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DuckDuckGo was down

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272 pointsjshupe537 comments

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.

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

Someone please tell them they can wrap that code inside an "if" condition, and continue with the rest of the search.

What would be the rest if they don't have their own index?

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

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.

> Brave Search or Mojeek provide more privacy

Do they? Or have they just not had that "history" yet? I don't see anything fundamentally different in Brave that protects your and my privacy better than on DDG. I don't know Mojeek enough.

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?

They don't. The cryptocurrency options are all disabled by default and are opt-in.

It literally never did that. There's some crypto wallet button that you get in the address bar that you can disable with a right click, and that's pretty much the extent of it. All crypto and other related functionality is completely opt-in.

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?

I was talking about Brave Search (https://search.brave.com), not Brave browser. Seaech doesn't promote crypto.

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?

That only concern the browser not the search engine ?

HN discussion at the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31490515

Cause Brave CEO, Brendan Eich, is such a swell guy.

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

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.

Quant also relies on Bing API.

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)

Qwant, sorry. On Wikiledia they mention Bing multiple times: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qwant

Qwant was also out of service today due to Bing API outage: https://www.gamingdeputy.com/bing-outage-exposes-qwant-and-d...

Pretty sure kagi is a bing wrapper too, although they blend in some other datasets.

Kagi's main results come from Google actually. (edit: see https://help.kagi.com/kagi/why-kagi/kagi-vs-google.html - Kagi really shows how good Google could be, since it's mostly using the Google index and then doing user-friendly things instead of user-unfriendly things on top)

While I'm not disagreeing that Kagi's main results from Google, the source you linked doesn't specifically say that. Just says:

> "Heck, it even enables Kagi to exist!"

> "We’re grateful to have access to Google's search technology and infrastructure for Kagi."

So I wonder what the actual results mix is. Like I said, could be mainly from Google.

Edit: Added additional quote.

I could be wrong, but I think they're playing to their early adopter audience, that being tech workers.

Google is terrible at tech searches, without verbatim and now "web" search. Kagi spending work in this area, and indexing this area, might bear good fruit.

I firmly believe Google will release Premium Search at some point. They did it quite successfully with YouTube...

One wonders if the popular narrative around crappification of Search is partially self-induced to prime consumers for premiumization.

More countries have nukes than companies have actual indexes

But do more countries actually build them?

As someone who uses Kagi, I think it is absolutely not accurate to say they are a search engine rather than a meta search engine. Most of their results come from the other engines you listed.

https://help.kagi.com/kagi/search-details/search-sources.htm...

Interesting, I always had the impression they had their own index. Shame.

As per the first sentence on that page, they do. It's just not their only source, and from my experience it is far from the main source. You can see "% of unique Kagi results" on each search; these are the results from their own index.

Mojeek has its very own index.

Never heard of Mojeek and tested it right now, surprised how fast it feels! Going to use it as my default for a while.

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.”

Qwant is also a meta engine, and was also down yesterday.

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

The industry term is "whitelabeling"

Sometimes it pays to pretend

The legal term is "deception".

Taking someone else's product and making it better is a useful service.

It's not deception if you tell people you're doing it.

DDG massively oversells their own contribution to the search results.

If you look at their marketing material, they claim to "use a variety of sources, 500+ to bring you your search results". This is of course technically correct, but the truth is they are a relatively thin wrapper on Bing results.

So yes, I'd claim it is a form of deception.

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.

There's also Kagi

That article is from 2011. I can imagine that in 13 years this may no longer be true.

What would lead you to believe that in the last 13 years MS would make the titanic investment of reimplementing their (alleged) Google-based search backend?

Given the trajectory of Bing this seems unlikely.

For me it’s because DDG (aka Bing) results are vastly different than Google results. I use the !g and !s bangs often.

I think you’re making a huge assumption that nothing would change in 13 years!

Makes me wonder, does this mean Bing is the Chromium or Firefox of search?

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.

Wait till you find out who makes some store-brand food.

If they branded themselves as what it is, anonymized bing search with better features, I would be totally fine with that. As is, even if they don’t go with that branding, I have no problem using the service under those terms.

"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?

How do I set that up on iOS Safari?

Exactly. You can't except by setting DDG as the default search engine. Chrome, Brave, and FF for iOS also don't directly support this sort of feature either.

They already set them up for a ton of sites, though, and often you can guess your way to a bang on the first try. I have only looked at the actual list once or twice. Plus it seems to match the closest one in cases of using one that doesn't exist. I can also go to a machine that isn't my own and take advantage of them there right away. I heavily use the quickmarks in qutebrowser, but also the ddg bangs. I just hit O for open in new tab and can put in a bang right there.

Just to emphasize: When opan says ton, they mean a TON. Around 13 thousand, if I remember correctly.

They proxy the !bang things so that whoever provides the search gets less info about who you are. Less isn't nothing, but it is still better than your browser can do without the proxy.

>Just configure some custom search keywords in your search settings. What does DDG offer that's better than this?

Pre-configured keywords could be considered better than manually-configured keywords.

>Just configure

I might not be impressed, but as I get older, I skew toward out of the box experience over configuration. I rather learn, and then apply that knowledge everywhere the thing is used, than configure, and lug my configuration around. Therefore, I value an opinionated feature like the bangs in DDG, even though as a professional, I know that there are many alternatives to it. If I know how to do it with DDG, I can use it everywhere I load DDG: my personal computer, my work computer, my phone's browser, my phone's other browser, the browser in the VM, the browser in the VM in the cloud, on the freshly installed computer with its default settings, everywhere.

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

Their previous answer: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40454640

How can a poor peasant start using Bing APIs? They seem to cost a ton. Do I have to raise money before I even attempt a metasearch engine.

the most valuable service they provide is being a proxy for bing. they will never own up to it, but that in and of itself is an awesome service, as long as they're bing honest about your privacy.

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?

I believe that generally refers to all their custom answers, e.g. when you search for "weather <place name>". 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?

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.

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.

Do you really understand the scale of this (ongoing) investment? I'm not sure I'd classify this as "Absurd" - the value of DDG is not yet-another (tm) search index but the specific values they add on top. When you have limited resources I'd say they're making the right choice.

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.

It’s easy to make a crappy search and crappy browser, I think the sentiment is aimed at producing a useful alternative to google and chrome

In my honest opinion, Brave is a bit better than a crappy browser. They have their little crypto widgets, which you can disable very quickly if you’d like. Which depending on how hot blooded you are on the subject of crypto can be a turn off. But “crappy” seems a bit on the harsh end of the spectrum, no?

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)

If you have a web browser that isn’t Firefox, it’s probably Chromium these days. Also irrelevant to the search product.

Regarding the search product, you’re suggesting they used to use Bing/Google but now don’t. … Does that not mean they run their own indexers? So you’re just diminishing their value today based on what they used to do?

Not as irrelevant as it might seem. They do run their own indexers now, but my understanding is that they didn't actually build the index that way. They used the Brave browser traffic to guide which pages to index, which was primarily driven by the Google/Bing search results the browser was vending at that time. it's more of an embrace-extend strategy than a build-from-scratch

The point of my previous response stands... What is the difference in how one reaches a destination, if they in fact did make it to that destination? Granted, this does read a bit like an ethical dilemma where people with different values may come to different conclusions. But if you use Brave search today, you are getting results sourced from Brave's index, and not Microsoft/Google's, so in my mind, how they got to this point is now irrelevant. It's just smarter to do it how they did instead of starting from square 1.

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...

I wonder if there's anything in their contract with Bing that prevents this.

Exactly. See Brave Search, they are much newer but did it right.

Brave Search feels like Google from 2008. Just works, no BS.

Building an organic dataset with decent results is the expensive and hard part. Weather, wiki etc are the kind of things you can develop on a $20/m dedicated server.

I definitely felt misled, when I first learned about this, back when they censored Tank Man the same time Bing did[0]. I did remain a user though, mostly because I haven't felt like keeping up who the current good guys are. Lately I have been considering Kagi, but I don't like it that I need to log in on all my devices, and then I have to have a fallback, for when I'm not on my own devices.

So yeah, for my intents and purposes, DDG is a frontend to Bing. I do appreciate how uncluttered it is though, in comparison.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tank_Man#Censorship

I do wish Kagi had less friction getting logged in on each device, but they have gotten it as streamlined as possible without patching the browsers. Your key goes in a query string so you can put it in any browser's new/default search engine config[1].

