostly on Bing and it fails forever in the
| future, they can "simply" make a contract with google and
| continue whatever they were doing.
|
| Same for OpenAI. Its not that Bing is the only search
| engine index on the web is it ? So yes, it would mean they
| have to spend a lot of manpower in a short time.
|
| On the other hand, how likely is it that Bing just goes
| offline?
|
| Do you always have a second datacenter in case your
| provider fails? Not everyone does it and as long as you
| have a way of putting things back up in reasonable time you
| are good to go.
| pythux wrote:
| What makes you think that Google would agree to such a
| deal?
| jsnell wrote:
| That they've been making those deals with other search
| engines for a long time (e.g. Kagi, Startpage, Mullvad
| Leta).
| michael9423 wrote:
| So much about DuckDuckGo's claim that Bing is only a part of
| their search results.
| Springtime wrote:
| Prior to the Russia-Ukraine situation they actually did offer
| Yandex results if you set your region to Russia. It was
| interesting sometimes to see if there were any more useful top
| results. So at one point the claim was accurate.
| deutschepost wrote:
| I'm pretty sure it was always just a proxy for bing. Just
| stripping away the Microsoft tracking.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27394925
| rvnx wrote:
| If you use Bing: You have "only" Microsoft Bing tracking you
|
| If you use DuckDuckGo: Now, you have "Yahoo Ads" instead of
| Microsoft Ads, but these ads, they are in fact Microsoft Ads,
| except sold via Yahoo.
|
| In front of these Yahoo Ads, DuckDuckGo actually adds its own
| click-through tracker.
|
| Now you have DDG, Yahoo and Microsoft tracking you.
|
| Bonus point if you click on an Amazon affiliate link, because
| in that case, the Amazon affiliate (DuckDuckGo) knows item-
| per-item what you purchased.
| dazc wrote:
| Good reason not to use amazon then.
| Springtime wrote:
| There's a setting in DDG to disable ads. I'm aware of the
| Amazon affiliate link URL addition but since I don't buy
| anything from Amazon it doesn't concern me personally.
| Either way everyone can benefit from running a content
| blocker (I'd be surprised if anyone from this audience
| wasn't).
| Brian_K_White wrote:
| that kagi couples plan feeling better and better
| roenxi wrote:
| If you use a search product then _someone_ is going to have
| your search history and it 'll more-than-likely be provided
| to law enforcement in your country who are the #1 threat to
| you [0]. It'll also be sent to some sort of data centre for
| tracking and whatever commercial uses that tracking is good
| for. I've never understood how that would be a threat, but
| if you don't like it it comes almost baked in to the
| business model. You can't stop them sharing data, so they
| will probably do it for money.
|
| The sell is more that the data MS/DDG has is hopefully
| going to be siloed away from Google and so it is getting
| more expensive for an given entity to cross-reference
| information about you. And if we're lucky competitive
| pressure will peel DDG away from MS sooner or later if they
| get larger.
|
| [0] This logic does lead to an argument for a fair chunk of
| HNs readership to use Yandex, because they are hosted in a
| country that is effectively at war with the English-
| speaking world but not presently targeting English
| speakers.
| fattegourmet wrote:
| your [0] is just silly. If a person is at risk from their
| state's law enforcement, handing over their search data
| to yandex just makes it easier for Russia to convert them
| into spying/sabotage activities through, e.g., extortion.
|
| As you have noted, Russia is at war with the ~English-
| speaking world~ West, so it is much more likely to use
| this data against the users than in the past.
| sharpshadow wrote:
| This makes sense, I was sceptical with the fast pace DDG
| had in the search market.
| niutech wrote:
| DDG was once caught red-handed of tracking for Microsoft:
| https://techcrunch.com/2022/05/24/ddg-microsoft-tracking-
| blo...
| Springtime wrote:
| That's a strange characterization of it. They weren't
| tracking for MS, their branded mobile browser (distinct
| from their site) was found to have an exclusion in its
| built-in content blocker for Microsoft-run tracking scripts
| in ads.
|
| Or put another way, if their browser had no content blocker
| (like the stock browsers of any mobile OS), their browser
| would be behaving like all the others. The scrutiny came
| from the conspicuous exclusion, given their arrangement
| with Bing (much like the controversy of Adblock Plus many
| years ago).
| tombert wrote:
| I don't think the parent's comment was that strange of a
| way of characterizing it.
|
| Yes, they block other tracking scripts, but since they
| have an explicit exception for tracking from Microsoft,
| it's not a complete stretch to say they were "tracking
| for MS"; I know technically it's Microsoft doing the
| tracking, but DDG gives them _explicit permission_ to do
| so. I think that it 's a distinction without much of a
| difference, and I don't think it's unfair to extrapolate
| a bit. If they're being misleading about the types of
| tracking in their mobile app to make Daddy Microsoft
| happy, why the fuck would I believe their claims that
| their search engine (which is more or less a proxy for
| Bing) would be immune from it?
|
| It actually really upset me; I was a big user and
| advocate of the DDG browser on iOS and Android, but when
| that news came out it felt like a big betrayal. I haven't
| used any DDG product since then, and while I have no idea
| what kind of trackers they block (if any), I just use
| Firefox Focus now with Kagi search.
| Springtime wrote:
| _> why the fuck would I believe their claims that their
| search engine (which is more or less a proxy for Bing)
| would be immune from it?_
|
| The context of the news was a security researcher
| conducting an audit of the app. If DDG were, as the GP
| claimed, performing tracking on behalf of MS then it
| would be more concerning since there _is_ a difference
| between performing tracking on behalf of a third-party
| company and merely excluding them from being blocked via
| a content blocker that most mobile browsers lack anyway.
