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DuckDuckGo was down

duckduckgo.com

301–310 of 571 posts

Re: DuckDuckGo was down

#301

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.

Page rank was a google thing, and it helped them take market share from everyone else and achieve their current quasi-monopoly?

Re: DuckDuckGo was down

#302

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) ?

Microsoft has the compute, so its likely to be an infrastructure problem

Re: DuckDuckGo was down

#303
post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

They probably start with Bing results and do custom filtering, ranking and presentation, so without the initial Bing results they can't do anything.

Someone please tell them they can wrap that code inside an "if" condition, and continue with the rest of the search.

Re: DuckDuckGo was down

#304

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) ?

At least for DDG, it's public knowledge.

Re: DuckDuckGo was down

#305
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...

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.

Re: DuckDuckGo was down

#307

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

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.

Re: DuckDuckGo was down

#308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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.

Re: DuckDuckGo was down

#309
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.

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.

Re: DuckDuckGo was down

#310

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... :-)

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)
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