Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

DuckDuckGo was down

duckduckgo.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

241–250 of 571 posts

Re: DuckDuckGo was down

#241

Post by dazc »

rvnx wrote: post #186
deutschepost wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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, t…

Good reason not to use amazon then.

Re: DuckDuckGo was down

#242

Post by aeonian_8 »

"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.

Re: DuckDuckGo was down

#243

Post by Springtime »

rvnx wrote: post #186
deutschepost wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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, t…

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).

Re: DuckDuckGo was down

#244

Post by reddalo »

dewey wrote: 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.

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/

Re: DuckDuckGo was down

#246

Post by firebird84 »

dewey wrote: 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.

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.

Re: DuckDuckGo was down

#247

Post by TechDebtDevin »

FerretFred wrote: post #237
TechDebtDevin wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

Sounds like a native MS product.

Re: DuckDuckGo was down

#248

Post by notRobot »

npteljes wrote: post #228

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.

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.

Re: DuckDuckGo was down

#249

Post by simias »

mhuffman wrote: post #141

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.

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.

Re: DuckDuckGo was down

#250

Post by altdataseller »

siva7 wrote: post #226
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.

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

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
Post reply on HN