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DuckDuckGo was down

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Re: DuckDuckGo was down

#521

Post by pythux »

swiftcoder wrote: post #514
somenameforme wrote: post #412

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/

Brave search is only very recently independent, and not, as far as I can tell, 100% of the way there. While they are building out their own index, they only recently stopped augmenting their own results with Bing, and are still augmenting them with Google.

That is not fully accurate. Brave Search is fully independent - the last dependency on Bing was dropped more than a year ago, but even at the time the dependency would not have prevented Brave Search from functioning during an event like yesterday’s Bing outage - it would have resulted in a drop of quality on a subset of complicated queries, though.

The “augmentation with Google” that you mention is an optional feature that only works in Brave browser and doesn’t mean Brave Search is less independent than in other browsers (but it might mean that the quality is increased for some queries; or at least closer to Google results in these cases).

I think when talking about independence it is important to make a distinction between “dependent” which means “cannot work at all if the provider goes down” (e.g. yesterday’s outage) and “dependent” meaning that the service would continue to operate but with some amount of degradation of service. It’s a spectrum. Yesterday we saw that some services could not operate at all when Bing was down.

Disclaimer: I work at Brave.

Re: DuckDuckGo was down

#522

Post by mdp2021 »

niutech wrote: post #316
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.

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

https://duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/sources...

> # Where do DuckDuckGo search results come from? // Most of our search result pages feature one or more Instant Answers. To deliver Instant Answers on specific topics, DuckDuckGo leverages many sources, including specialized sources like Sportradar and crowd-sourced sites like Wikipedia. We also maintain our own crawler (DuckDuckBot) and many indexes to support our results. 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

Re: DuckDuckGo was down

#523

Post by carlosjobim »

definitelyauser wrote: post #502
flakeoil wrote: post #486

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You can get the unlimited plan for a cheap price and then not have to think about it.

Re: DuckDuckGo was down

#524

Post by Zambyte »

8n4vidtmkvmk wrote: post #481
hifikuno wrote: post #480

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As another lover of Kagi, Kagi also has bangs. Apparently they also support all DDG bangs. https://help.kagi.com/kagi/features/bangs.html

Why y'all going to your fav search engine first to search with another search engine? This is built into chrome and probably Firefox and every other browser

I don't know how the syncing works for that, but all my custom bangs (which for me includes bangs for Kagi lenses / filters and non search engine sites at this point) sync using my Kagi account which is pretty nice.

Also I use Firefox Focus on mobile, which doesn't have many settings, and I don't think I've seen that features there.

Re: DuckDuckGo was down

#525

Post by arrowsmith »

red_admiral wrote: post #517
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.

"Bing but without copilot" alone would be a product worth having. But I think DDG has a few more things on top of that, like the `!bang` stuff and the bit where they don't send tracking data on you to Microsoft.

I really don't understand why any technically literate person would be impressed by the "!bang" stuff on DDG. You know your browser already provides this feature, right? Just configure some custom search keywords in your search settings. What does DDG offer that's better than this?

Re: DuckDuckGo was down

#527

Post by arrowsmith »

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?

No, they're not. I've been using Brave almost since its inception and I still have no idea what its cryptocurrency features are. Nor have I ever seen an intrusive ad from Brave, or anywhere else since Brave has an ad blocker built in.

Why does this same conversation happen every time Brave is mentioned on HN? Have any of the people complaining about Brave's crypto-whatever "problem" ever actually used it?

Re: DuckDuckGo was down

#528

Post by arrowsmith »

decide1000 wrote: post #437
kunley wrote: post #384

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Yes, those ads are still part of Brave.

What ads? I'm writing this on Brave and I've never seen any ads. Are we talking about the same browser?

Re: DuckDuckGo was down

#529

Post by carlosjobim »

nobody9999 wrote: post #216
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.

>Maybe Kagi is an option for you? Thanks, but I'd rather have my tonsils extracted through my ears. Unless you're buying. From the FAQ[0]: >Kagi Search requires an account only because it is a paid service which requires an account for the transaction. [0] https://help.kagi.com/kagi/faq/faq.html#why-does-kagi-search...

> I'd rather have my tonsils extracted through my ears.

That will probably also cost you ten dollars or more...

Re: DuckDuckGo was down

#530

Post by balder1991 »

openplatypus wrote: post #466
kornhole wrote: post #340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Just tried it and it led me to a 403 error page: “Sorry your network appears to be sending automated queries so we can't process your search at this time.”
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