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DuckDuckGo was down

duckduckgo.com

291–300 of 571 posts

Re: DuckDuckGo was down

#291

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.

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: DuckDuckGo was down

#292
post #194

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.

now I know why their results are so trash. switched to kagi a few years ago and it has been quite nice.

Re: DuckDuckGo was down

#293

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.

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

Re: DuckDuckGo was down

#294
post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 keybo…

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.

The Copilot key is actually Left-Shift + Windows key + F23

Re: DuckDuckGo was down

#295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

But why?

Re: DuckDuckGo was down

#296
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) ?

Re: DuckDuckGo was down

#297
post #109
post #49

Non-Google recommendations in the interim?

https://search.brave.com/ using that as my default search engine on firefox since last year. quite happy with the quality of results.

Looks great thank you. I see there's a !brave bang for duckduckgo too so no need to change up browser defaults.

Re: DuckDuckGo was down

#298

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.

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... :-)

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Re: DuckDuckGo was down

#300

> "Update 1: Microsoft has confirmed an issue where users may be unable to access the Microsoft Copilot service" So not all bad then?!

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.

[deleted]
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