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DuckDuckGo was down

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Re: DuckDuckGo was down

#281
post #249

Can't wait to find out what happened here. This seems to be a massive outage. Interesting how fragile things become when so much technology is concentrated into just a few companies.

My subjective impression as a web user since the late 90s is that now things break relatively rarely (I think it's the first time I have any such issue with DDG for instance) but when they do a huge chunk of the web becomes unreachable. Back when things were more decentralized individual websites and services would have issues much more regularly because the individual software and hardware stacks weren't as robust a…

And America only uses the term “Too Big Toto Fail” when it comes to banks.

Re: DuckDuckGo was down

#285

> "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.

Why the snarky tone? MS Copilot is a mixture of enhanced search, ChatGPT like chat and Dall-E 3 for image generation, but without the need to create an account (only for image generation, I think). I use it at work every day and it is super helpful. I haven't compared it to ChatGPT, though.

Re: DuckDuckGo was down

#287

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.

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.

Re: DuckDuckGo was down

#288

Is it just me or is search terribly broken on the internet. It’s Google or Bing and Bing imposters. Why aren’t there more broad search options? Search was better when we had page rank algorithms. It’s gotten over condensed into 2 companies.

Like others have said, try out Kagi. I didn't buy the hype but the results are much better.

Re: DuckDuckGo was down

#289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Genuine question, are distributed systems naturally more resilient? I can see arguments for both sides. Your point and then the hidden failure modes without central observability and ownership. Nothing exists in isolation.

>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 higher number of components.

Re: DuckDuckGo was down

#290

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.

Firefox users can create their own "bangs" with bookmark keywords. Just bookmark https://example.com/%s and then assign a keyword to it from the Library window (full bookmarks manager).
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