|
| A mobile app has much more freedom to do what it likes so
| if this was the worst that occurred in an audit I'm not
| of the opinion this mark against them is enough to change
| my use of them. Many things carry some compromise so one
| has to weigh if an alternative is better. Use of Firefox
| by default has Mozilla tracking (hence why some mobile
| forks exists, including one I use), analytics for
| sponsored links, non-disableable domain name auto-
| completion by partners, while use of Kagi search is
| directly tied to an IRL identity via payment.
|
| For me, I'm comfortable using uBlock Origin on both
| Desktop and Mobile (via a Firefox fork) unless more
| egregious facts present themselves.
| tombert wrote:
| > The context of the news was a security researcher
| conducting an audit of the app. If DDG were, as the GP
| claimed, performing tracking on behalf of MS then it
| would be more concerning since there is a difference
| between performing tracking on behalf of a third-party
| company and merely excluding them from being blocked via
| a content blocker that most mobile browsers lack anyway.
|
| Sorry, I'm still not entirely sure that I agree that this
| doesn't count as tracking on behalf of Microsoft. If
| their browser has an "if MSTracker then allow else
| doNotAllow", that still seems like it's effectively
| endorsing MS tracking.
|
| That said, I agree with your criticisms on Kagi (as
| outlined in sister thread). It would be ideal if Kagi had
| some means of truly decoupling searches from accounts,
| but as I stated, at least Kagi charges a fee so they have
| a means of making money _without_ mining and selling
| data.
|
| Which Firefox fork do you use? Does it work on iPhone? I
| would really prefer to use something that allows me to
| install extensions like uBlock.
| Springtime wrote:
| _> Which Firefox fork do you use? Does it work on
| iPhone?_
|
| I use Fennec, which afaict is Android only. It's my
| understanding it removed various Mozilla analytics though
| some is said to remain. It's compiled independently from
| source by F-Droid, which supports reproducible builds.
|
| Primary reasons I use it is for enabling about:config
| editing out of the box and third party addons (either
| Mozilla-approved ones like uBlock Origin or any arbitrary
| addons so long as they're in an addon 'collection',
| following the same procedure like Firefox Nightly until
| Mozilla fulfils their goal of easier addon support).
| tombert wrote:
| Yeah, doesn't appear to support iOS, at least not in the
| app store.
|
| Once Alt stores show up in the US I suspect we'll get a
| lot more of these browsers showing up on iPhone. My last
| experience with Android was awful so I went crawling back
| to iOS, but I think that I just got a bad physical unit
| more than anything else.
|
| I did see that Kagi's Orion browser allows you to install
| extensions, though I had issues with stability when I
| tried it a year ago, but a lot can change in a year so I
| should probably give it again.
| freediver wrote:
| > It would be ideal if Kagi had some means of truly
| decoupling searches from accounts
|
| Important to note is that Kagi does not associate
| searches with an account to begin with, nor there are any
| incentives for Kagi to do so (search log would be just a
| giant liability from a standpoint of Kagi's business
| model, with no benefit).
|
| I think what you mean is - are there means to make that
| provable from a technology standpoint? It turns out there
| are, through something called blind tokens, and we are
| looking into it. It is being discussed in Kagi forums
| here: https://kagifeedback.org/d/653-completely-
| anonymous-searches...
|
| Another solution available right now in Kagi is paying
| for the service with Bitcoin/Lightning and using a random
| email address to sign up (Kagi does not need or verify
| email addresses, they are just a login id and can be
| anything).
| autoexec wrote:
| Kagi has its own issues. At least with DDG you could
| search without logging in and your searches weren't
| directly tied to your name/address/credit card. Ads are
| best handled with ad blockers anyway.
|
| This rando's comments (https://old.reddit.com/r/privacy/c
| omments/1bmubkd/thoughts_a...) on the filter bubble
| problem seems like a reasonable concern too. It's best
| for a search engine to know nothing about you and just
| provide the best results for what you asked, not what it
| thinks you want to hear.
| tombert wrote:
| The privacy vs. anonymous thing is fair, and I have some
| issues with that, and I wish it were a bit more clear on
| what exactly that means. Even if Vlad's example of
| "parents knowing what you're doing but still respecting
| privacy" thing is true, it's not like I _want_ my parents
| know I 'm looking at porn, even if they don't know what
| kind of porn I'm looking at. That's something that they
| should address.
|
| I still trust Kagi more than basically any free service
| though. There's no ads, and since they charge for search
| they at least have a means of making money that doesn't
| involve selling my data. Even if Kagi knows what I'm
| doing, I'm willing to accept that they're not dispensing
| my data quite as liberally as Google and Microsoft (and
| apparently DDG).
| ricardo81 wrote:
| Just the way they market it. Almost 100% positive their organic
| results are purely Bing. The 'other sources' seems to be a
| sleight of hand wrt wiki boxes etc.
| darreninthenet wrote:
| Not defending DDG or anyone here but it depends on the cause of
| the outage... is it something broken in Azure (for example)
| that's causing it? As has been pointed out it's still possible
| to search with Bing (both directly and through DDG with bangs)
| so it might not be as simple as you're implying.
| datavirtue wrote:
| I get here by typing a mangled version of "hacker news" into
| DDG. It's currently not working at all.
| ddtaylor wrote:
| But why?
| dylan604 wrote:
| wait, if you typed that into DDG and it brought you here,
| then how is it not working? if that's not what you meant,
| you worded your "DDG is not working at all, so I jumped
| onto HN to look for a thread about it" comment very
| strangely
| leokennis wrote:
| Some DDG results still work, mostly the "instant answer" cards
| like word definitions.
|
| As far as I know, DDG's claim was mainly that they use Bing,
| but that Bing is unable to see/corellate who searched for what.
