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DuckDuckGo was down

duckduckgo.com

211–220 of 571 posts

Re: DuckDuckGo was down

#212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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…

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.

Re: DuckDuckGo was down

#213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

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.

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.

Re: DuckDuckGo was down

#214

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.

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.

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.

Re: DuckDuckGo was down

#215

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.

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"

Re: DuckDuckGo was down

#216
post #168

> 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.

>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...

Re: DuckDuckGo was down

#217
post #168

> 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.

>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...

You pay with your data instead, which is a fair choice.

Re: DuckDuckGo was down

#218

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.

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.

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.

Re: DuckDuckGo was down

#219

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

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...

Re: DuckDuckGo was down

#220

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...

Being discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40453077
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