I love the acknowledgement that DDG put on their page.<p><pre><code> 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"
</code></pre>
So fun and straightforward.
I grew up using Google (and ask jeeves and yahoo.) In school, google won.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.
A Microsoft outage is the source of this problem:<p><pre><code> 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.
</code></pre>
<a href="https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/microsoft/microsoft-outage-affects-bing-copilot-duckduckgo-and-chatgpt-internet-search/" rel="nofollow">https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/microsoft/microsoft-ou...</a>
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.
> Hopefully DDG will be back soon, as I'm loathe to go back to Google for search.<p>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.
<a href="https://www.bing.com/" rel="nofollow">https://www.bing.com/</a> is down too at the moment.<p>Curiously I cannot find a "health" or a "status" page for either.
I duno how this isn't getting more views tbh<p>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
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.
They're aware of the problem.<p><a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/duckduckgo/comments/1cynfft/duckduckgo_search_issues/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button" rel="nofollow">https://www.reddit.com/r/duckduckgo/comments/1cynfft/duckduc...</a>
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.
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.
This appears to be covered by the following HN submission which already has a dozen comments. Please redirect your interest there:<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40451490">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40451490</a>
Startpage [0] search also is not returning web results. But image search is working. I wonder what's happening.<p>[0] <a href="https://www.startpage.com" rel="nofollow">https://www.startpage.com</a>
If you look up "hacker news", it at least shows you an insert from the Wikipedia article, even if there are no normal results:
<a href="https://html.duckduckgo.com/html?q=hacker+news" rel="nofollow">https://html.duckduckgo.com/html?q=hacker+news</a>
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.
According to the comments on this lemmy post [0] Bing, DuckDuckGo, Ecosia, StartPage, Qwant are/were affected<p>[0] <a href="https://lemmy.world/post/15708430" rel="nofollow">https://lemmy.world/post/15708430</a>
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: <a href="https://x.com/DuckDuckGo/status/1793557968027570527" rel="nofollow">https://x.com/DuckDuckGo/status/1793557968027570527</a>
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.<p>Still no results .. strange :P
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.
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 ?<p>Is it public knowledge that they use the Bing backend to do their work ?<p>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) ?
maybe it's time to centralize crawlers and search data, making it publicly available to anyone willing to process it.<p>Not only would that reduce crawler traffic on websites to a single crawler entity it would make page data available for any indexer.<p>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’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)<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.<p>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.<p>"It takes years to build trust and seconds to destroy it." - Warren Buffett<p>Now search.brave.com is my default on both Desktop and iOS (using the excellent Safari extension Hyperweb)
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).<p>The only thing DDG is good for: using bangs! search any and every search engine thru ![bang].<p>What other search engines are still good? Google hit the fan a couple of years back after the hire of Prabhakar Raghavan (<a href="https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/" rel="nofollow">https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/</a>). Bing cowered to censored results. ChatGPT is muzzled.
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?<p>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.
"We're currently experiencing an issue with DuckDuckGo Search. Thanks for your patience while we get our ducks in a row.<p>In the meantime, you can use other search engines right here by using "bangs":<p><pre><code> 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."
</code></pre>
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?
What a coincidence!<p>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<p><a href="https://www4.bing.com/" rel="nofollow">https://www4.bing.com/</a>
Yup, I am also running into the same issue where duck duck go is returning the error message:<p>> Sorry, we ran into an error displaying these results. Click here to try again.<p>I thought it was just duck duck go, but I tried searching with bing, and was met with:<p>> It's not you, it's us<p>> 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.
bing.com also down, looks like duckduckgo is frontend to bing<p>at least bing images, <a href="https://www.bing.com/images/search?q=katrina" rel="nofollow">https://www.bing.com/images/search?q=katrina</a>
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.<p>Then checking if my IP perhaps is blocked.<p>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.
Bangs still work e.g. <a href="https://duckduckgo.com/?q=duckduckgo+search+not+working+!g" rel="nofollow">https://duckduckgo.com/?q=duckduckgo+search+not+working+!g</a>
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.
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.
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.
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. <a href="https://xkcd.com/2347/" rel="nofollow">https://xkcd.com/2347/</a>
Yes, seeing it too, for about an hour already! Came here to check. Nothing on their xitter page but this thing is spiking: <a href="https://downdetector.com/status/duckduckgo/" rel="nofollow">https://downdetector.com/status/duckduckgo/</a>
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
Is it just me or is search terribly broken on the internet.<p>It’s Google or Bing and Bing imposters.<p>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.
That's it, ddg is gone from my Firefox and hopefully from my browsing habits.<p>Speaking about Firefox, it is insane how needlessly complicated it is to add new search engine to Firefox [1]<p><pre><code> 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.
</code></pre>
[1] <a href="https://superuser.com/questions/7327/how-to-add-a-custom-search-engine-to-firefox/1756774#1756774" rel="nofollow">https://superuser.com/questions/7327/how-to-add-a-custom-sea...</a>