| Basically that DDG acts as an anonymity proxy between you and
| Bing.
| lucideer wrote:
| Tbh I've been rather impressed about how much of DDG has
| continued to work while all their results are down - e.g. all
| bangs continue to work fine.
| fguerraz wrote:
| Where did you read such a claim? There is a difference between
| "only a part" and "largely sourced from".
|
| _Of course, we have more traditional links and images in our
| search results too, which we largely source from Bing. Our
| focus is synthesizing all these sources to create a superior
| search experience._
|
| https://duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/sources...
| niutech wrote:
| From their FAQ (thanks to Web Archive):
|
| > Where do you get your results?
|
| > From over 30 sources, including DuckDuckBot (our own
| crawler), crowd-sourced sites (in our own index), Yahoo!
| BOSS, embed.ly, WolframAlpha, EntireWeb, Bing & Blekko. For
| any given search, there is usually a vertical search engine
| out there that does a better job at answering it than a
| general search engine. Our long-term goal is to get you
| information from that best source, ideally in instant answer
| form.
| Shank wrote:
| Well, at least Blekko is definitely dead from that list, so
| it's not a reflection of today.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blekko
| notatoad wrote:
| Yahoo BOSS and WolframAlpha are also bing, right?
| udev4096 wrote:
| Unless you have been living under a rock, they have said it
| plenty of times
| niutech wrote:
| They claim on their website (https://duckduckgo.com/about): "We
| are the independent Internet privacy company", meanwhile they
| prove otherwise. They depend on Bing API, unlike Brave Search
| or Mojeek, which are truly independent and respecting privacy.
| ohmyiv wrote:
| Are they truly independent now? I remember a couple of years
| ago a small percentage (less than 10%?) of searches used
| bing. It's great of they're fully independent now.
| jccalhoun wrote:
| I mean, 100% is technically still "part"
| beretguy wrote:
| Use Brave search for now instead.
|
| https://search.brave.com
| reddalo wrote:
| No thanks, it's run by cryptobros.
| beretguy wrote:
| Then you can pay for Kagi.
| atomicfiredoll wrote:
| The amount of Brave and Kagi spam in this thread is nutso. I
| can't be convinced it's not coordinated marketing by either
| or both of them.
|
| I'm not saying that there aren't some satisfied customers,
| but at some point a normal human being says: "Hey, 30 other
| people posted this. Maybe I shouldn't."
| kunley wrote:
| Bing is working though, DDG still down
| mrkramer wrote:
| Death by outsourcing.
| exitzer0 wrote:
| This guy Microsofts.
| dewey wrote:
| > Hopefully DDG will be back soon, as I'm loathe to go back to
| Google for search.
|
| Maybe Kagi is an option for you? I'm very happy with them and
| exclusively use them for more than a year now after never getting
| comfortable with DDG.
| dpatac wrote:
| I concur on Kagi. Now when I go to other search engines I just
| get frustrated.
| jasonvorhe wrote:
| Came here to praise Kagi (and Brave Search) as well.
| nobody9999 wrote:
| >Maybe Kagi is an option for you?
|
| Thanks, but I'd rather have my tonsils extracted through my
| ears. Unless you're buying.
|
| From the FAQ[0]:
|
| >Kagi Search requires an account only because it is a paid
| service which requires an account for the transaction.
|
| [0] https://help.kagi.com/kagi/faq/faq.html#why-does-kagi-
| search...
| dewey wrote:
| You pay with your data instead, which is a fair choice.
| idiotsecant wrote:
| Yes, unlike google who takes all the pesky account business
| out of the loop and does the tracking for you!
|
| Either you pay for the product or you _are_ the product for
| someone else who is paying. I know which I prefer.
| quectophoton wrote:
| They say this:
|
| > You can create a Kagi account with any email address
| including a fake one (we do not care or verify it, it is just
| an id for logging in)
|
| But seeing how they didn't go the Mullvad way, and instead
| chose to ask for an email during signup and hide this bit of
| info in a completely separate page, doesn't sit too well with
| me and comes off as a little bit dishonest (they say they
| don't need this info but sure seems to me they seem to want
| to have it).
|
| And part of the message I get from reading their F.A.Q. is
| that a valid email address might start being required at any
| time soon.
|
| Sure, they would have payment information anyway, but if
| searches are also linked to email address, that means
| companies that offer free services can try to buy this
| information about their free users. So even if you don't pay
| for, say, Discord, they can still be interested in the
| searches that are linked to the email address you signed up
| with.
|
| The difference in privacy between Mullvad and Kagi is not
| even that much since both are paid services; but Mullvad can
| get my money and a good chunk of my internet activity, while
| Kagi doesn't get either from me.
|
| Look, I don't mind too much paying for stuff. And even if I'm
| paying, I wouldn't even care[1] if I get non-intrusive non-
| tracking ads (i.e. just text, or first-party <img> tags)
| related to stuff that I _don 't_ delete from my search
| history. Show me ads for anime figurines, or new releases of
| light novels, or nice notebooks, or shops selling plants, or
| computer parts, or a new Steam Deck, stuff like that. I would
| even help fine tune the ads if it means I get better
| recommendations (or fewer bad ones, at least).
|
| But it's these kinds of mixed signals, like trying to project
| an image of offering better privacy than what's common[2]
| while also doing the email address thingy, that give me a lot
| of pause when I'm evaluating a service.
|
| [1]: I'm aware my stance on ads is unusual here in HN. I
| wouldn't disable my adblocker, but if done right, I wouldn't
| need to. I haven't gone out of my way to block HN frontpage
| ads (yet), for example.
|
| [2]: That's the subjective impression I got, which might be
| wrong. The rest of my comment was written based on this.
