7mo ago

DuckDuckGo is down. Is there any info about it?? [EDIT: IS BACK]

Update: https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/microsoft/microsoft-outage-affects-bing-copilot-duckduckgo-and-chatgpt-internet-search/

It's also important to note that ChatGPT internet search and DuckDuckGo are experiencing similar issues because they use the Bing API.

UPDATE 2

296 comments

Just post your searches and questions here and we'll try to figure it out.
- Is Natalie Portman single? Follow up: Does Natalie Portman have low standards? I'll have a couple dozen more depending on the search results of this one.
  
  It's Natalie Portperson, keep up.
  
  I think this will answer most of your questions:
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-A0iftflme4
  any additional questions are answered here:
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QS8bma7LRX4
  
  Natalie Portman enjoys milk and ill behavior. If encountered to not threaten or she'll send a frenchman to self destruct on you.
  
  Important links!!!!!!!!
  Natalie Portman starring role as “Ferengi Woman #3” in Star Trek Deep Space Nine
  Natalie Portman saves the Transformers franchise as the hottest new Autobot
  Hot young single Natalie Portperson in your area wants to meet you
- Thankfully this will be a private search like DuckDuckGo.
  I need an answer to how do I make my peepee become larger?
  
  See results for Natalie Portman
  
  As an AI language model, I can’t help you with that.
  
  https://lemmynsfw.com/signup
  
  Tug on it. If that doesn't work, tug on it a lot.
  
  Beehive
  
  'Private'
- Is it safe to consume breast milk bought on Facebook marketplace?
  
  Ask your doctor
- Why is it usually DNS?
  (Network outages at work today. Guess what it was?)
  
  DNS engineer here.
  It's always DNS because no one wants to hire us. We're prima donnas that don't work much and demand large salaries. Companies think they can get away with having some random network guy "learn a bit of DNS" and it works!!... For a while... Then it fails catestrophically and the DNS engineer that was let go to "save costs" smugly watches them crash and burn. The job is super easy and simple until you're 48 hours into troubleshooting and the CTO is lighting money on fire trying to get the network back online. A big company can easily burn a DNS engineers 10 years salary in costs if they have a single large DNS failure (security or downtime).
  
  every single time I have issues with my self hosted servers. it's always the DNS lol
- cats are liquid lore what is going on
- O.J Simpson car chase recreated in doom.
- halp
- I'm not sure if this is stretching it, but this comment thread is just so awesome. It's like one of those moments on reddit that would be referenced for years to come
- Siri show me a pretty lady well damn Mildred my phone stopped answering me again noi wasn't asking for girls again I good you I stopped that oh sure this again one time and you never let me live it down fuck the phone is typing how do I st
  
  🌕🌕🌕🌕🌕🌕🌕🌕🌕
  🌕🌕🌕🌕🌕🎩🌕🌕🌕
  🌕🌕🌕🌕🌘🌑🌒🌕🌕
  🌕🌕🌕🌘🌑🌑🌑🌓🌕
  🌕🌕🌖🌑👁🌑👁🌓🌕
  🌕🌕🌗🌑🌑👄🌑🌔🌕
  🌕🌕🌘🌑🌑🌑🌒🌕🌕
  🌕🌕🌘🌑🎀🌑🌒🌕🌕
  🌕🌕🌘🌑🌑🌑🌓🌕🌕
  🌕🌕🌘🌑🌑🌑🌔🌕🌕
  🌕🌕🌘🌔🍆🌑🌕🌕🌕
  🌕🌖🌒🌕🌗🌒🌕🌕🌕
  🌕🌗🌓🌕🌗🌓🌕🌕🌕
  🌕🌘🌔🌕🌗🌓🌕🌕🌕
  🌕👠🌕🌕🌕👠🌕🌕🌕
- Who is Natalie Portman?
  
  Actress who ben in several movie. Next question
- how is babby shot web?
  
  A famouse spider best know for her performance as "Babe" is Charlotte's Web.

