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DuckDuckGo was down

duckduckgo.com

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Re: DuckDuckGo was down

#311

Post by aembleton »

tinyhouse wrote: post #287
notRobot wrote: post #248

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.

I wonder if there's anything in their contract with Bing that prevents this.

Re: DuckDuckGo was down

#312

Post by dewey »

reddalo wrote: post #244
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/

You said slow...but even trying that landing page took 4 seconds for me.

Re: DuckDuckGo was down

#313

Post by dylan604 »

datavirtue wrote: post #209
darreninthenet wrote: post #177

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.

wait, if you typed that into DDG and it brought you here, then how is it not working? if that's not what you meant, you worded your "DDG is not working at all, so I jumped onto HN to look for a thread about it" comment very strangely

Re: DuckDuckGo was down

#314

Post by niutech »

tinyhouse wrote: post #287
notRobot wrote: post #248

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.

Exactly. See Brave Search, they are much newer but did it right.

Re: DuckDuckGo was down

#315

Post by shaan7 »

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.

The notice helped me realize that Yahoo! Search still exists xD

Re: DuckDuckGo was down

#316

Post by niutech »

devit wrote: post #253
notRobot wrote: post #248

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.

So basically DDG is the wrapper for Bing Search, not an "independent" search company as they claim.

Re: DuckDuckGo was down

#317

Post by coldtea »

grimoald wrote: post #285
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.

Why the snarky tone? MS Copilot is a mixture of enhanced search, ChatGPT like chat and Dall-E 3 for image generation, but without the need to create an account (only for image generation, I think). I use it at work every day and it is super helpful. I haven't compared it to ChatGPT, though.

>Why the snarky tone? MS Copilot is a mixture of enhanced search, ChatGPT like chat and Dall-E 3 for image generation, but without the need to create an account (only for image generation, I think).

Because such branding deserves a snarky tone.

Re: DuckDuckGo was down

#319

Post by niutech »

ffhhj wrote: post #303
devit wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What would be the rest if they don't have their own index?

Re: DuckDuckGo was down

#320

Post by ricardo81 »

tinyhouse wrote: post #287
notRobot wrote: post #248

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.

Building an organic dataset with decent results is the expensive and hard part. Weather, wiki etc are the kind of things you can develop on a $20/m dedicated server.
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