| reddalo wrote:
| Yep [1] is also a new interesting search engine, based on the
| index that Ahrefs [2], a SEO toolkit, has been keeping for 13+
| years.
|
| The only downsite is that it's slower than DDG and Google.
|
| [1] https://yep.com/ [2] https://ahrefs.com/
| dewey wrote:
| You said slow...but even trying that landing page took 4
| seconds for me.
| firebird84 wrote:
| Kagi has the same problem for me. The results don't load about
| 50% of the time. I had to cancel my subscription because I
| couldn't just roll the dice every time I searched to see if it
| would come back. Happens to all devices on my network.
| andyjohnson0 wrote:
| Not disputing your experience, but fwiw I've been using kagi
| since it was in beta (now a paying customer) and I can't
| remember this ever happening to me.
| dmd wrote:
| I feel like maybe this is your network. I've been using Kagi
| for months and have never even once had this happen, nor has
| anyone, ever, not even once, reported this kind of issue on
| the Discord.
| dewey wrote:
| I've never seen that, maybe some extension, content filter
| gone rogue?
| benhurmarcel wrote:
| Have you contacted their support?
| bhaney wrote:
| Bing is down and the rest of those use Bing for results?
| maryShap wrote:
| Duckduckgo is working fine on my iPhone15.
| GRBurst wrote:
| yeah seems like at least for many that is the case. I wasn't
| aware that so many engines are using bing! under the hood. Afaik
| qwant uses their own thing and that startpage is using google
| under the hood, but that might have changed
| maryShap wrote:
| Sorry, should have said that it was with the Safari brower
| nullndr wrote:
| Ddg has been down for 5 hours. Quite a problem they got.
| biglyburrito wrote:
| Kagi works just fine: https://kagi.com
| divyaranjan1905 wrote:
| Even startpage.com shows no results
| probably_wrong wrote:
| Startpage works for me in Germany, and has been working all
| morning. DDG remains unhappy.
| luuurker wrote:
| It's working for me. Also, they use Google for search results,
| not Bing.
| keybits wrote:
| A Microsoft outage is the source of this problem:
| A massive Microsoft outage affects Bing.com, Copilot for web and
| mobile, Copilot in Windows, ChatGPT internet search and
| DuckDuckGo. Microsoft outage started at
| approximately 3 AM EDT and seems to have primarily affected users
| in Asia and Europe.
|
| https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/microsoft/microsoft-ou...
| keybits wrote:
| Being discussed here:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40453077
| tokai wrote:
| Whats up with the 'surprised' comments about ddg? I don't like
| ddg myself, but it has never been a secret that they base their
| results on bing.
| whalesalad wrote:
| now I know why their results are so trash. switched to kagi a
| few years ago and it has been quite nice.
| moffkalast wrote:
| Paying for search results? Come on, we're not _that_
| desperate.
| whalesalad wrote:
| Totally worth it. Very happy to see a small startup start
| eating into this space and happy to support them.
| sidcool wrote:
| Still down.
| biglyburrito wrote:
| Kagi works just fine: https://kagi.com
| randomuser69 wrote:
| 100 search for free :(
| neogodless wrote:
| Is there any possibility that the latest Windows 11 update which
| is going out to "Insiders" now could be massively increasing the
| load on CoPilot / Bing infrastructure?
| _tk_me wrote:
| Microsoft outage
| dgan wrote:
| Same for Startpage.
|
| Using Kagi now
| dgan wrote:
| Same for Startpage
| weinzierl wrote:
| Bangs still seem to work, so "[search term] g!" saves the day
| until this is fixed.
| az09mugen wrote:
| Startpage [0] search also is not returning web results. But image
| search is working. I wonder what's happening.
|
| [0] https://www.startpage.com
| FerretFred wrote:
| > "Update 1: Microsoft has confirmed an issue where users may be
| unable to access the Microsoft Copilot service"
|
| So not all bad then?!
| TechDebtDevin wrote:
| I'm still unsure of what MS Copilot is. For the longest time I
| thought it was GH Cp because of the obvious association, but
| it's not. I'm assuming it's some bunk ass Bing "AI" assisted
| search?
|
| I truly think MS is the perfect example of a moat experiencing
| a drought. Unfortunately, money can't buy rain, it can only
| pump water from other sources. This never works.
| FerretFred wrote:
| I encountered MS Copilot recently when I reluctantly
| installed Windows for a local charity (their idea, not mine).
| Basically, if you do a search it'll give you the results but
| will then fill your screen with other information allegedly
| related to your query but relayed in the most verbose and
| annoying manner possible.
| TechDebtDevin wrote:
| Sounds like a native MS product.
| altdataseller wrote:
| I thibk its the AI version of Clippy or something embedded in
| Office or Microsoft365 or whatever they call that thing these
| days.. (i think, i have absolutely no idea either :)
| mavhc wrote:
| It's chatgpt wearing a hat and sunglasses
| lenerdenator wrote:
| For better or for worse, it absolutely works. Pumping water
| from other sources or copying another type of well has been
| Microsoft's MO for almost 50 years and they're one of the
| most valuable companies on the planet.
| TechDebtDevin wrote:
| We are on different scales of time. This does not work. Ask
| MS how well this technique went with phones. Their moat is
| as wide as the Mississippi. It will be a while, but there's
| a large quantity of water required to fill that ditch. They
| obviously know what they're doing, but time has a way of
| eating things.
| t-sauer wrote:
| Copilot is branding, not a product or feature. Problem is
| that the features/products that run under that branding don't
| have proper names themselves and I guess that's what trips up
| a lot of people.
| grimoald wrote:
| Why the snarky tone? MS Copilot is a mixture of enhanced
| search, ChatGPT like chat and Dall-E 3 for image generation,
| but without the need to create an account (only for image
| generation, I think). I use it at work every day and it is
| super helpful. I haven't compared it to ChatGPT, though.