[1] https://help.kagi.com/kagi/getting-started/setting-default.h...

I just left Kagi. At first, it looked very nice, but for some reason, in a few weeks both Google and ddg gave me much better results. The new g web filter is actually quite good as well.

Yeah, exactly. They're mostly a front end for Bing. I know they have their fans, and this remark will probably anger them, but I have never understood the point of DDG.

I'm not angry but: privacy? Isn't that the point they're blasting all over their page and apps?

DDG UI is a lot calmer. Opening Bing feels like entering a Middle-Eastern market.

I created this account just to say thank you for this comment.

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

Mojeek has its own index as well.

Data point: Bing was not down for me.

This. At some point in the past I was giving a "test drive" to DuckDuckGo. And the moment when I realised that they are a Bing wrapper was the end of it.

comparing their search result with bing for at least the first 3 or 4 pages you'll see a very high correlation to bing's result (as long as you're logged out of bing). The main thing is they proxy your search for you and give half way decent results like bing.

I keep meaning to make a Chrome extension called DDGoogle that would reskin Google results in the style of DuckDuckGo. This way people who insist on using DDG wouldn't have to endure Bing-quality results.

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).

Or right-click in any search box on any website, choose "Add keyword for this search".

The notice helped me realize that Yahoo! Search still exists xD

Doesn't yahoo also use bing under the hood?

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.

This take implies there is no on-call rotation at DDG, which I find suspicious

the most important function of on call rotation is there to fix problems, not to make announcements to the public. so they surely have the first, but maybe not the second.

Well, maybe that perspective explains why it takes 6+ hours to update any status page then: "welp, shit's broke, better wait for the management team to wake up to tell anyone"

more like: wait for them to decide exactly how to present this to the public.

This is incorrect, the primary job of an on-call rotation is to satisfy customers.

It’s usually much better ROI to publicly acknowledge an issue if the resolution is not going to be single digit minutes, as it massively reduces the incoming query/support burden

yes, but the users of the search engine are not the customers. actually, who would the customers of ddg be?

ad agencies? are they going to get upset if their ads are not visible for a few hours on of many sites where they post them? are they even going to notice?

DDG has a global remote workforce so this wouldn't seem to apply in their case.

(just guessing) the directors might be in US though

My company has a global remote workforce. The only team of which that owns any infrastructure being the team I am on, and all of my peers on that team being based in various parts of the US. So it’s not as simple maybe as you might think.

DDG has relatively large pool of European employees.

They should put an if results = 0 then post helpful message instead of try broken search again?

I thought I was easily entertained.

I'd love to see the DDG engineering team at work - I'm guessing no nonsense, smart folks who can poke fun at themselves but still get things done. Contrasting to what I've personally seen at a certain other search giant.

Nice, but they totally missed the opportunity to say 'Thanks for your patience while we get our ducks in a go'.

get it because ducks

To be fair, DDG uptime seems about 5-6 9's. P0 outages happen but DDG seems to have them maybe once every couple of years or so. That's pretty excellent effort.

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 it. I hate that it's 100 searches for the cheapest account, but it gets me right into the thick of my research off the bat, plus searching smallweb has brought my faith back into the internet, and it's AI stuff is useful, insofar that it doesn't get in the way.

DDG is still my standard search tool for "picture of banana" or "WWII jet airplanes" but for "forum discussion 73 magazine article on homebrew superheterodyne receiver from 1980s" im going straight to kagi.

>it's like the search engine is conspiring against you to more or less find completely useless results.

Has not been my experience at all. Been using ddg as my default for a few years. What kinds of searches do you find frustrating?

In my experience DDG and Google are similar in that you either get what you wanted right away, or you’re doomed

At least with Kagi it’s been worth scrolling down a page or two before reformatting my search query.

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

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 let you search on hundreds of specific sites, and you dont need to set anything up yourself.

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.)

>!hn by:dredmorbius ddg bangs

We found no stories matching by:dredmorbius ddg bang.

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

My usual use case is to search HN comments. Problem is that there doesn't seem to be a way to specify comments on the bang search itself, so you have to toggle the results page option, or click "search for comments" to get the 57 (at this writing) comment hits:

<https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...>

I really wish the bang would default to comment search, as it's a much broader search target. Posts are limited to 80 characters, comments to rather more than that (there is a max comment length, and I've hit it, but it's fairly generous). So your odds of matching term(s) in a comment are higher than for posts.

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.

99% sure Chrome will sync your search settings across devices if you log in. Firefox and Vivaldi also let you log into the browser and sync.

https://youryoure.com/?its

shameless undercover plug for kagi much?

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.

Just don't think about it. Kagi keeps track of it and they do not charge for anything extra. They will tell you when you reached your limit. At first I also thought I would have to think about and not search for anything unnecessary to keep the usage low, but now I just blast away without thinking about it and I have so far never reached the monthly limit of 300 for the $5 plan.

It's refreshing to not have any ads and know there is no hidden agenda behind the search results.

This has been my exact experience with DDG. I tried Yandex when somebody posted on here that it had old-school style results, and it was true to a certain degree, but I'm not gonna use some Russian search engine. So I just literally stopped searching for things. The Internet mostly died, for me, when searching got bad; now it's just specific forums and websites that I already know about.

In my opinion, this was all done on purpose. They wanted to ruin free and open access to independent, distributed creations, and keep any traffic into a narrow funnel owned mostly by Black Rock, Vanguard Trust, and State Street Capital, with the eventual goal of frustrating people into purchasing licensed access to AI to get curated and censored access to limited information.

My first stop is No Trash Search: https://notrashsearch.github.io/about.html

What turned me off Kagi is that they spent a huge percentage of some recent funding they got on making ridiculously customized overengineered…t-shirts.

Their development process seems to be “just say yes to everything that piques your interest” and so even with their steep pricing I’m fairly sure they’ll run out of money quickly.

A Microsoft outage is the source of this problem:

  A massive Microsoft outage affects Bing.com, Copilot for web and mobile, Copilot in Windows, ChatGPT internet search and DuckDuckGo.
  
  Microsoft outage started at approximately 3 AM EDT and seems to have primarily affected users in Asia and Europe.

https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/microsoft/microsoft-ou...

Being discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40453077

So much about DuckDuckGo's claim that Bing is only a part of their search results.

Prior to the Russia-Ukraine situation they actually did offer Yandex results if you set your region to Russia. It was interesting sometimes to see if there were any more useful top results. So at one point the claim was accurate.

Yandex.com itself seems to be still available in the West.

I‘m pretty sure it was always just a proxy for bing. Just stripping away the Microsoft tracking.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27394925

If you use Bing: You have "only" Microsoft Bing tracking you

If you use DuckDuckGo: Now, you have "Yahoo Ads" instead of Microsoft Ads, but these ads, they are in fact Microsoft Ads, except sold via Yahoo.

In front of these Yahoo Ads, DuckDuckGo actually adds its own click-through tracker.

Now you have DDG, Yahoo and Microsoft tracking you.

Bonus point if you click on an Amazon affiliate link, because in that case, the Amazon affiliate (DuckDuckGo) knows item-per-item what you purchased.

Good reason not to use amazon then.

There's a setting in DDG to disable ads. I'm aware of the Amazon affiliate link URL addition but since I don't buy anything from Amazon it doesn't concern me personally. Either way everyone can benefit from running a content blocker (I'd be surprised if anyone from this audience wasn't).

that kagi couples plan feeling better and better

If you use a search product then someone is going to have your search history and it'll more-than-likely be provided to law enforcement in your country who are the #1 threat to you [0]. It'll also be sent to some sort of data centre for tracking and whatever commercial uses that tracking is good for. I've never understood how that would be a threat, but if you don't like it it comes almost baked in to the business model. You can't stop them sharing data, so they will probably do it for money.

The sell is more that the data MS/DDG has is hopefully going to be siloed away from Google and so it is getting more expensive for an given entity to cross-reference information about you. And if we're lucky competitive pressure will peel DDG away from MS sooner or later if they get larger.

[0] This logic does lead to an argument for a fair chunk of HNs readership to use Yandex, because they are hosted in a country that is effectively at war with the English-speaking world but not presently targeting English speakers.

your [0] is just silly. If a person is at risk from their state's law enforcement, handing over their search data to yandex just makes it easier for Russia to convert them into spying/sabotage activities through, e.g., extortion.

