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DuckDuckGo was down

duckduckgo.com

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Re: DuckDuckGo was down

#511

Post by mda »

Vinnl wrote: post #261
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 believe that generally refers to all their custom answers, e.g. when you search for "weather ". Nevertheless, those don't seem to work either.

No they always downplayed and tried to obscure the fact that it is basically a bing wrapper. Smoke and mirrors seems to be the main business strategy.

Re: DuckDuckGo was down

#512

Post by tomphoolery »

npteljes wrote: post #228

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.

get it because ducks

Re: DuckDuckGo was down

#513

Post by dredmorbius »

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

Bangs make searching third-party sites easier. For HN, for example:

  !hn by:dredmorbius ddg bangs
(I don't know how to force that to search comments by default, but that's a toggle on the results page.)

Others are image, weather, and Wikipedia searches.

You can share your bang searches with others. Since the syntax is centralised, you're not working through other people's individual search shortcuts.

DDG maintain the bangs and generally update the ones that break. Since more people are effectively testing these all the time, this is more effective than your own ability to keep your own search shortcuts in working order.

My claim isn't that these are necessarily overwhelming advantages. But they are benefits which some of us have noted and appreciate, and show that the concept has more than nil value.

And: DDG have over 13,500 bangs and counting, and you can search for relevant bangs using, of course, the !bang bang search, e.g.,

  !bang weather
(About 24 results.)

Re: DuckDuckGo was down

#514

Post by swiftcoder »

somenameforme wrote: post #412
autoexec wrote: post #392

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And Bing lifts their results from Google ( https://www.wired.com/2011/02/bing-copies-google/ ) so in the end it seems like the internet only has one search engine.

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.

Re: DuckDuckGo was down

#515

Post by swiftcoder »

tredre3 wrote: post #434
somenameforme wrote: post #420

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Brave rolled their own completely independent search [1] on what I assume is a relatively limited budget. It seems that regularly grabbing the data would be pretty easy. The harder part would be searching/ordering it in an efficient and meaningful way while avoiding SEO, but that seems more like a fun problem than a difficult one (if not both). [1] - https://search.brave.com/

There are two things the general HN sentiment genuinely believes is impossible to build unless you have billions of dollars: - Search Engines - Browser Engines I don't quite understand how we got there because neither of those things are impossible. Both are achievable with a small team and a couple years of runway. As proved by Brave and Ladybird.

As I understand it, Brave shipped a white-labelled Chromium, and piggybacked their search results on Bing+Google until they had enough cached results to start using their own index.

These are both orders of magnitude easier than building a browser or a search engine from scratch (although they may require similar capital investment)

Re: DuckDuckGo was down

#516

Post by jamesrr39 »

devit wrote: post #253
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.

They probably start with Bing results and do custom filtering, ranking and presentation, so without the initial Bing results they can't do anything.

I wonder if there are any duckduckgo/other search engine devs here to answer; why not keep a limited own index? Like, wikipedia, stack overflow, build up a cache of own-scraped sites for the top hits to popular search queries?

Am a being naive with how much is possible without going all-in and building an index of the whole web, or is it possible to have some kind of in-house fallback?

Re: DuckDuckGo was down

#517

Post by red_admiral »

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.

"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.

Re: DuckDuckGo was down

#518

Post by red_admiral »

niutech wrote: post #333
victor_z wrote: post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably. But DDG at least offers more privacy, right? Right?

DDG has a history of breaching privacy: https://techcrunch.com/2022/05/24/ddg-microsoft-tracking-blo... Meanwhile Brave Search or Mojeek provide more privacy, being independent at the same time.

That is true, but it's referring to their android browser app not their search engine, if I've read correctly.

Re: DuckDuckGo was down

#519

Post by cam_l »

dredmorbius wrote: post #513
8n4vidtmkvmk wrote: post #481

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Bangs make searching third-party sites easier. For HN, for example: !hn by:dredmorbius ddg bangs (I don't know how to force that to search comments by default, but that's a toggle on the results page.) Others are image, weather, and Wikipedia searches. You can share your bang searches with others. Since the syntax is centralised, you're not working through other people's individual search shortcuts. DDG maintain the…

>!hn by:dredmorbius ddg bangs

We found no stories matching by:dredmorbius ddg bang.

:(

But thanks, I had no idea hn had a bang!

Re: DuckDuckGo was down

#520

Post by ColinHayhurst »

tredre3 wrote: post #434
somenameforme wrote: post #420

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Brave rolled their own completely independent search [1] on what I assume is a relatively limited budget. It seems that regularly grabbing the data would be pretty easy. The harder part would be searching/ordering it in an efficient and meaningful way while avoiding SEO, but that seems more like a fun problem than a difficult one (if not both). [1] - https://search.brave.com/

There are two things the general HN sentiment genuinely believes is impossible to build unless you have billions of dollars: - Search Engines - Browser Engines I don't quite understand how we got there because neither of those things are impossible. Both are achievable with a small team and a couple years of runway. As proved by Brave and Ladybird.

As proved by Mojeek; a full web scale international search engine built from the ground up with £3 million in funding, and no dependencies. Admittedly longer than a couple of years; 5 years as a hobby project, 10 years building, and more recently GTM [0].

I declare a bias as CEO, but the determination of our founder Marc Smith deserves more recognition, so here is the story up to 2021 [1]

[0] https://www.mojeek.com/about/technology.html

[1] https://blog.mojeek.com/2021/03/to-track-or-not-to-track.htm...

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