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"
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.
_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...
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
Curiously I cannot find a "health" or a "status" page for either.
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.
Note they seem to have managed to fix the Bing frontend hours ago, but DDG is still dead in the water. Priorities... :-)
I can see arguments for both sides. Your point and then the hidden failure modes without central observability and ownership. Nothing exists in isolation.
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.
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...
The only downsite is that it's slower than DDG and Google.
[1] https://yep.com/ [2] https://ahrefs.com/
using that as my default search engine on firefox since last year. quite happy with the quality of results.
public instances https://searx.space
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
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'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.
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.
So not all bad then?!
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.
/Bets on "If it's not DNS, they'll be rolling back a poorly-tested patch they just installed."?
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) ?
at least bing images, https://www.bing.com/images/search?q=katrina
> Bing isn't available right now, but everything should be back to normal very soon.
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,
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.reddit.com/r/duckduckgo/comments/1cynfft/duckduc...
Also, why is your username green?
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...
And then the curve ends back on the ground,
with manual updates being swapped back into the same previously automated status pages,
because money.
This is the real world...if a tree falls in the forest and no one hears it
Still no results .. strange :P
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)
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.
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."
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
> 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.
Then checking if my IP perhaps is blocked.
Nope, down in general, no search results
I had to use Yahoo today, ew.
edit: working now.
Using Kagi now
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.
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.