As you have noted, Russia is at war with the ~English-speaking world~ West, so it is much more likely to use this data against the users than in the past.

But in your example the person involved would rather cooperate with the Russian authorities than turn their data over to local law enforcement. So it clearly makes sense to this hypothetical individual.

Besides, it'd be a struggle for the Russians to even figure out who they are. They'd only have search data. That is powerful but probably not enough in many cases.

Install Qubes OS,

Create disposable template for the browser with deleted browser dot-folder with no network,

(Optional) create appvm qube (or disposable template + disposable) for ProtonVPN or Mullvad

Create named disposable qube utilising the disposable template for the browser, and either sys-whonix or your VPN qube for network, and enjoy the most anonymous internet you will ever get!

This makes sense, I was sceptical with the fast pace DDG had in the search market.

DDG was once caught red-handed of tracking for Microsoft: https://techcrunch.com/2022/05/24/ddg-microsoft-tracking-blo...

That's a strange characterization of it. They weren't tracking for MS, their branded mobile browser (distinct from their site) was found to have an exclusion in its built-in content blocker for Microsoft-run tracking scripts in ads.

Or put another way, if their browser had no content blocker (like the stock browsers of any mobile OS), their browser would be behaving like all the others. The scrutiny came from the conspicuous exclusion, given their arrangement with Bing (much like the controversy of Adblock Plus many years ago).

I don't think the parent's comment was that strange of a way of characterizing it.

Yes, they block other tracking scripts, but since they have an explicit exception for tracking from Microsoft, it's not a complete stretch to say they were "tracking for MS"; I know technically it's Microsoft doing the tracking, but DDG gives them explicit permission to do so. I think that it's a distinction without much of a difference, and I don't think it's unfair to extrapolate a bit. If they're being misleading about the types of tracking in their mobile app to make Daddy Microsoft happy, 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?

It actually really upset me; I was a big user and advocate of the DDG browser on iOS and Android, but when that news came out it felt like a big betrayal. I haven't used any DDG product since then, and while I have no idea what kind of trackers they block (if any), I just use Firefox Focus now with Kagi search.

>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 excluding them from being blocked via a content blocker that most mobile browsers lack anyway.

A mobile app has much more freedom to do what it likes so if this was the worst that occurred in an audit I'm not of the opinion this mark against them is enough to change my use of them. Many things carry some compromise so one has to weigh if an alternative is better. Use of Firefox by default has Mozilla tracking (hence why some mobile forks exists, including one I use), analytics for sponsored links, non-disableable domain name auto-completion by partners, while use of Kagi search is directly tied to an IRL identity via payment.

For me, I'm comfortable using uBlock Origin on both Desktop and Mobile (via a Firefox fork) unless more egregious facts present themselves.

> 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 that I agree that this doesn't count as tracking on behalf of Microsoft. If their browser has an "if MSTracker then allow else doNotAllow", that still seems like it's effectively endorsing MS tracking.

That said, I agree with your criticisms on Kagi (as outlined in sister thread). It would be ideal if Kagi had some means of truly decoupling searches from accounts, but as I stated, at least Kagi charges a fee so they have a means of making money without mining and selling data.

Which Firefox fork do you use? Does it work on iPhone? I would really prefer to use something that allows me to install extensions like uBlock.

> Which Firefox fork do you use? Does it work on iPhone?

I use Fennec, which afaict is Android only. It's my understanding it removed various Mozilla analytics though some is said to remain. It's compiled independently from source by F-Droid, which supports reproducible builds.

Primary reasons I use it is for enabling about:config editing out of the box and third party addons (either Mozilla-approved ones like uBlock Origin or any arbitrary addons so long as they're in an addon 'collection', following the same procedure like Firefox Nightly until Mozilla fulfils their goal of easier addon support).

Yeah, doesn't appear to support iOS, at least not in the app store.

Once Alt stores show up in the US I suspect we'll get a lot more of these browsers showing up on iPhone. My last experience with Android was awful so I went crawling back to iOS, but I think that I just got a bad physical unit more than anything else.

I did see that Kagi's Orion browser allows you to install extensions, though I had issues with stability when I tried it a year ago, but a lot can change in a year so I should probably give it again.

> 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).

> I think what you mean is - are there means to make that provable from a technology standpoint?

Yes that is what I meant. I do genuinely believe you when you say that the searches aren't correlated to the accounts, but the problem is that it's difficult to know for sure if that's actually true; how many cases in tech have we thought something was "private" and it turned out that they were vending our data out to the highest bidder?

As long as Kagi doesn't start serving targeted ads, I am personally willing to trust it (as I have for the last year and a half), though I am super interested in the blind token thing you linked.

Kagi has its own issues. At least with DDG you could search without logging in and your searches weren't directly tied to your name/address/credit card. Ads are best handled with ad blockers anyway.

This rando's comments (https://old.reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/1bmubkd/thoughts_a...) on the filter bubble problem seems like a reasonable concern too. It's best for a search engine to know nothing about you and just provide the best results for what you asked, not what it thinks you want to hear.

The privacy vs. anonymous thing is fair, and I have some issues with that, and I wish it were a bit more clear on what exactly that means. Even if Vlad's example of "parents knowing what you're doing but still respecting privacy" thing is true, it's not like I want my parents know I'm looking at porn, even if they don't know what kind of porn I'm looking at. That's something that they should address.

I still trust Kagi more than basically any free service though. There's no ads, and since they charge for search they at least have a means of making money that doesn't involve selling my data. Even if Kagi knows what I'm doing, I'm willing to accept that they're not dispensing my data quite as liberally as Google and Microsoft (and apparently DDG).

> I still trust Kagi more than basically any free service though

Please don’t. Just look at the paid services/products around you. Don’t give more PII to a browser vendor than is necessary.

Well I don't use the Kagi Orion browser at all, I use IceCat on all my PC stuff, and Firefox on mobile.

I do generally agree with your broader point, however in 2024 I don't think it's realistic to stop utilizing search engines while not inadvertently giving up PII. I mean, I could, but I do think my life would be considerably worse.

At least with Kagi, they have some means of making money that doesn't involve selling data. It's entirely possible that they betray us and start selling our data anyway, I'm not completely naive, but at least it's not an inevitability like with ostensibly free services.

Just the way they market it. Almost 100% positive their organic results are purely Bing. The 'other sources' seems to be a sleight of hand wrt wiki boxes etc.

Not defending DDG or anyone here but it depends on the cause of the outage... is it something broken in Azure (for example) that's causing it? As has been pointed out it's still possible to search with Bing (both directly and through DDG with bangs) so it might not be as simple as you're implying.

I get here by typing a mangled version of "hacker news" into DDG. It's currently not working at all.

But why?

wait, if you typed that into DDG and it brought you here, then how is it not working? if that's not what you meant, you worded your "DDG is not working at all, so I jumped onto HN to look for a thread about it" comment very strangely

I think that's how they typically get here, but upon it not working, they were able to unmangle the URL

No need to unwind the pedants.

Nobody was being pedantic. I don't use the web that way. I never type into a search engine the domain of a site I want to go to, so that's just totally odd to me. I'm of an age where we actually know what a domain is, and do not use the web like it is AOL keywords. Especially when >90% of the time, you just tack on a .com to your keywords to find the actual website.

> I never type into a search engine the domain of a site I want to go to

I think the plurality, if not majority, of people use a browser configured such that the URL bar is automatically a search engine if it doesn't recognize the URL.

Some DDG results still work, mostly the "instant answer" cards like word definitions.

As far as I know, DDG's claim was mainly that they use Bing, but that Bing is unable to see/corellate who searched for what. Basically that DDG acts as an anonymity proxy between you and Bing.

Tbh I've been rather impressed about how much of DDG has continued to work while all their results are down - e.g. all bangs continue to work fine.

Where did you read such a claim? There is a difference between "only a part" and "largely sourced from".

_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._

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

From their FAQ (thanks to Web Archive):

> Where do you get your results?

> From over 30 sources, including DuckDuckBot (our own crawler), crowd-sourced sites (in our own index), Yahoo! BOSS, embed.ly, WolframAlpha, EntireWeb, Bing & Blekko. For any given search, there is usually a vertical search engine out there that does a better job at answering it than a general search engine. Our long-term goal is to get you information from that best source, ideally in instant answer form.