| coldtea wrote:
| > _Why the snarky tone? MS Copilot is a mixture of enhanced
| search, ChatGPT like chat and Dall-E 3 for image
| generation, but without the need to create an account (only
| for image generation, I think)._
|
| Because such branding deserves a snarky tone.
| HeckFeck wrote:
| _Sent from Outlook_ (whichever program /service/webapp
| that means now)
| TechDebtDevin wrote:
| Thank you.
| HeckFeck wrote:
| No no, you're confusing it with Copilot Series X, it
| leverages the latest Windows screen capture technology on
| your Xbox One X Series One and is intended to help
| speedrunners up their game, while also helping connect
| everyone else with relevant products and services from over
| 9000 partners.
| BirAdam wrote:
| So, uh, Copilot+PC, how much of their AI computer thing would
| be completely useless right now?
| tanelpoder wrote:
| I had been using DuckDuckGo for the last 2-3 years, but starting
| from early this year I noticed that their search index just
| didn't index some of the things I searched for (enterprise tech
| stuff). These searches worked ok before and still worked with
| other engines. So I finally switched to Kagi and am happy with
| it.
| npteljes wrote:
| I love the acknowledgement that DDG put on their page.
| We're currently experiencing an issue with DuckDuckGo Search.
| Thanks for your patience while we get our ducks in a row.
| In the meantime, you can use other search engines right here by
| using "bangs"
|
| So fun and straightforward.
| notRobot wrote:
| Interesting how they insist that they use "so much more" than
| just Bing for their results, but the moment Bing goes down
| their search functionality is down entirely, unable to show a
| single result.
| devit wrote:
| They probably start with Bing results and do custom
| filtering, ranking and presentation, so without the initial
| Bing results they can't do anything.
| ffhhj wrote:
| Someone please tell them they can wrap that code inside an
| "if" condition, and continue with the rest of the search.
| niutech wrote:
| What would be the rest if they don't have their own
| index?
| niutech wrote:
| So basically DDG is the wrapper for Bing Search, not an
| "independent" search company as they claim.
| victor_z wrote:
| Probably. But DDG at least offers more privacy, right?
|
| Right?
| niutech wrote:
| DDG has a history of breaching privacy:
| https://techcrunch.com/2022/05/24/ddg-microsoft-tracking-
| blo...
|
| Meanwhile Brave Search or Mojeek provide more privacy,
| being independent at the same time.
| berkes wrote:
| > Brave Search or Mojeek provide more privacy
|
| Do they? Or have they just not had that "history" yet? I
| don't see anything fundamentally different in Brave that
| protects your and my privacy better than on DDG. I don't
| know Mojeek enough.
| syklep wrote:
| Brave explicitly claims not to.[1] Brave also does not
| rely on Bing for results.
|
| [1] https://search.brave.com/help/privacy-policy
|
| Edit: mojeek claims the same.[2]
|
| [2] https://www.mojeek.com/about/privacy/
| kunley wrote:
| Last time i checked, Brave was insisting on convinving me
| to use certain cryptocurrency platforms and it was more
| intrusive with it than typical web ads, which seemed
| really twisted, as the same Brave claimed to give ad-free
| experience.
|
| Are they still doing that?
| NayamAmarshe wrote:
| They don't. The cryptocurrency options are all disabled
| by default and are opt-in.
| somenameforme wrote:
| It literally never did that. There's some crypto wallet
| button that you get in the address bar that you can
| disable with a right click, and that's pretty much the
| extent of it. All crypto and other related functionality
| is completely opt-in.
| decide1000 wrote:
| Yes, those ads are still part of Brave.
| niutech wrote:
| I was talking about Brave Search
| (https://search.brave.com), not Brave browser. Seaech
| doesn't promote crypto.
| Timshel wrote:
| That only concern the browser not the search engine ?
|
| HN discussion at the time:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31490515
| ipqk wrote:
| Cause Brave CEO, Brendan Eich, is such a swell guy.
| kornhole wrote:
| Yes it is one of many metasearch sites and not actually a
| search engine. Other engines include Kagi, Yandex, Brave,
| Mojeek, Quant, and something called Google.
| niutech wrote:
| Quant also relies on Bing API.
| decide1000 wrote:
| Quant or Qwant? Qwant does not rely on the Bing api but
| has its own index.
| mardifoufs wrote:
| Are you sure about that? It doesn't completely rely on it
| but didn't it use bing as one of the search providers?
| I'm probably completely wrong and my info is outdated but
| I'm asking because it would be pretty special (in a good
| way!) if they use their own index exclusively.
| niutech wrote:
| Qwant, sorry. On Wikiledia they mention Bing multiple
| times: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qwant
|
| Qwant was also out of service today due to Bing API
| outage: https://www.gamingdeputy.com/bing-outage-exposes-
| qwant-and-d...
| gregw134 wrote:
| Pretty sure kagi is a bing wrapper too, although they
| blend in some other datasets.
| miloignis wrote:
| Kagi's main results come from Google actually. (edit: see
| https://help.kagi.com/kagi/why-kagi/kagi-vs-google.html -
| Kagi really shows how good Google _could_ be, since it 's
| mostly using the Google index and then doing user-
| friendly things instead of user-unfriendly things on top)
| iamthirsty wrote:
| While I'm not disagreeing that Kagi's main results from
| Google, the source you linked doesn't _specifically_ say
| that. Just says:
|
| > "Heck, it even enables Kagi to exist!"
|
| > "We're grateful to have access to Google's search
| technology and infrastructure for Kagi."
|
| So I wonder what the actual results mix is. Like I said,
| could be mainly from Google.
|
| Edit: Added additional quote.