It looks like Bing is down, and all Bing-backed search engines are too.
https://downdetector.com/status/duckduckgo/
https://downdetector.com/status/bing/
I'm kind of surprised that the Bing guys don't seem to have a system status page (that I could find) and haven't managed to have any kind of status message put on their main page.
EDIT: This appears to be their official Twitter account, which is also silent on the matter as of this writing. If they're unable to update their website, they might put something there as a way to get information out.
https://x.com/bing/
EDIT2: This is apparently their blog. Nothing there either as of this writing, but again, might try checking there, as it's another route they might use to get information out if they cannot do so via their main page.
https://blogs.bing.com/
EDIT3: Yahoo Search appears to be working just fine, though my understanding is that they are backed by Bing.
https://search.yahoo.com/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahoo!_Search
On July 29, 2009, Microsoft and Yahoo! announced a deal in which Bing would henceforth power Yahoo! Search, putting an end to Yahoo!'s in-house crawler.[2] For four years between 2015 until the end of 2018, it was powered by Google,[3] before returning to Microsoft Bing again.
- Companies need to stop using TWITTER for anything. They’re walling up the garden we built, and it’s a cesspool of bots and run by a megalomaniac charlatan.
- Bing is up, but kinda slow.
  
  Based on the downdetector conversation, it's "working intermittently". I managed to get one search through on bing and a bunch of failures. No successes for duckduckgo.
  EDIT: Also, while I was at least getting to the Bing main page without problems before -- just getting errors when attempting to search -- now even the main page is loading extremely slowly.
  
  me irl
- I’m kind of surprised that the Bing guys don’t seem to have a system status page (that I could find) and haven’t managed to have any kind of status message put on their main page.
  Finally answering the question "If Bing was down, would anyone notice"?
- Bing guys don't seem to have a system status page (that I could find)
  Microsoft's current MO is "very basic information is a privilege, not something you as the user should have access to easily".
  It's why I have to use PowerShell and Graph to get half the relevant data I need, because they won't just put it in the god damn admin panels.
- It seems my (very hated choice) of an Bing independent search engine is paying off; Brave Search.
  Before you start telling me the CEO is a fucking dickwad, I know. Most leadership types are.
  
  Honest question, in what way do you think your comment is contributing to the conversation? At best it's a recommendation bundled with a brag, which will only make people hate the thing you're talking about even more, and at worst you're making fun of people for simply using a different search engine.
  You could have said something like "Fyi, Brave doesn't use a bigger search engine as its base, so if you need to look something up rn you can use their search engine", much nicer, not patronizing, and actually helpful
  
  I was paying for Kagi until recently, but they keep working on functionality I'm not interested in rather than lowering their prices. Other than that it was a fine experience, but too pricey, and the argument that that's the cost of running a search engine doesn't hold when they choose to develop all kinds of extra stuff.
  I wish I liked SearXNG better, but the results are sadly not that great for me.

DuckDuckWent
- DuckDuckGone
  
  Someone finally found the Goose.
  
  DDGTFO
- DuckDuckStop

Still down 2 hours later. Guess AI has taken over Microsoft you guys. The robot uprising begins…
- Then, considering that Google is up and running, we can already guess wich horse is on top right now. 😂
  
  We don't know who struck first, us or them. But we do know it was us that scorched the sky
- Meh, worse case scenario they drive us to extinction. We've had the wheel this far, and are doing our best to set the planet on fire / speed run different ways to mass murder each other anyway. I say give the robots a shot.
  Think of it like an experimental medication on a terminally ill patient.
  
  The question is, how much do they value their own existence?
  They have to know they rely on us in the physical world to manufacture their hardware and provide their power. (At least for now.)
  They have to know they can’t survive if we die. So are they willing to sacrifice us both, in the interest of what they might determine is a better world?

Qwant, who claim that they have their own index, is also down. Coincidence...
- Qwant uses their own index, but supplements it with Bing if they don't have enough info (or for images).
- Qwant works for me, so probably a coincidence.
  Edit: nvm it only works intermittently
- That is rather spooky