Well, at least Blekko is definitely dead from that list, so it’s not a reflection of today.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blekko

Yahoo BOSS and WolframAlpha are also bing, right?

Unless you have been living under a rock, they have said it plenty of times

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.

I mean, 100% is technically still "part"

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.

It's always DNS.

Unless it's Nagle. (Sorry animats.)

Or BGP

My money is on expired domain somewhere or security certificate.

A Windows update restarted a critical server automatically. A core service is blocked from starting by a Candy Crush ad installed by the update. The Crandy Crush ad is somehow expecting a Copilot key to be pressed on the keyboard to let the system keep going.

MS engineers are waiting for an online purchase of a new $400 keyboard with the Copilot key to complete and planning to run to the data center to plug the keyboard.

However, the Bing outage is preventing the purchase to go through, because the payment somehow relies on Bing suggestions to load for obscure reasons.

No way Microsoft could be this inept… could they?

Very very technically, if RDP is enabled and working, this could be fixed by rdesktop-ing to the machine from a Linux box and using xdotool to experiment with typing raw keyboard scancodes through the RDP session in the hope you figure out the encoding of the Copilot key.

The Copilot key is actually Left-Shift + Windows key + F23

And you can remap it but can’t use it as a modifier key https://www.tomshardware.com/software/windows/windows-copilo...

Neat answer :-)

I also appreciate that you prevented me from countering using a guard like "if RDP is enabled and working", and that a follow up answer actually provides the missing piece xD.

Update: the payment gateway is Stripe, which is not processing any transactions associated with the MS account. A developer has posted the issue to HN in the hope that a Stripe employee will see it and escalate the issue. /s

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.

MS knows better than to run windows on their servers. They’ve famously been running Linux on their public web facing stuff for years, including when they were publicly discrediting Linux (because IIS and MS server were so good they couldn’t run their web services reliably and securely).

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.

To the GP's point - if you lose the RAID controller, then you've lost a whole lot more than just a single drive failure.

Yes, RAID isn't a backup, but it is resilient.

You will have a better chance at uptime with a RAID than a single drive so you hopefully don't have to climb up ventilation ducts, walk across broken glass, and kill anyone sent to stop you on your quest to reconnect those cables that were cut.

The controller isn't stateful; it's just an interface to the disks. If the controller fails, but the disks haven't, then all you've lost is the time it takes to plug the disks into a new controller.

With RAID1, there's also nothing specific to the RAID configuration inherent in the way the data is encoded on the disk. You might have to carefully replicate your configuration to access the filesystem from a failed RAID0 array, but you can just pull and individual disk out of a RAID1 array and use it normally as a standalone disk.

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.

When I think of distributed systems, the RAID1 analogy seems much more applicable than RAID0.

The term "distributed" has been traditionally applied to the original design of the TCP/IP protocol, various application-layer protocols like NNTP, IRC, etc., with the common factor being that each node operates as a standalone unit, but with nodes maintaining connectivity to each other so the whole system approaches a synchronized state -- if one node fails. the others continue to operate, but the overall system might become partitioned, with each segment diverging in its state.

The "RAID0" approach might apply to something like a Kubernetes cluster, where each node of the system is an autonomous unit, but each node performs a slightly different function, so that if any one node fails, the functionality of the overall system is blocked.

That second approach seems more consistent with what we traditionally label as "distributed" -- for example, the original design of the TCP/IP protocol, along with lots of application-layer protocols like NNTP and IRC, have each node operating autonomously but synchronized to other nodes so the whole system approaches a common data state. If one node fails, the other nodes all continue to operate, but might cause the overall system to become partitioned, leading to divergent states in each disconnected segment.

The CAP theorem comes to mind: the first approach maintains availability but risks consistency, the second approach maintains consistency but risks availability. But the second approach seems like a variant implementation strategy for what is still effectively a centralized system -- the overall solution still exists only as a single instance -- so I usually think of the first approach when something is described as "distributed".

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.

Distribution alone doesn't make a system resilient. A distributed system can help with resilience for anything related to network or hardware failure, but even then you need to make sure the different resources don't have a hard dependency on each other.

If you want a resilient system redundancy and automatic failover systems are really important, along with solid error handling.

Think about a distributed data store for example. You may spread all your data across multiple distributed areas, but if each area is managing a shard of data and they aren't replications then you still lose functionality when any one region goes down. If you instead have a copy complete copy of data in each region, and a system to automatically switch regions if the primary goes down, your system is much more resilient to outages (though also more complex and expensive).

It does not garanty resiliency but it does increase it.

If tomorow mastodon.social disappear the network might lose 80% of it's content but recovery could be possible even if the server never come back.

My point was just that resilience still depends on how a system is distributed and what else is done.

Distribution alone doesn't really make a difference, though pairing it was redundancy and failovers is going to get pretty far.

The case of mastodon.social is really a question of whether the value there is the network and protocol itself or the user created content posted there. If its the user content, the value is lost when the one host goes away. If the value is the network and protocol then yes, the value of the network is still there even though the data is gone. It does raise an interesting question of whether Mastodon is really considered distributed or not, the network is and hosts are using a shared protocol but the data isn't really distributed.

Yes there is the question of network vs data :). And as you mention while some data end-up being distributed with Activity Pub the protocol is not made to allow restoration.

One point I find interesting too is that distributed network often allows more agency to external actors. For example if you believe that the resiliency of the mastodon.social instance is not enough for you then you can decide to host you own server with your preferred criteria.

That's really where ActivityPub starts to rub me the wrong way. Server admins really need moderation power since everything is hosted on their hardware, but it also is a poison pill for decentralization.

I can host my own server and make my own rules, but every other admin can just ban my instance.

I feel like that's actually a counterexample. At least most people with mastodon.social as their home server will probably not have a backup of their followed/following graph and never be able to recover.

Not distributed per se, but diversity makes a huge difference in resilience.

When everybody is using the exact same tech, the fall out of an incident can be huge because it will affect everybody everywhere at the same time. Superficially it might seem efficient and smart, but the end result is fragility.

Diversity of species is what nature ended up with as the ultimate solution: the individual species do not matter, but life as a whole will be able to flourish. With technology, we're now moving the other way: every single thing gets concentrated into one of the few cloud providers. Resilience decreases, fragility increases.

I prefer heterogeneity rather than diversity. Different implementations of similar processes fenerally make different tradeoffs, incurring different bottlenecks, and resulting in an ecosystem with a higher statistical probability that one relative Black Swan won't wipe out a key structural function in it's totality.

It's actually a hallmark of building fault tolerant systems and ecosystems. Pity the economists and MBA's can't be convinced of it. Otherwise there'd be less push to create TBTF institutions.

Not exactly “more resilient”, but rather, “the only way to gain more resiliency over a single system”.

A distributed system can be more resilient, but it also adds complexity, making it (sometimes) less reliable.

A single system with a lot of internal redundancy can be more reliable than a poorly implemented distributed system, which is why at a smaller scale it’s often better to scale vertically until a single node can’t handle your needs.

Distributed systems are more of a necessity than “the best way”. If we could just build a single node that scaled infinitely, that would be more reliable than a distributed system.

With a large number of small providers, more often than not some of them will fail on any given day, but stars need to align really well to get a half-of-the-internet-is-down kind of failure caused by AWS or Cloudflare.

Distributed systems with tight coupling and no redundancy are less resilient. It's not so much a question about distribution but more about redundancy and coupling.

> Genuine question, are distributed systems naturally more resilient?

Only if they've prioritized the "availability" component from the CAP theorem.

“A distributed system is one in which the failure of a computer you didn't even know existed can render your own computer unusable.” — Leslie Lamport, 1987

Used a Co-pilot enabled PC.

Not necessarily massive. Given that Bing works again now, this seems more like an API frontend failure, or an internal routing failure at some level.

Note they seem to have managed to fix the Bing frontend hours ago, but DDG is still dead in the water. Priorities... :-)

Bing does not work me at the moment (maybe they can service partial traffic? Unclear if it’s better/worse than a few hours ago when the outage started)

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 and fault-tolerant, but then usually the problem would always be limited to a single website/service.

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

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

And only when they're not in Kansas, anymore.

> "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.