| pphysch wrote:
| I firmly believe Google will release Premium Search at
| some point. They did it quite successfully with
| YouTube...
|
| One wonders if the popular narrative around
| crappification of Search is partially self-induced to
| prime consumers for premiumization.
| danielcampos93 wrote:
| More countries have nukes than companies have actual
| indexes
| Zambyte wrote:
| As someone who uses Kagi, I think it is absolutely not
| accurate to say they are a search engine rather than a
| meta search engine. Most of their results come from the
| other engines you listed.
|
| https://help.kagi.com/kagi/search-details/search-
| sources.htm...
| worksonmine wrote:
| Interesting, I always had the impression they had their
| own index. Shame.
| Zambyte wrote:
| As per the first sentence on that page, they do. It's
| just not their only source, and from my experience it is
| far from the main source. You can see "% of unique Kagi
| results" on each search; these are the results from their
| own index.
| openplatypus wrote:
| Mojeek has its very own index.
| Minor49er wrote:
| The industry term is "whitelabeling"
|
| Sometimes it pays to pretend
| elevatedastalt wrote:
| The legal term is "deception".
| ThrowawayTestr wrote:
| Taking someone else's product and making it better is a
| useful service.
| autoexec wrote:
| And Bing lifts their results from Google
| (https://www.wired.com/2011/02/bing-copies-google/) so in
| the end it seems like the internet only has one search
| engine.
| barbazoo wrote:
| There's also Kagi
| bloblaw wrote:
| That article is from 2011. I can imagine that in 13 years
| this may no longer be true.
| pphysch wrote:
| What would lead you to believe that in the last 13 years
| MS would make the titanic investment of reimplementing
| their (alleged) Google-based search backend?
|
| Given the trajectory of Bing this seems unlikely.
| adamomada wrote:
| For me it's because DDG (aka Bing) results are vastly
| different than Google results. I use the !g and !s bangs
| often.
|
| I think you're making a huge assumption that _nothing_
| would change in 13 years!
| politelemon wrote:
| Makes me wonder, does this mean Bing is the Chromium or
| Firefox of search?
| somenameforme wrote:
| Brave Search [1] is 100% independent. There's also Yandex
| [2] which also works excellently, but is biased towards
| more Russian language results. The image search is second
| to none though.
|
| [1] - https://search.brave.com/
|
| [2] - https://yandex.com/
| wannacboatmovie wrote:
| Wait till you find out who makes some store-brand food.
| throwaway425933 wrote:
| How can a poor peasant start using Bing APIs? They seem to
| cost a ton. Do I have to raise money before I even attempt
| a metasearch engine.
| Vinnl wrote:
| I believe that generally refers to all their custom answers,
| e.g. when you search for "weather <place name>".
| Nevertheless, those don't seem to work either.
| rekoil wrote:
| I bet their engineers are currently discussing how to make
| any such answers possible without Bing working, assuming
| the upstream data for them is not in fact also Bing.
| tinyhouse wrote:
| Absurd. They have been doing search for so long and couldn't
| build their own search index? I understand it's a huge
| investment, and clearly for some data sources you need to
| create partnerships and depend on others (e.g., youtube
| videos). But you would think that a search engine company
| would invest more in this area.
| skeeter2020 wrote:
| Do you really understand the scale of this (ongoing)
| investment? I'm not sure I'd classify this as "Absurd" -
| the value of DDG is not yet-another (tm) search index but
| the specific values they add on top. When you have limited
| resources I'd say they're making the right choice.
| somenameforme wrote:
| Brave rolled their own completely independent search [1]
| on what I assume is a relatively limited budget. It seems
| that regularly grabbing the data would be pretty easy.
| The harder part would be searching/ordering it in an
| efficient and meaningful way while avoiding SEO, but that
| seems more like a fun problem than a difficult one (if
| not both).
|
| [1] - https://search.brave.com/
| tredre3 wrote:
| There are two things the general HN sentiment genuinely
| believes is impossible to build unless you have billions
| of dollars:
|
| - Search Engines
|
| - Browser Engines
|
| I don't quite understand how we got there because neither
| of those things are impossible. Both are achievable with
| a small team and a couple years of runway. As proved by
| Brave and Ladybird.
| adamomada wrote:
| It's easy to make a crappy search and crappy browser, I
| think the sentiment is aimed at producing a useful
| alternative to google and chrome
| aembleton wrote:
| I wonder if there's anything in their contract with Bing
| that prevents this.
| niutech wrote:
| Exactly. See Brave Search, they are much newer but did it
| right.
| slig wrote:
| Brave Search feels like Google from 2008. Just works, no
| BS.
| ricardo81 wrote:
| Building an organic dataset with decent results is the
| expensive and hard part. Weather, wiki etc are the kind of
| things you can develop on a $20/m dedicated server.
| npteljes wrote:
| I definitely felt misled, when I first learned about this,
| back when they censored Tank Man the same time Bing did[0]. I
| did remain a user though, mostly because I haven't felt like
| keeping up who the current good guys are. Lately I have been
| considering Kagi, but I don't like it that I need to log in
| on all my devices, and then I have to have a fallback, for
| when I'm not on my own devices.
|
| So yeah, for my intents and purposes, DDG is a frontend to
| Bing. I do appreciate how uncluttered it is though, in
| comparison.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tank_Man#Censorship
| freedomben wrote:
| I do wish Kagi had less friction getting logged in on each
| device, but they have gotten it as streamlined as possible
| without patching the browsers. Your key goes in a query
| string so you can put it in any browser's new/default
| search engine config[1].
|
| [1] https://help.kagi.com/kagi/getting-started/setting-
| default.h...
