DuckDuckGo was down • Hacker News Board

Re: DuckDuckGo was down

#421

Post by RunningDroid » Thu, May 23, 2024, 5:46 PM UTC

sigmonsays wrote: post #414

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...

I think a better design would be to define a spec for search data so sites that implement it could generate a ".well-known/search_data.zst" (or whatever) and people would only need to crawl the site to check compliance with the spec.

Re: DuckDuckGo was down

#422

Post by pmlnr » Thu, May 23, 2024, 5:47 PM UTC

npteljes wrote: post #357

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.

I definitely felt misled, when I first learned about this, back when they censored Tank Man the same time Bing did[0]. I did remain a user though, mostly because I haven't felt like keeping up who the current good guys are. Lately I have been considering Kagi, but I don't like it that I need to log in on all my devices, and then I have to have a fallback, for when I'm not on my own devices. So yeah, for my intents an…

I just left Kagi. At first, it looked very nice, but for some reason, in a few weeks both Google and ddg gave me much better results. The new g web filter is actually quite good as well.

Re: DuckDuckGo was down

#423

Post by atomicfiredoll » Thu, May 23, 2024, 5:53 PM UTC

reddalo wrote: post #245

beretguy wrote: post #155

Use Brave search for now instead. https://search.brave.com

No thanks, it's run by cryptobros.

The amount of Brave and Kagi spam in this thread is nutso. I can't be convinced it's not coordinated marketing by either or both of them.

I'm not saying that there aren't some satisfied customers, but at some point a normal human being says: "Hey, 30 other people posted this. Maybe I shouldn't."

Re: DuckDuckGo was down

#424

Post by playingalong » Thu, May 23, 2024, 6:03 PM UTC

ErrantX wrote: post #378

berkes wrote: post #356

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Often the case with US-based companies that have outages during "office hours in Europe". We, europeans see it going down. Communication on why, how and ETAs only appear at the start of the US day.

DDG has a global remote workforce so this wouldn't seem to apply in their case.

(just guessing) the directors might be in US though

Re: DuckDuckGo was down

#425

Post by PascLeRasc » Thu, May 23, 2024, 6:04 PM UTC

farmdve wrote: post #69

While we are on the subject of search engines, which search engines still show you like blogs, forum posts and stuff like that? Most of the blogs for obscure projects or problems are no longer even discoverable.

Google with the udm-14 flag: https://udm14.com/

Re: DuckDuckGo was down

#426

Post by notatoad » Thu, May 23, 2024, 6:11 PM UTC

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…

Yahoo BOSS and WolframAlpha are also bing, right?

Re: DuckDuckGo was down

#427

Post by danielcampos93 » Thu, May 23, 2024, 6:11 PM UTC

kornhole wrote: post #340

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.

Yes it is one of many metasearch sites and not actually a search engine. Other engines include Kagi, Yandex, Brave, Mojeek, Quant, and something called Google.

More countries have nukes than companies have actual indexes

Re: DuckDuckGo was down

#428

Post by [deleted] » Thu, May 23, 2024, 6:11 PM UTC

TechDebtDevin wrote: post #230

FerretFred wrote: post #221

> "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]

Re: DuckDuckGo was down

#429

Post by Zambyte » Thu, May 23, 2024, 6:12 PM UTC

kornhole wrote: post #340

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.

Yes it is one of many metasearch sites and not actually a search engine. Other engines include Kagi, Yandex, Brave, Mojeek, Quant, and something called Google.

As someone who uses Kagi, I think it is absolutely not accurate to say they are a search engine rather than a meta search engine. Most of their results come from the other engines you listed.

https://help.kagi.com/kagi/search-details/search-sources.htm...

Re: DuckDuckGo was down

#430

Post by lxgr » Thu, May 23, 2024, 6:27 PM UTC

Timshel wrote: post #212

_heimdall wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Distribution alone doesn't make a system resilient. A distributed system can help with resilience for anything related to network or hardware failure, but even then you need to make sure the different resources don't have a hard dependency on each other. If you want a resilient system redundancy and automatic failover systems are really important, along with solid error handling. Think about a distributed data store…

It does not garanty resiliency but it does increase it. If tomorow mastodon.social disappear the network might lose 80% of it's content but recovery could be possible even if the server never come back.

I feel like that's actually a counterexample. At least most people with mastodon.social as their home server will probably not have a backup of their followed/following graph and never be able to recover.