I encountered MS Copilot recently when I reluctantly installed Windows for a local charity (their idea, not mine). Basically, if you do a search it'll give you the results but will then fill your screen with other information allegedly related to your query but relayed in the most verbose and annoying manner possible.

Sounds like a native MS product.

I thibk its the AI version of Clippy or something embedded in Office or Microsoft365 or whatever they call that thing these days.. (i think, i have absolutely no idea either :)

It's chatgpt wearing a hat and sunglasses

For better or for worse, it absolutely works. Pumping water from other sources or copying another type of well has been Microsoft's MO for almost 50 years and they're one of the most valuable companies on the planet.

We are on different scales of time. This does not work. Ask MS how well this technique went with phones. Their moat is as wide as the Mississippi. It will be a while, but there's a large quantity of water required to fill that ditch. They obviously know what they're doing, but time has a way of eating things.

Copilot is branding, not a product or feature. Problem is that the features/products that run under that branding don't have proper names themselves and I guess that's what trips up a lot of people.

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.

>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).

Because such branding deserves a snarky tone.

Sent from Outlook (whichever program/service/webapp that means now)

Thank you.

No no, you're confusing it with Copilot Series X, it leverages the latest Windows screen capture technology on your Xbox One X Series One and is intended to help speedrunners up their game, while also helping connect everyone else with relevant products and services from over 9000 partners.

So, uh, Copilot+PC, how much of their AI computer thing would be completely useless right now?

> 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.

I concur on Kagi. Now when I go to other search engines I just get frustrated.

Came here to praise Kagi (and Brave Search) as well.

I'm a Kagi user and unfortunately they are reselling Google Search results.

>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...

You pay with your data instead, which is a fair choice.

Yes, unlike google who takes all the pesky account business out of the loop and does the tracking for you!

Either you pay for the product or you are the product for someone else who is paying. I know which I prefer.

They say this:

> You can create a Kagi account with any email address including a fake one (we do not care or verify it, it is just an id for logging in)

But seeing how they didn't go the Mullvad way, and instead chose to ask for an email during signup and hide this bit of info in a completely separate page, doesn't sit too well with me and comes off as a little bit dishonest (they say they don't need this info but sure seems to me they seem to want to have it).

And part of the message I get from reading their F.A.Q. is that a valid email address might start being required at any time soon.

Sure, they would have payment information anyway, but if searches are also linked to email address, that means companies that offer free services can try to buy this information about their free users. So even if you don't pay for, say, Discord, they can still be interested in the searches that are linked to the email address you signed up with.

The difference in privacy between Mullvad and Kagi is not even that much since both are paid services; but Mullvad can get my money and a good chunk of my internet activity, while Kagi doesn't get either from me.

Look, I don't mind too much paying for stuff. And even if I'm paying, I wouldn't even care[1] if I get non-intrusive non-tracking ads (i.e. just text, or first-party <img> tags) related to stuff that I don't delete from my search history. Show me ads for anime figurines, or new releases of light novels, or nice notebooks, or shops selling plants, or computer parts, or a new Steam Deck, stuff like that. I would even help fine tune the ads if it means I get better recommendations (or fewer bad ones, at least).

But it's these kinds of mixed signals, like trying to project an image of offering better privacy than what's common[2] while also doing the email address thingy, that give me a lot of pause when I'm evaluating a service.

[1]: I'm aware my stance on ads is unusual here in HN. I wouldn't disable my adblocker, but if done right, I wouldn't need to. I haven't gone out of my way to block HN frontpage ads (yet), for example.

[2]: That's the subjective impression I got, which might be wrong. The rest of my comment was written based on this.

Verbatim from Kagi FAQ:

"Why does Kagi Search require an email address? We require an email address to be able to verify the account really belongs to you in the following cases:

To handle the account recovery (in case you lose your password) In case you contact us via email with an account related questions (in particular requests to delete your account or change your subscription) To occasionally send product updates, which you can disable in your Kagi settings or unsubscribe directly from the email Note that you can use an anonymous email provider such as SimpleLogin with Kagi Search and it is up to you what email address you want to use.

Kagi does not need your personal information and the above requirements are just bare minimums needed in order to be able to operate a subscription product business."

It's similar to services like Bitwarden in that regard.

Mullvad can get away with not doing that because they have a single plan with a low price.

Yes that's what I'm sayin'

>> [...] instead chose to ask for an email during signup and hide this bit of info in a completely separate page, [...]

>> they say they don't need this info but sure seems to me they seem to want to have it

>> And part of the message I get from reading their F.A.Q. is that a valid email address might start being required at any time soon.

>> But it's these kinds of mixed signals [...]

If they had presence here in the EU, then at least there would be some legal risk (GDPR) for Kagi if they do the deed and get caught. Higher than their current situation at least, where we only have their word.

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

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

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/

You said slow...but even trying that landing page took 4 seconds for me.

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.

Kagi has the same problem for me. The results don't load about 50% of the time. I had to cancel my subscription because I couldn't just roll the dice every time I searched to see if it would come back. Happens to all devices on my network.

Not disputing your experience, but fwiw I've been using kagi since it was in beta (now a paying customer) and I can't remember this ever happening to me.

I feel like maybe this is your network. I've been using Kagi for months and have never even once had this happen, nor has anyone, ever, not even once, reported this kind of issue on the Discord.

I've never seen that, maybe some extension, content filter gone rogue?

Have you contacted their support?

https://www.bing.com/ is down too at the moment.

Curiously I cannot find a "health" or a "status" page for either.

Does it vary by region? Mine works fine for bing.

Bing is sluggish but seems to work sometimes now.

I wonder if it's a DDoS attack on Bing.

....can you really DDoS Bing?

Maybe today's the day we find out DDG is just a UI to an Amazon Go-style backend: a room full of workers in India typing the queries into Bing and copy/pasting the results back to you.

DDG runs on bing, so that squares. Apparently, MS uses Bing for their portal, because I can't search inside Azure portal neither.

like a very large number of things we are pitched as search engines: https://www.searchenginemap.com/

works for me 8 minutes later, idk

The lack of status pages is annoying. Neither Bing, Ecosia or DuckDuckGo have one.

https://xkcd.com/2347/

Wow. This.

It has not been down for me.

I duno how this isn't getting more views tbh

Ecosia and Duckduckgo and Bing are down, there's at least 5% of the search engine market (the non-google part) down at the moment

Man, can you imagine if this happened to Google! I’m so curious now.

because not that many people use search engines other than google

which is surprising given how unbearable google has gotten

it's a bit like sticking to using windows in 2010

It's not surprising given how much better it is than everything else

lol what? Google or Windows? Got a chuckle out of this either way.

who said anything about windows?

The comment you replied to?

I've been migrating away from google with their recent changes because it's gotten less and less useful in getting me the answers. DDG has done better, but it's not as good as Google used to be before it was taken over by MBAs.

DDG is Bing. Using DDG is supporting Microsoft. Even if Bing was better than Google I wouldn't do it on principle

It’s not surprising. For approximately everyone there are only two search engines: Chrome and Edge

I know ecosia relies on bing but why does this affect DDG? Do they internally use bing as well?

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

"Of course, we have more traditional links and images in our search results too, which we largely source from Bing."

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.

You're supposed to get your information from big platforms exclusively, otherwise how would you be able to see all the nice ads and "curated activism"?

"Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. That tramples curiosity" [0]

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I'm sorry, I did not realize that complaining about big corporations using their monopoly was considered political and ideological now, but I suppose it makes sense. Please excuse my previous comment, I agree it's not helpful, and I should have resisted the urge to voice my frustration with the direction I see the internet heading

FWIW, I agree with your post and disagree that it violates the rules.

https://search.marginalia.nu/

https://blog.kagi.com/small-web

I tried marginalia with site: for my blog.

> This website is not known to the search engine. To submit the website for crawling, follow these instructions.

Yes, it's not a massive index that already includes every known website, that's not the goal of it at all.

Is there something wrong with these instructions?

Kagi. They actually have a filter setting to only show forum results. They have one for the "smallweb" as well. Also a "smallweb" landing page designed to help you discover niche creators like you mentioned. Here: https://kagi.com/smallweb/

this is cool as fuck

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 :)

That is exactly why I scrape internet. I maintain all found domains in github:

https://github.com/rumca-js/Internet-Places-Database

I wanted to have all links about amiga, or commodore, chiptune.

