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DuckDuckGo was down

duckduckgo.com

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Re: DuckDuckGo was down

#201

Post by biglyburrito »

marginalia_nu wrote: post #138
voidUpdate wrote: post #74

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

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.

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

Re: DuckDuckGo was down

#203

Post by misnome »

devnonymous wrote: post #148

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.

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."

Re: DuckDuckGo was down

#204

Post by Operyl »

altdataseller wrote: post #149

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.

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.

Re: DuckDuckGo was down

#205

Post by lucideer »

michael9423 wrote: post #151

So much about DuckDuckGo's claim that Bing is only a part of their search results.

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.

Re: DuckDuckGo was down

#208

Post by biglyburrito »

beretguy wrote: post #123
voidUpdate wrote: post #74

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

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.

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.

Re: DuckDuckGo was down

#209

Post by datavirtue »

darreninthenet wrote: post #177
michael9423 wrote: post #151

So much about DuckDuckGo's claim that Bing is only a part of their search results.

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.

I get here by typing a mangled version of "hacker news" into DDG. It's currently not working at all.
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