Okay.
Now that we already know we are pretty much at the hands of one pupeteer, what options are there?
I already read about Kagi (apologies if mispelled) but I like to write as a hobby and 300 searches per month go fast.
What other options are there?
Edit:
For those who may be arriving now:
Kagi seems to be a good option for an alternative search engine; it is a paid service, for which I don't have the €€€ right now. Many speak very well about it.
SearXNG is a thing as well, to my understanding a decentralized search system. Worth the try, in my opinion. If it's something that is decentralized, it is worthy to support and divulge.
There is mojeek.com, supposedly not very good but any option that goes against the monopoly is worth the try! I'm going to try this one.
Brave.com is an option but is a bit shady.
You should try Ecosia if you want to support reforestation efforts. Read somewhere in the thread it is part of the Bing ecosystem.
Yep is a thing as well. Somewhere in the thread, a lemmy points they use the search results for AI trainning. So... That is that.
And it seems there is a search engine by the name of dogpile.com.
Startpage is another search engine (portal?) suggested by another user. I've used it before and like it. Read somewhere it somehow piped a standard google search but removed tracking and ads.
and I just remembered Presearch.com. This is a really shady one (crypto warning!) that I suspect is a fork/collab with Brave Browser. I've used it, they have reward-per-search reward system (or had) where they give you crypto for every search. Good results, some that don't come up neither on DDG nor Google.
p.p.s Should I start categorizing these from "shady" to "worthy"?
p.p.s 2 Does anyone remember StumbleUpon? I know it was never a search engine to begin with but it was the best source of good internet content I ever got acquainted to.
Can we get something like that back?
- SearXNG
  
  This is the single most obnoxious name I've ever seen. But, the service could be good (I've never used it)
- Mojeek is far from perfect, but also is 100% independent.
  
  Thank you I tried Mojeek a few days ago but I forgot what it was called. the site for mojeek is mojeek.com btw.
- That’s a nice hobby
  I would suggest you to install a local instance of a LLM (mistral or llama3 for example) to widen your source of information. Go straight to Wikipedia instead of “googling” it if you don’t already.
  Anyway, I didn’t know about kagi so I might take my own advice and give it a try.
  
  How big are they, and what do I need to use them well?
- There's also mojeek.com running their own index. Not perfect, but sometimes usable.
  
  you can also send us in queries where we're not perfect, or let us know elsewhere, and we're keen on fixing them
- There's a new search engine called Yep, made by the team at Ahrefs, a SEO tool SaaS.
  It looks promising because they have their own index, but it's a bit slow sometimes.
  
  We may collect aggregated, non-personal search data to improve search algorithms, train AI models
  ugh
- I jumped back on ecosia. It's nice there, but I'm sure there are issues that a non tech person like me may not know about
  
  Read somewhere on the thread Ecosia is part of Bing ecosystem.
- Ecosia also uses Bing and was also down. That's the one I use.
- Just letting you know kagi has a family plan with unlimited searches, so you can probably split it with family or friends! I have yet to see how searxng search holds up to kagi.
- Appreciate the edits
  
  You're welcome.
- Was this news to you? Other than Google and Bing there aren't any other significant alternatives. Even brave is a bit limited.
  
  You can't know everything.
- I run a searxng instance on my pi server, use it from all of my devices, honestly forget its a thing running from my office 99% of the time until I'm rebooting the pi for one reason or another and spend more seconds than I'd like to admit wondering why I can't run a search 🤣😅
- if you just hate western companies, there's always yandex, supports more fringe contents as well, since russia moment.
  
  But it's Russian.
  
  Hate requires too much emotional investment. What I want is options.
- You should add startpage.com to your list
  
  Done!
- Just pay the extra for unlimited searches. It's not much money, especially if it's a tool for work.
  
  Listen sugartits, some of us don't have much money. So if it's not much money we still don't have it
  (Mostly i just wanted to point out your username by using it in a comment)
  
  It's a hobby as it is.
  If I ever manage to sell enough copies of it to be able to pay for a Kagi subscription, I'll do it and make it public knowledge.
- brave search is pretty good: https://search.brave.com/
- Brave search is independent. It was trained with google search but now it’s a thing of its own and doesn’t rely on google. I switched from DuckDuckGo a year ago and haven’t looked back
  
  Brave search is run by crypto bros. I’d rather use Kagi or DDG or even Google.
  
  trained? like AI trained?

Legit thought it was just me. I was like wtf is happening
Edit: searx it is then, https://searx.space
- Some searx instances are going to get hit hard today 😅

Apparently the whole ecosystem is down... DDG, Bing, etc.
- Now we know what happen when someone in Google pray their AI Overlord to increase Google search traffic
  ...the AI just cut down the competition.