It is not a search engine. For now, it is only data.

Maybe this will help somebody, or somebody will be able to use this data better.

I have a demo app running on rpi. It may be immediately broken if top many ppl accessed it.

https://renegat0x0.ddns.net/apps/places

How about providing an example of a blog for an obscure project or problem that is no longer discoverable.

Google with the udm-14 flag: https://udm14.com/

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

It seems to be all search engines powered by Bing. Ecosia isn't working either, and they also don't have a status page.

yep

They're aware of the problem.

https://www.reddit.com/r/duckduckgo/comments/1cynfft/duckduc...

It's disappointing that a "meeh" Reddit post is total sum of communication from Bing, DuckDuckGo, Ecosia and others.

Huh, of all those, ddg seems the odd one. I thought it used its own search service, didn't realise it was bing underneath. Even if that's not entirely true the fact that the home page is down due to the same reason that bing is down doesn't look good.

When the outage started, for me duckduckgo.com just returned no results with the searchbar visible. The ddg homepage was still working. I've been using "my search term !g" for now and ddg just redirects my search to Google, so I don't have to change search provider in browsers.

It's been many hours now. They could have at least added a page saying "We are having an outage" rather than "There was an error displaying the search results. Please try again."

I switched to Brave search; I think their search results are from a search engine they acquired, so they don't use Bing or Google unless you tell them to 'mix in' those results. I've actually found Brave search's results to be more accurate and less spammy than Google's, but they still exhibit similar biases in predictable areas.

It was me. I asked it which pigeon has orange beak and it crashed it.

Let me help you ;) https://unsplash.com/photos/blue-and-white-bird-with-orange-...

That's him. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_wood_pigeon

Actually, I think it was me asking "Show me an example of a major systems outage at Microsoft."

/Bets on "If it's not DNS, they'll be rolling back a poorly-tested patch they just installed."?

DDG relying on bing for doing searches is... strange to me. I feel like I've seen its own web crawler in my access logs

NSA needs backup, when people wants to remain "private" ;)

It's other ! commands still work though, so !g will work as a backup or even !yandex if you feel that way inclined (and don't mind answering endless captchas

yeah of course that works because that just redirects to to another site

Yeah, I knew they rely on Bing but didn’t know this much. This really makes me not want to use ddg anymore. I’m seriously considering just paying $108/year to Kagi.

You don't have to go straight to the Professional ($108/year, unlimited searches) plan. There's also the Trial (free, 100 searches one-time) and Starter ($5/month, 3600 searches per year) plans, to help you figure out if it's worth spending for the unlimited plan.

Once I hit 3600 searches & was faced with the prospect of either going back to DuckDuckGo & Google to provide inferior search results -OR- paying $108/year for Kagi, it made the choice pretty simple. But it took me a few months to get to that point, and I don't think I spent more than $15 in that time figuring out if Kagi was right for me.

I am already on $5 plan and it’s definitely worth it. I was able to find things that neither ddg nor brave could.

Most alternative search engines are backed by either Google or Bing. Some have their own indexes as well, but it's rare to see a fully independent search engine.

Kagi is indie & works just fine, because it doesn't leverage either Google or Bing. IMO it works as well as Google used to, back when it didn't serve up SEO-tuned garbage or straight-up malware sites in its first pages.

https://kagi.com

That isn't true at all, it uses a bunch of different providers (including my own search engine).

"Our search results also include anonymized API calls to all major search result providers worldwide"

- https://help.kagi.com/kagi/search-details/search-sources.htm...

It's probably because Bing is down

This appears to be covered by the following HN submission which already has a dozen comments. Please redirect your interest there:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40451490

Startpage [0] search also is not returning web results. But image search is working. I wonder what's happening.

[0] https://www.startpage.com

DuckDuckGo also is unable to provide search results, which seems to confirm they use Bing as a base for their searches.

ditto for Ecosia.

Startpage too, but only on mobile (???)

Yes, they use bing https://duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/sources...

DuckDuckGo is just a search proxy

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

I use Ecosia (which Bing powered) and wondered why it was down earlier. Makes you realise just how few players there actually are in the search rankings space.

I believe you.com has their own proper search index? Ecosia and duckduckgo exist purely on ad revenue, any good search engine will be paid for in the future, even Google’s non-ad search results make me hesitant, it’s all SEO spam now, plus chatGPT or Gemini can answer nearly any question when you pay for the real service

The movies were indeed way ahead and knew -- Mothership snaps and the entire fleet just collapse like an unplugged discharged device.

According to the comments on this lemmy post [0] Bing, DuckDuckGo, Ecosia, StartPage, Qwant are/were affected

[0] https://lemmy.world/post/15708430

Ecosia is also down. I think all of these use Bing under the covers? If it is actually a Bing problem, it is pretty incredible that MS has an outage this long. Makes me think twice about the stability of Azure.

From DDG: https://x.com/DuckDuckGo/status/1793557968027570527

I just experienced this as well. I had a giggle when I opened a new tab and searched "is duckduckgo down" and the default search engine is ... duckduckgo.

Still no results .. strange :P

How in the world is DDG dependent upon Bing to function? So glad I switched to Brave Search :)

Single point of faaaaiiiiiluuuuure - Sing it!

I love it when Cloudflare accidentally breaks something and over half of the entire internet immediately goes down.

I also love that because I hope it will cause people to rethink such rampant centralization. Yeah, I get it, blah, blah, ddos, spider, etc, but for their gatekeeping, there sure doesn't seem to be any appeals process if they deem you to be Not An Upstanding Netizen

Whats up with the 'surprised' comments about ddg? I don't like ddg myself, but it has never been a secret that they base their results on bing.

now I know why their results are so trash. switched to kagi a few years ago and it has been quite nice.

Paying for search results? Come on, we're not that desperate.

Totally worth it. Very happy to see a small startup start eating into this space and happy to support them.

I hope duckduckgo tries to shift away from Bing. They were lying about the fact that "we rely on different crawlers apart from Bing"

Where exactly were they lying, and how do you know for a fact?

DuckDuckNoGo

What makes me sad is that even the url decode function of duck duck go failed :(

I'd have thought at least that part would work.

at least the !bangs still work, they probably are implemented at their load balancers

ah thats why ddg was down too?

Question for OP. What would be your guess that someone like he article writer is able to make the inference that Bing being down was also impacting DDG or ChatGPT ?

Is it public knowledge that they use the Bing backend to do their work ?

Particularly for Bing Copilot, isn't the relationship the other way around (OpenAI has the core sauce, bing uses its API to power their copilot searches) ?

Microsoft has the compute, so its likely to be an infrastructure problem

At least for DDG, it's public knowledge.

maybe it's time to centralize crawlers and search data, making it publicly available to anyone willing to process it.

Not only would that reduce crawler traffic on websites to a single crawler entity it would make page data available for any indexer.

The idea that one company owns this data is kind of silly, it should be a coalition or a group of companies working together...

I think a better design would be to define a spec for search data so sites that implement it could generate a ".well-known/search_data.zst" (or whatever) and people would only need to crawl the site to check compliance with the spec.

Looks like it's affecting anything Bing-related, at least over here in Australia. Same symptoms for Bing and Ecosia.

Yep, (typing from Poland)

Same, Germany

Use Brave search for now instead.

https://search.brave.com

No thanks, it's run by cryptobros.

Then you can pay for Kagi.

The amount of Brave and Kagi spam in this thread is nutso. I can't be convinced it's not coordinated marketing by either or both of them.

I'm not saying that there aren't some satisfied customers, but at some point a normal human being says: "Hey, 30 other people posted this. Maybe I shouldn't."

Are you a marketer for DDG? No need to get so paranoid. People just share their experiences.

I didn't say anything about DDG. Plus, the internet is full of influence campaigns and "organic marketing," so there's plenty of reason to be mindful and question what you're seeing/reading.

A suspiciously large number of people seem to "share their experiences" whenever anything tangentially related comes up. Authentic or not, it's raising spam flags.

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)

Bangs still seem to work, so "[search term] g!" saves the day until this is fixed.

I realized DDG was just a skin on Bing a couple of days ago. Bing's results have gone incredibly sour. Too many ads on bing. Bing speaks of censorship and fake results (repeated listings of the same garbage on 3rd, 4th pages).