| pmlnr wrote:
| I just left Kagi. At first, it looked very nice, but for
| some reason, in a few weeks both Google and ddg gave me
| much better results. The new g web filter is actually quite
| good as well.
| bambax wrote:
| Yeah, exactly. They're mostly a front end for Bing. I know
| they have their fans, and this remark will probably anger
| them, but I have never understood the point of DDG.
| elevatedastalt wrote:
| There are only 3 planet scale search indices I think. Google,
| Bing and Yandex. Everyone else is just rehashing those
| results.
| 1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote:
| Data point: Bing was not down for me.
| ReadCarlBarks wrote:
| Firefox users can create their own "bangs" with bookmark
| keywords. Just bookmark https://example.com/%s and then assign
| a keyword to it from the Library window (full bookmarks
| manager).
| roelschroeven wrote:
| Or right-click in any search box on any website, choose "Add
| keyword for this search".
| shaan7 wrote:
| The notice helped me realize that Yahoo! Search still exists xD
| Krastan wrote:
| Doesn't yahoo also use bing under the hood?
| gpvos wrote:
| Took them several hours to put that message there though.
| berkes wrote:
| Often the case with US-based companies that have outages
| during "office hours in Europe". We, europeans see it going
| down. Communication on why, how and ETAs only appear at the
| start of the US day.
| mdaniel wrote:
| This take implies there is no on-call rotation at DDG,
| which I find suspicious
| em-bee wrote:
| the most important function of on call rotation is there
| to fix problems, not to make announcements to the public.
| so they surely have the first, but maybe not the second.
| mdaniel wrote:
| Well, maybe that perspective explains why it takes 6+
| hours to update any status page then: "welp, shit's
| broke, better wait for the management team to wake up to
| tell anyone"
| em-bee wrote:
| more like: wait for them to decide exactly how to present
| this to the public.
| glenjamin wrote:
| This is incorrect, the primary job of an on-call rotation
| is to satisfy customers.
|
| It's usually much better ROI to publicly acknowledge an
| issue if the resolution is not going to be single digit
| minutes, as it massively reduces the incoming
| query/support burden
| em-bee wrote:
| yes, but the users of the search engine are not the
| customers. actually, who would the customers of ddg be?
|
| ad agencies? are they going to get upset if their ads are
| not visible for a few hours on of many sites where they
| post them? are they even going to notice?
| ErrantX wrote:
| DDG has a global remote workforce so this wouldn't seem to
| apply in their case.
| playingalong wrote:
| (just guessing) the directors might be in US though
| openplatypus wrote:
| DDG has relatively large pool of European employees.
| adamomada wrote:
| They should put an if results = 0 then post helpful message
| instead of try broken search again?
| realfeel78 wrote:
| I thought _I_ was easily entertained.
| eth0up wrote:
| I'm not sure why DDG has become such an acceptable google
| alternative. Even google returns less IP-based, irrelevant
| results. It's not terrible and sometimes it's good, but results
| are frequently absurd. I find an instance of searx, or even
| swisscows generally superior. DDG has no regard for specific
| queries and always seems to insert a handful of ridiculous IP-
| based results, however impossibly pertinent to the subject. I
| think DDG has IP tourette.
| knifie_spoonie wrote:
| It's probably because Bing is down
| Brajeshwar wrote:
| The movies were indeed way ahead and knew -- Mothership snaps and
| the entire fleet just collapse like an unplugged discharged
| device.
| is_true wrote:
| Probably nothing, or a rogue AI is taking over MS.
|
| This is the real world...if a tree falls in the forest and no one
| hears it
| jklein11 wrote:
| Go on... if a tree falls in the forest, and no one hears it...
| ?
| throwaway211 wrote:
| The falling produces a sound that no one hears.
| wglb wrote:
| Do the other trees laugh at it?
| aeonian_8 wrote:
| "We're currently experiencing an issue with DuckDuckGo Search.
| Thanks for your patience while we get our ducks in a row.
|
| In the meantime, you can use other search engines right here by
| using "bangs": Google: !g why did youtube
| remove my subscriptions list Yahoo: !y why did youtube
| remove my subscriptions list Wikipedia: !w why did
| youtube remove my subscriptions list And many more."
|
| This change just happened. I've been waiting on Ddg since ~10am
| in Frankfurt, Germany.
| cooljoey wrote:
| Oops, lots of corporate MS Dynamics platforms are down as they
| rely on Bing address api
| cooljoey wrote:
| Oops lots of corporates MS Dyanmics platforms down as they rely
| on Bing address api!
| sixthDot wrote:
| what a quack
| philipov wrote:
| Single point of faaaaiiiiiluuuuure - Sing it!
| moffkalast wrote:
| I love it when Cloudflare accidentally breaks something and
| over half of the entire internet immediately goes down.
| mdaniel wrote:
| I also love that because I hope it will cause people to
| rethink such rampant centralization. Yeah, I get it, blah,
| blah, ddos, spider, etc, but for their gatekeeping, there
| sure doesn't seem to be any appeals process if they deem you
| to be Not An Upstanding Netizen
| MatthiasPortzel wrote:
| Luckily !g still works, but this is pretty by bad.
| binarymax wrote:
| Unlikely, but perhaps this might motivate DDG into finally making
| their own index and eventually drop bing
| blondie9x wrote:
| Is it just me or is search terribly broken on the internet.
|
| It's Google or Bing and Bing imposters.
|
| Why aren't there more broad search options? Search was better
| when we had page rank algorithms. It's gotten over condensed into
| 2 companies.
| alphabetting wrote:
| search has always been hard and say if you do get market share
| on google, a portion of the massive SEO industry will
| eventually turn their sights on you and make your life hell.
| lawn wrote:
| Like others have said, try out Kagi. I didn't buy the hype but
| the results are much better.
