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DuckDuckGo was down

duckduckgo.com

461–470 of 571 posts

Re: DuckDuckGo was down

#461

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.

Are they truly independent now? I remember a couple of years ago a small percentage (less than 10%?) of searches used bing. It's great of they're fully independent now.

Re: DuckDuckGo was down

#462
post #442

I grew up using Google (and ask jeeves and yahoo.) In school, google won. Now, google sucks. It's all ads, AI SEO maxxing, and the work to find useful results has gone up manyfold. I found myself using site:"" to get closer to what I needed. I tried DDG, and it's more or less the same, but it's like the search engine is conspiring against you to more or less find completely useless results. I tried kagi, and i love i…

I main DDG for it's bang feature. It's permanently ingrained into my muscle memory now.

Brave Search supports bangs too! https://search.brave.com/bangs

Re: DuckDuckGo was down

#463

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>are distributed systems naturally more resilient? All else being equal: Yes. It's like asking if a RAID1 is more resilient than a single drive.

RAID1 is mirrored. That is not what I would call a typical distributed system. It is a very redundant system. Like a cluster. A distributed system without redundancy would rather be something like data stripped across disks without parity. And that actually makes it less resilient, because failure of one component can bring down the whole system and the likelihood of failure is statistically higher because of the hig…

You're assuming a stateful system where the state is distributed throughout the components of the system. For a stateless component of a distributed system, you don't need redundancy to recover from an outage.

>likelihood of failure is statistically higher because of the higher number of components

Yes, absolutely true, but resiliency for a distributed system is not necessarily like your example of data stripped without parity, unless we're specifically talking about distributed storage.

Re: DuckDuckGo was down

#464
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.

Brave Search Goggles to the rescue: https://search.brave.com/goggles/discover

Re: DuckDuckGo was down

#465

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…

> It would be ideal if Kagi had some means of truly decoupling searches from accounts

Important to note is that Kagi does not associate searches with an account to begin with, nor there are any incentives for Kagi to do so (search log would be just a giant liability from a standpoint of Kagi's business model, with no benefit).

I think what you mean is - are there means to make that provable from a technology standpoint? It turns out there are, through something called blind tokens, and we are looking into it. It is being discussed in Kagi forums here: https://kagifeedback.org/d/653-completely-anonymous-searches...

Another solution available right now in Kagi is paying for the service with Bitcoin/Lightning and using a random email address to sign up (Kagi does not need or verify email addresses, they are just a login id and can be anything).

Re: DuckDuckGo was down

#466

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.

Mojeek has its very own index.

Re: DuckDuckGo was down

#467
post #356
post #337

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Took them several hours to put that message there though.

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 relatively large pool of European employees.

Re: DuckDuckGo was down

#468

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love that you had to include the /s because someone might actually believe that is indeed the case. What a bizarre world we live in.

Poe’s Law is pretty old by now

I get that but still. I found it amusing.

Re: DuckDuckGo was down

#470

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.

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.

There are only 3 planet scale search indices I think. Google, Bing and Yandex. Everyone else is just rehashing those results.
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