DuckDuckGo was down | Hacker News Reader

DuckDuckGo was down

duckduckgo.com

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.

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 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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Data point: Bing was not down for me.

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".

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.

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

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

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 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.

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

Doesn't yahoo also use bing under the hood?

get it because ducks

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.

As another lover of Kagi, Kagi also has bangs. Apparently they also support all DDG bangs.

https://help.kagi.com/kagi/features/bangs.html

Brave Search supports bangs too! https://search.brave.com/bangs

https://youryoure.com/?its

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.

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.

shameless undercover plug for kagi much?

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

It's always DNS.

My money is on expired domain somewhere or security certificate.

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... :-)

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.

Used a Co-pilot enabled PC.

> "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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

It's chatgpt wearing a hat and sunglasses

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 :)

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.

>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...

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/

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.

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

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

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

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/

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

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.

https://xkcd.com/2347/

Wow. This.

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.

It has not been down for me.

works for me 8 minutes later, idk

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.

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."

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

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.

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/

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

https://search.marginalia.nu/

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

Mojeek, fully independent index. self-disclosure: CEO

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

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"?

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

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

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.

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."?

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

ditto for Ecosia.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

Same, Germany

Yep, (typing from Poland)

Use Brave search for now instead.

https://search.brave.com

No thanks, it's run by cryptobros.

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 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

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.

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?

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?

https://search.brave.com/

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

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

searx.org

public instances https://searx.space

Kagi

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?

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,

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.

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.

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

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

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"

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

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.

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... ?

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

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.

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.

DDG is back.

bing as well

Bing is up now, but DDG is still down.

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

keyword !brave works though

not down for me.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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/

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