The only thing DDG is good for: using bangs! search any and every search engine thru ![bang].

What other search engines are still good? Google hit the fan a couple of years back after the hire of Prabhakar Raghavan (https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/). Bing cowered to censored results. ChatGPT is muzzled.

DDG has been down all morning (UK) on safari mobile and chrome on windows 10.

Yes. It certainly appears so, and has been down for at least a couple hours.

Is it just me or is it really weird that neither Microsoft, or ANY of the search engines that uses Bing on the backend has posted anything about this?

DuckDuckGo and Ecosia has not been working all morning (CET) but there is zero indication on their sites that they are even aware of the problem. DuckDuckGo has a single Reddit posts and that's it.

I kind of hope it’s something to do with AI, like, I don’t know, AI coming to conclusion that internet is bad for humanity and so it’s trying to shut down a search engine, or something mildly dystopian like that.

I went looking for a DDG status page this morning before seeing this link on HN. Google found a tweet from them earlier today with an announcement [1]

I'm pretty surprised that I'm unable to find a dedicated status page for DDG - kinda horrible that I need to rely on twitter/reddit in order to know that they are having issues.

I'm also a little tickled by the fact that I need to search "Duck Duck Go status !g" in order to be directed to Google, because searching for DDGs status on DDG does not, well, work.

1 - https://x.com/DuckDuckGo/status/1793557968027570527

That statement in that tweet is also strange, but it's the same for Qwant and Ecosia now. I wonder if they are contractually not allowed to state that there are issues with Bing, or if others are correct in that they really don't want to be to public about the Bing dependency.

Because DDG markets itself as privacy focused, yet is hosted on MS servers.

Ecosia make a lot about their green credentials but it's not obvious if they factor in the CO2 output of what Bing requires to product results.

Started about an hour ago (~1716454800000)

"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":

    Google: !g why did youtube remove my subscriptions list
    Yahoo: !y why did youtube remove my subscriptions list
    Wikipedia: !w why did youtube remove my subscriptions list
    And many more."

This change just happened. I've been waiting on Ddg since ~10am in Frankfurt, Germany.

Is there any possibility that the latest Windows 11 update which is going out to "Insiders" now could be massively increasing the load on CoPilot / Bing infrastructure?

Ddg has been down for 5 hours. Quite a problem they got.

Bing is down and the rest of those use Bing for results?

What a coincidence!

I used it after 3-4 months and it didn't show any search results. Thought I had forgotten how to use their !bangs feature. Turns out it is down

If you still want to search with bing you can use this URL

https://www4.bing.com/

I don’t, but I’m still curious what difference does that “4” make?

It's one more than 3 (I think that host just doesn't have AI stuff associated or whatever is bringing it down)

Teamviewer also seems to have issues. No one in our company can even log in, not even get past the email screen in their own web app

This probably relates to the Bing Search API. A lot of these alternative search engines are using Bing for the organic results.

Yup, I am also running into the same issue where duck duck go is returning the error message:

> Sorry, we ran into an error displaying these results. Click here to try again.

I thought it was just duck duck go, but I tried searching with bing, and was met with:

> It's not you, it's us

> Bing isn't available right now, but everything should be back to normal very soon.

I had been using DuckDuckGo for the last 2-3 years, but starting from early this year I noticed that their search index just didn’t index some of the things I searched for (enterprise tech stuff). These searches worked ok before and still worked with other engines. So I finally switched to Kagi and am happy with it.

Non-Google recommendations in the interim?

Kagi

searx.org

public instances https://searx.space

https://search.brave.com/

using that as my default search engine on firefox since last year. quite happy with the quality of results.

It's fairly quick and supports !bangs, and it actually works right now... I'll give it a try.

Looks great thank you. I see there's a !brave bang for duckduckgo too so no need to change up browser defaults.

https://seirdy.one/posts/2021/03/10/search-engines-with-own-...

Unlikely, but perhaps this might motivate DDG into finally making their own index and eventually drop bing

Kagi works just fine: https://kagi.com

100 search for free :(

Maybe it was acquired by Google?

Oops lots of corporates MS Dyanmics platforms down as they rely on Bing address api!

Actually Qwant.com uses bing API too and has a warning at the top of their homepage.

Yeah I saw this too. DDG was down, so I searched (on Wikipedia!) for another search engine. Tried Qwant for the first time, and it's also down.

bing.com also down, looks like duckduckgo is frontend to bing

at least bing images, https://www.bing.com/images/search?q=katrina

> It's not you, it's us

> Bing isn't available right now, but everything should be back to normal very soon.

> https://www4.bing.com/bingparachute/panda.png

> https://www4.bing.com/bingparachute/bing_logo.png

It seems that https://www.startpage.com also uses Bing for its images.

Hillarious! I was debugging a python script and didn't get results from duckduckgo and I was checking ANYTHING else first before checking their page manually.

Then checking if my IP perhaps is blocked.

Nope, down in general, no search results

My conspiracy mind tells me, may be bing changed their search api with breaking changes or suddenly introduced massive billing(think Twitter API, reddit API et al.) hence all search-engines pulled an immediate break without having time to fix/update.

I don’t see anybody mentioning Brave Search. I’m getting 500. Anybody else?

One of the interesting things about this downtime is that it has highlighted how many 'alternative' search engines are really just a front-end for Bing.

Not sure why your text is grey. I mean, yeah, “Dependency” xkcd exists for a reason: https://xkcd.com/2347/

Except that in this case instead of a “random person in Nebraska” we have a multi billion dollar corporation.

Wait until the ChatGPT API goes down one day and see how just about all startups from the last 12 months are just wrappers.

You don't need to look hard to find this happen. OpenAI has had several API outages this year

Hey, Brave engineer here. Brave Search is up and running (thanks to our fully independent index and no reliance on Bing whatsoever). Any 500 error is unrelated to the Bing incident.

Would you be able to share a query if the 500 happens consistently? We’ll look into it.

Thanks for your help, I hope that helps,

Test - works

Test one - works

Test one two three - got 500

Feels strange.

Edit:

Hello - works

Hello world - 500 again

It’s like, if you type in more than 1-2 words it gives you 500.

Edit:

Test one two - just gave me 500 this time. It’s not very consistent. Maybe it’s something on my end. I wonder if anybody can reproduce it. I made a screen recording to proof I’m not too crazy, if necessary.

Thanks! At the moment we are not observing any 500s on our end so it would definitely be very useful to get a screen recording so that we can pin-point any issue that you are facing.

Bangs still work e.g. https://duckduckgo.com/?q=duckduckgo+search+not+working+!g

DDG Site responds, but gives and error and is not showing search results.

Perhaps it's time to give Mojeek a try if you haven't already.

Unfortunately I tried to DDG 'mojeek', but that didn't work!

https://www.mojeek.com/

Back: https://x.com/DuckDuckGo/status/1793652538476216398

Maybe this forces DDG and ChatGPT to make their own search engine index and corpus. Sure it might be a few years too late for the former, but thats probably what they said 5 years ago too.

Do DDG and ChatGPT believe that they could do a better job of uptime than Microsoft?

Its not just a question of uptime but dependencies too. The moment it doesnt make strategic sense to have an open Bing API for Microsoft, anyone reliant on them is in for a world of hurt. Especially if its the core feature of your product (ie DDG)

Brave is genuinely impressive here in having their own index (granted, that’s the result of an acquisition rather than their own volition).

Yeah. I like Brave Search. In my own usage it seems to offer far more useful results rather than 5 pages of ads.

With how aggressively Anthropic is crawling the internet right now, they might not be far behind. They’re hitting some web properties I oversee at 50 RPS in some cases and it’s frustrating.

Another option is to use multiple sources. For example Kagi who use Mojeek (self-disclosure) and others; "Our search results also include anonymized API calls to all major search result providers worldwide"

A rare outage should cause an executive to think "let's make our own search engine index"? If for every partner outage i would go "let's do it ourselves' i would be long out of business

It should remind them their entire livelihood is dependent on one single company. They arent partners at all. Its more like one is sustenance/oxygen for the other

But are they? Not asking for the contract side here but for the technical aspect.

If DDG relies mostly on Bing and it fails forever in the future, they can "simply" make a contract with google and continue whatever they were doing.

Same for OpenAI. Its not that Bing is the only search engine index on the web is it ? So yes, it would mean they have to spend a lot of manpower in a short time.