| nottorp wrote:
| Page rank was a google thing, and it helped them take market
| share from everyone else and achieve their current quasi-
| monopoly?
| benrutter wrote:
| I use Ecosia (which Bing powered) and wondered why it was down
| earlier. Makes you realise just how few players there actually
| are in the search rankings space.
| repeekad wrote:
| I believe you.com has their own proper search index? Ecosia and
| duckduckgo exist purely on ad revenue, any good search engine
| will be paid for in the future, even Google's non-ad search
| results make me hesitant, it's all SEO spam now, plus chatGPT
| or Gemini can answer nearly any question when you pay for the
| real service
| jandrusk wrote:
| How in the world is DDG dependent upon Bing to function? So glad
| I switched to Brave Search :)
| kbazbaz wrote:
| From DDG: https://x.com/DuckDuckGo/status/1793557968027570527
| IG_Semmelweiss wrote:
| Question for OP. What would be your guess that someone like he
| article writer is able to make the inference that Bing being down
| was also impacting DDG or ChatGPT ?
|
| Is it public knowledge that they use the Bing backend to do their
| work ?
|
| Particularly for Bing Copilot, isn't the relationship the other
| way around (OpenAI has the core sauce, bing uses its API to power
| their copilot searches) ?
| jerpint wrote:
| Microsoft has the compute, so its likely to be an
| infrastructure problem
| marcosdumay wrote:
| At least for DDG, it's public knowledge.
| rodondenderon wrote:
| Nice to see https://search.brave.com/, https://entireweb.com and
| https://mojeek.com are still kicking it. In case anyone needs to
| know alternatives besides the monopoly that is Google.
| mistyvales wrote:
| Maybe it's an issue with their Bing connection..
| markbeare wrote:
| This probably relates to the Bing Search API. A lot of these
| alternative search engines are using Bing for the organic
| results.
| noman-land wrote:
| It's still down... crazy.
|
| I had to use Yahoo today, ew.
| jraph wrote:
| DDG is back.
| kbazbaz wrote:
| Back: https://x.com/DuckDuckGo/status/1793652538476216398
| dudeinjapan wrote:
| Bet their site reliability team was saying "F*k F*k No!"
| gunapologist99 wrote:
| I switched to Brave search; I think their search results are from
| a search engine they acquired, so they don't use Bing or Google
| unless you tell them to 'mix in' those results. I've actually
| found Brave search's results to be more accurate and less spammy
| than Google's, but they still exhibit similar biases in
| predictable areas.
| udev4096 wrote:
| I hope duckduckgo tries to shift away from Bing. They were lying
| about the fact that "we rely on different crawlers apart from
| Bing"
| iamthirsty wrote:
| Where exactly were they lying, and how do you know for a fact?
| sigmonsays wrote:
| maybe it's time to centralize crawlers and search data, making it
| publicly available to anyone willing to process it.
|
| Not only would that reduce crawler traffic on websites to a
| single crawler entity it would make page data available for any
| indexer.
|
| The idea that one company owns this data is kind of silly, it
| should be a coalition or a group of companies working together...
| RunningDroid wrote:
| I think a better design would be to define a spec for search
| data so sites that implement it could generate a ".well-
| known/search_data.zst" (or whatever) and people would only need
| to crawl the site to check compliance with the spec.
| vondur wrote:
| I was getting an error from Bing not working earlier today.
| Possibly related?
| phreeza wrote:
| Did they stop publishing detailed traffic stats? They used to
| have a very detailed page if I recall correctly, but I can't find
| it any more.
| nashashmi wrote:
| I realized DDG was just a skin on Bing a couple of days ago.
| Bing's results have gone incredibly sour. Too many ads on bing.
| Bing speaks of censorship and fake results (repeated listings of
| the same garbage on 3rd, 4th pages).
|
| The only thing DDG is good for: using bangs! search any and every
| search engine thru ![bang].
|
| What other search engines are still good? Google hit the fan a
| couple of years back after the hire of Prabhakar Raghavan
| (https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/). Bing
| cowered to censored results. ChatGPT is muzzled.
| kawfey wrote:
| I grew up using Google (and ask jeeves and yahoo.) In school,
| google won.
|
| Now, google sucks. It's all ads, AI SEO maxxing, and the work to
| find useful results has gone up manyfold. I found myself using
| site:"" to get closer to what I needed.
|
| I tried DDG, and it's more or less the same, but it's like the
| search engine is conspiring against you to more or less find
| completely useless results.
|
| I tried kagi, and i love it. I hate that it's 100 searches for
| the cheapest account, but it gets me right into the thick of my
| research off the bat, plus searching smallweb has brought my
| faith back into the internet, and it's AI stuff is useful,
| insofar that it doesn't get in the way.
|
| DDG is still my standard search tool for "picture of banana" or
| "WWII jet airplanes" but for "forum discussion 73 magazine
| article on homebrew superheterodyne receiver from 1980s" im going
| straight to kagi.
| elicksaur wrote:
| >it's like the search engine is conspiring against you to more
| or less find completely useless results.
|
| Has not been my experience at all. Been using ddg as my default
| for a few years. What kinds of searches do you find
| frustrating?
| bombcar wrote:
| In my experience DDG and Google are similar in that you
| either get what you wanted right away, or you're doomed
|
| At least with Kagi it's been worth scrolling down a page or
| two before reformatting my search query.
| Atlas48 wrote:
| I main DDG for it's bang feature. It's permanently ingrained
| into my muscle memory now.
| niutech wrote:
| Brave Search supports bangs too!
| https://search.brave.com/bangs
| jsemrau wrote:
| I wrote a Langchain ReAct agent that searches the web for me
| using Wikipedia, Serpapi (google), and DDG. Works better than
| traditional search.
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