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

411–420 of 571 posts

Re: DuckDuckGo was down

#411

Post by pphysch »

bloblaw wrote: post #405
autoexec wrote: post #392

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And Bing lifts their results from Google ( https://www.wired.com/2011/02/bing-copies-google/ ) so in the end it seems like the internet only has one search engine.

That article is from 2011. I can imagine that in 13 years this may no longer be true.

What would lead you to believe that in the last 13 years MS would make the titanic investment of reimplementing their (alleged) Google-based search backend?

Given the trajectory of Bing this seems unlikely.

Re: DuckDuckGo was down

#412

Post by somenameforme »

autoexec wrote: post #392
niutech wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

And Bing lifts their results from Google ( https://www.wired.com/2011/02/bing-copies-google/ ) so in the end it seems like the internet only has one search engine.

Brave Search [1] is 100% independent. There's also Yandex [2] which also works excellently, but is biased towards more Russian language results. The image search is second to none though.

[1] - https://search.brave.com/

[2] - https://yandex.com/

Re: DuckDuckGo was down

#413

Post by pphysch »

miloignis wrote: post #390
gregw134 wrote: post #377

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pretty sure kagi is a bing wrapper too, although they blend in some other datasets.

Kagi's main results come from Google actually. (edit: see https://help.kagi.com/kagi/why-kagi/kagi-vs-google.html - Kagi really shows how good Google could be, since it's mostly using the Google index and then doing user-friendly things instead of user-unfriendly things on top)

I firmly believe Google will release Premium Search at some point. They did it quite successfully with YouTube...

One wonders if the popular narrative around crappification of Search is partially self-induced to prime consumers for premiumization.

Re: DuckDuckGo was down

#414

Post by sigmonsays »

maybe it's time to centralize crawlers and search data, making it publicly available to anyone willing to process it.

Not only would that reduce crawler traffic on websites to a single crawler entity it would make page data available for any indexer.

The idea that one company owns this data is kind of silly, it should be a coalition or a group of companies working together...

Re: DuckDuckGo was down

#415

Post by somenameforme »

kunley wrote: post #384
syklep wrote: post #379

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Brave explicitly claims not to.[1] Brave also does not rely on Bing for results. [1] https://search.brave.com/help/privacy-policy Edit: mojeek claims the same.[2] [2] https://www.mojeek.com/about/privacy/

Last time i checked, Brave was insisting on convinving me to use certain cryptocurrency platforms and it was more intrusive with it than typical web ads, which seemed really twisted, as the same Brave claimed to give ad-free experience. Are they still doing that?

It literally never did that. There's some crypto wallet button that you get in the address bar that you can disable with a right click, and that's pretty much the extent of it. All crypto and other related functionality is completely opt-in.

Re: DuckDuckGo was down

#417

Post by em-bee »

mdaniel wrote: post #389
em-bee wrote: post #376

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the most important function of on call rotation is there to fix problems, not to make announcements to the public. so they surely have the first, but maybe not the second.

Well, maybe that perspective explains why it takes 6+ hours to update any status page then: "welp, shit's broke, better wait for the management team to wake up to tell anyone"

more like: wait for them to decide exactly how to present this to the public.

Re: DuckDuckGo was down

#418

Post by Shank »

niutech wrote: post #331
fguerraz wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

From their FAQ (thanks to Web Archive): > Where do you get your results? > From over 30 sources, including DuckDuckBot (our own crawler), crowd-sourced sites (in our own index), Yahoo! BOSS, embed.ly, WolframAlpha, EntireWeb, Bing & Blekko. For any given search, there is usually a vertical search engine out there that does a better job at answering it than a general search engine. Our long-term goal is to get you inf…

Well, at least Blekko is definitely dead from that list, so it’s not a reflection of today.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blekko

Re: DuckDuckGo was down

#419

Post by Springtime »

tombert wrote: post #409
Springtime wrote: post #397

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>why the fuck would I believe their claims that their search engine (which is more or less a proxy for Bing) would be immune from it? The context of the news was a security researcher conducting an audit of the app. If DDG were, as the GP claimed, performing tracking on behalf of MS then it would be more concerning since there is a difference between performing tracking on behalf of a third-party company and merely e…

> The context of the news was a security researcher conducting an audit of the app. If DDG were, as the GP claimed, performing tracking on behalf of MS then it would be more concerning since there is a difference between performing tracking on behalf of a third-party company and merely excluding them from being blocked via a content blocker that most mobile browsers lack anyway. Sorry, I'm still not entirely sure tha…

> Which Firefox fork do you use? Does it work on iPhone?

I use Fennec, which afaict is Android only. It's my understanding it removed various Mozilla analytics though some is said to remain. It's compiled independently from source by F-Droid, which supports reproducible builds.

Primary reasons I use it is for enabling about:config editing out of the box and third party addons (either Mozilla-approved ones like uBlock Origin or any arbitrary addons so long as they're in an addon 'collection', following the same procedure like Firefox Nightly until Mozilla fulfils their goal of easier addon support).

Re: DuckDuckGo was down

#420

Post by somenameforme »

skeeter2020 wrote: post #308
tinyhouse wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Brave rolled their own completely independent search [1] on what I assume is a relatively limited budget. It seems that regularly grabbing the data would be pretty easy. The harder part would be searching/ordering it in an efficient and meaningful way while avoiding SEO, but that seems more like a fun problem than a difficult one (if not both).

[1] - https://search.brave.com/

Post reply on HN