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DuckDuckGo was down

duckduckgo.com

501–510 of 571 posts

Re: DuckDuckGo was down

#501
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.

Mojeek, fully independent index. self-disclosure: CEO

I heard about Mojeek for the first time in this comment section and am using it for the last hour. Really impressed by the speed. Set it as my default for now, used to be a DDG user :)

Re: DuckDuckGo was down

#502
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…

It's 300 searches per month for the cheapest Kagi plan. For me that has been enough so far. Some days I search a lot and then other days almost nothing so on average I never passed the 300/month so far.

Main thing holding me back from even trying it is the mental overhead of having to think about "number of searches per month".

Same as an ISP with a bandwidth limit, even if it's much higher than I'm likely to need, it's not something I'm interested in having to keep track of or worry about.

Re: DuckDuckGo was down

#503
post #25

If you look up "hacker news", it at least shows you an insert from the Wikipedia article, even if there are no normal results: https://html.duckduckgo.com/html?q=hacker+news

I love this low-tech DDG interface! Made my day, thanks. (aha, https://duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/features/non-ja... mentions the "HTML" and "Lite" versions) Also, why is your username green?

> What do green usernames mean? Green indicates a new account.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html

Re: DuckDuckGo was down

#506
I’ve started using search.brave.com instead of Duck Duck Go as my default search engine (which in turn replaced Google search, the spyware/adware posing as a search engine)

I was formerly a huge advocate of DDG but between the Microsoft ad tracking the company was paid to include without disclosing to users [1] and their pro-censorship stance on the Ukraine war [2], they lost my trust.

Turns out Duck Duck Go is not a serious company. They are not serious about privacy and they are not serious about censorship, two principles I hold dear.

"It takes years to build trust and seconds to destroy it." - Warren Buffett

Now search.brave.com is my default on both Desktop and iOS (using the excellent Safari extension Hyperweb)

Re: DuckDuckGo was down

#507

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.

Qwant also relies on Bing (and was not usable during yesterday's incident)

Re: DuckDuckGo was down

#508

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quant or Qwant? Qwant does not rely on the Bing api but has its own index.

Are you sure about that? It doesn't completely rely on it but didn't it use bing as one of the search providers? I'm probably completely wrong and my info is outdated but I'm asking because it would be pretty special (in a good way!) if they use their own index exclusively.

Qwant was not usable yesterday during the Bing outage so that pretty much shows they cannot function without Bing (even if they do have some auxiliary indexes of some sort)

Re: DuckDuckGo was down

#509
post #499

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/

Very reactionary, but an index built by an SEO toolkit sounds like the worst experience, ever. Isn't SEO the thing which broke online search to begin with?

> Isn't SEO the thing which broke online search to begin with?

I'd say that was maybe the case in the beginning where spamming meta tags in your page made you rank well.

These days I feel like there's also benefits from the technical SEO front where search engines prioritize pages that are fast, work well on mobile, have correct meta information, don't load large images, pushed the adoption of https at the beginning etc.

Re: DuckDuckGo was down

#510
post #277
post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe that generally refers to all their custom answers, e.g. when you search for "weather ". Nevertheless, those don't seem to work either.

I bet their engineers are currently discussing how to make any such answers possible without Bing working, assuming the upstream data for them is not in fact also Bing.

If the upstream data isn't Bing then why did they stop working in the first place?
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