On the other hand, how likely is it that Bing just goes offline?

Do you always have a second datacenter in case your provider fails? Not everyone does it and as long as you have a way of putting things back up in reasonable time you are good to go.

What makes you think that Google would agree to such a deal?

That they've been making those deals with other search engines for a long time (e.g. Kagi, Startpage, Mullvad Leta).

Get the same error with both Firefox and Edge. Very frustrating.

The site is having trouble, a different browser is not going to help.

Hmmm... Is having a status page a sign of engineering maturity?

Engineering excellence, maybe.

And then the curve ends back on the ground,

with manual updates being swapped back into the same previously automated status pages,

because money.

Bing wrappers exposed.

Did they stop publishing detailed traffic stats? They used to have a very detailed page if I recall correctly, but I can't find it any more.

I wrote a Langchain ReAct agent that searches the web for me using Wikipedia, Serpapi (google), and DDG. Works better than traditional search.

I'm not sure why DDG has become such an acceptable google alternative. Even google returns less IP-based, irrelevant results. It's not terrible and sometimes it's good, but results are frequently absurd. I find an instance of searx, or even swisscows generally superior. DDG has no regard for specific queries and always seems to insert a handful of ridiculous IP-based results, however impossibly pertinent to the subject. I think DDG has IP tourette.

It started failing on searches 1-2 hours ago.

Microsoft outage

Probably nothing, or a rogue AI is taking over MS.

This is the real world...if a tree falls in the forest and no one hears it

Go on... if a tree falls in the forest, and no one hears it... ?

The falling produces a sound that no one hears.

Do the other trees laugh at it?

Kagi works just fine: https://kagi.com

They lost all relevance after they gleefully announced their manipulation of search results 2 years ago

Still better than Google

Still there are better alternatives to ddg. I use Brave and Kagi.

But not free. I use Fennec with ddg. Loved Kagi, but too expensive for my German income

brave search is free.

Yes, Kagi is expensive. But it also has useful features other search engines don’t. It’s nice if you can afford it.

So, Kagi's not relying on Bing ?

DDG down here

Same here - it used to work intermittently this morning (1 out of 3 searches), but now I get the same error every time

I rediscovered Yahoo thanks to it.

Yes, ddg is just a bing frontend which anonymizes results before sending them to MS.

DDG also serves Yahoo ads (which are Microsoft ads) and host all their services on Microsoft Azure!

Yup. Maybe it's a NS, LB, or IPv6 only problem because it works eventually.

I was getting an error from Bing not working earlier today. Possibly related?

Duckduckgo doesn't work on Windows 11 but does work on Windows 10

I… don’t understand how that’s possible.

Serving different resources based on reported user agent data.

I'm using 10 - it doesn't work for me.

Sorry, should have said that it was with the Safari brower

Death by outsourcing.

This guy Microsofts.

Bet their site reliability team was saying “F*k F*k No!”

Maybe it's an issue with their Bing connection..

I have been meaning to check out Brave search anyhow.

Luckily !g still works, but this is pretty by bad.

down for me. doesn't get search results

It's still down... crazy.

I had to use Yahoo today, ew.

Duckduckgo is working fine on my iPhone15.

Weird, it still is not working for me.

edit: working now.

Bing is working though, DDG still down

Is it just me, or has DDG been having trouble often lately? Or is it just a combination with some outage + degradation of search results lately that makes me g! regularly these days? Didn't use to need that.

Bing's been working oddly for few days now for me.

I guess it impacts the other engines that are based on it.

Even startpage.com shows no results

Startpage works for me in Germany, and has been working all morning. DDG remains unhappy.

It's working for me. Also, they use Google for search results, not Bing.

Still down.

I also sometimes get 500 on Brave Search, but not always? Kagi works fine. Yeah, something is wrong with bing. That’s what you get when you rely on others instead of building your own. A jenga tower. https://xkcd.com/2347/

Please see my answer to another similar message of yours here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40452726

Brave Search is fully independent and does not rely on Bing whatsoever so any 500 is unrelated to this incident.

Oops, lots of corporate MS Dynamics platforms are down as they rely on Bing address api

same. I just noticed it too, about 30 minutes ago

Same for Startpage

Yes, seeing it too, for about an hour already! Came here to check. Nothing on their xitter page but this thing is spiking: https://downdetector.com/status/duckduckgo/

yeah seems like at least for many that is the case. I wasn't aware that so many engines are using bing! under the hood. Afaik qwant uses their own thing and that startpage is using google under the hood, but that might have changed

22-May-2024 ... the day privacy (finally) died.

Presume that duckduckgo is not private or otherwise compromised.

For example many things I search trough duckduckgo later that day showed up in my twitter/x.com algorithmic feed, coincidence ? don't think so.

Or it could be that, when you search something, you also click through to some of the results, where FB/AdWords and other trackers are present.

Alternatively, there was a fallacy of human mind(forgot the name), where if you think of something, your brain will start focusing on the random occurrences of that things in all places. So, those ads were always there, your brain just started focusing suddenly on those as you were thinking of those things.

Note: Not affiliated with DDG.

It's called the Baader-Meinhof effect.

Yes, in this case only way to not be spied on is to not go on the internet

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frequency_illusion

There's also the likelyhood that the pages you landed on sent your info to their "ad partners"

duckduckgo don't prevent website to track you or deposit cookies etc. Once you're on a website, let's say twitter, duckduckgo does nothing.

> When you view Twitter content such as embedded Tweets, buttons, or timelines integrated into other websites using Twitter for Websites, Twitter may receive information, including the web page you visited, your IP address, browser type, operating system, and cookie information. (https://developer.x.com/en/docs/twitter-for-websites/privacy)

So, if you visit a news paper that have embedded twitter post in it, twitter might know you passed by this website.

DDG is back.

bing as well

Same problem, encountering similar problems with Qwant (though not always)

Bing is up now, but DDG is still down.

Comes and goes for me

down right now.

keyword !brave works though

not down for me.

site responds but search results are down on my phone wifi, and LTE, and desktop

Same here still

what a quack

Same for Startpage.

Using Kagi now

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.

search has always been hard and say if you do get market share on google, a portion of the massive SEO industry will eventually turn their sights on you and make your life hell.

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

Page rank was a google thing, and it helped them take market share from everyone else and achieve their current quasi-monopoly?

That's it, ddg is gone from my Firefox and hopefully from my browsing habits.

Speaking about Firefox, it is insane how needlessly complicated it is to add new search engine to Firefox [1]

    1. Open a new tab and type about:config in the address bar
    2. In the search box type: browser.urlbar.update2.engineAliasRefresh
    3. Click on the little + symbol on the right. It should look like after you pressed it: boolean true value
    4. Go to firefox Settings → Search. Or enter this in the address bar: about:preferences#search
    5. In the "Search Shortcuts" section you should notice a new "add" button. search add button
    6. Press the add button and fill in the name, search engine url and a keyword(optional).
    7. Go to the "Default Search Engine" section and select the engine you just added.

[1] https://superuser.com/questions/7327/how-to-add-a-custom-sea...

Neat, I kept thinking there should be a way to add keywords to that list and now I know how to do it (execept for some reason you can only add a new engine with a keyword there and not add a keyword to an existing engine :( ). I use mozlz4 and aeson-pretty to look at the search.json.mozlz4 file.

https://github.com/jusw85/mozlz4

https://github.com/informatikr/aeson-pretty

To be fair you can also just right click on the URL bar when on a page that advertises having a search and click Add <name of search>. Or if you want to search by keyword you can right click on most search boxes and click "add a keyword for this search". Mycroft Project has a bunch of random search engines ready to add to Firefox (via right clicking on the URL bar when on the search entry page):

https://mycroftproject.com/

If you use more than one search engine, I like the Right Click Search addon to be able to search highlighted text with multiple engines easily (unfortunately not monitored by Mozilla but you can look over the code before installing and turn off updates since it is quite simple and requires no permissions):

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/right-click- search/

The most privacy friendly way to search is to search the site you want to end up on when you know what site that is and they have a usable search.

For general search engines, I suggest giving Metager a try, it is a non-profit metasearch.

https://metager.org/

> For search engines, I suggest giving Metager a try

Cool, might as well give it a go while Ecosia is down. Thanks.

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