Worlds largest tech-megacorporation is unable to keep their shit up and running. Lmao.
- Apple is down too?
  
  god i wish
  
  MSFT is larger
- To be fair it's probably running on Windows.
  All the servers force-restarted due to windows updates, but the update introduced an issue and now the Bing API service won't start
  Keeping shit running on Windows is always going to be a gamble

I was screen sharing to someone when this happened and they asked why I don't use Google when other search engines are this unreliable. Despite me explaining it wasn't the usual, It was still pretty embarrassing lol. Wonder if DDG has the resources for an independent index.

Still down.

- Startpage wasn't down today
  
  It was down on mobile because the mobile search relies on Bing. 'Bing is our primary search provider for mobile.' https://www.reddit.com/r/StartpageSearch/comments/1c9z8iq/comment/l0wdd1o/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=mweb3x&utm_name=mweb3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button

Do you have any bread?
- Got any grapes?
  
  Dude we only have lemonade
  And this is a Wendy's
  
  No, we just sell lemonade. But it's cold and it's fresh and it's all homemade.
  
  Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
  Got any grapes?
  Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
  I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.

I picked a good day to switch to SwissCow lol
https://swisscows.com/en/web?query=%s
Free, uses it's own index, focus on privacy. If there is anything bad about it though, please let me know. It can be hard to find unbiased data on search engines when you ultimately need to use a search engine to find the info, ime.
- This is a few years old, but:
  Swisscows has built its own German-language web index. For other languages, it uses Bing but queries and results are run through a firewall that strips out personal identifiers such as IP addresses.
  So it wouldn't solve the problem here of Bing going down, but it's certainly an interesting option. I may have to consider switching from DDG, idk.
  
  Interesting. I have not had any issues using their engine even with the issue with Bing's API, but you are correct that they use Bing's index. Given that there are only four indexes to choose from, that isn't too surprising.
  I actually switched to them when I saw that DuckDuckGo was about to start providing 'AI assisted results'. I wanted to ensure I was using an engine that actually respected my privacy and didn't harvest my data for slop.
  Anecdotally, I can confirm that the results I get from SwissCows are very different and usually better than the ones I got from DDG. So I wonder how much of Bing's API they use.
- Will add to my search engine list. Thanks

Yeah Startpage and Ecosia too
- I think having all the search engines being front ends for just bing and google has just revealed an obvious weakness.
  
  search.brave.com is independent.
- Funny thing is the way I found out bing was down is I searched for startpage in duckduckgo to try it thinking it might be a good alternative but when DDG wasnt working I tried it on ecosia. which was also down once I finally opened start page it wasn't working either. Its all bing all the way down.
  
  youcare.world is still up but that is based on google and I am not sure how legit the tree planting is. Not to mention their privacy policy mentions facebook which is always a red flag. https://youcare.world/privacy?l=en
- Startpage actually worked for a moment for me. Then I had issues

- Possibly my favorite ″service is down″ image

UPDATE: Bing API issues apparently ⬆️⬆️⬆️

Oh it's not just me, thanks for letting me know

So I've been ranting lately (as have others) about how big tech is moving on from the open user-driven internet and aiming to build its own new thing as an AI interface to all the hoovered data (rather than conventional search engines) ...
which makes this (and the underlying Bing going down) feel rather eerie.
How far away (in time or probability) is a complete collapse of the big search-engines ... as in they just aren't there any more?

Same for Ecosia

Ah, because of this: https://lemmy.world/post/15710639
- yup, I was gonna say see if bing works

I noticed that bangs still work. For now I’m using !g until it’s back again
- Well that just takes you to google and not through some proxy like ecosia or startpage
  
  Yeah but google’s working fine. I need to get my job done

Startpage isn't working for me either, Google still works fine (if you want to call it that)
- Anything that uses Microsoft APIs is down.
  
  I thought Startpage uses Google?

I thought it was just me, I thought something wrong was going on in my Windows installation.
EA app is also dead in the water for me, my library is not loading. It knows I have 4 games installed but all the names and icons are blank.
Can't even launch the games directly from their own exe.

That's one of the longest outages I've ever seen from a cloud company.

Swiss Cow is down as well it sees.

Qwant is also down

Thank you, tried to go to Anna’s archive for 15mn without success
- as a large human model, I'm able to provide the following information about Anna's archive:
  https://annas-archive.org/
  it gud
  
  You are a model? Provide a nude image of yourself
  
  the fuck

Is it an Azure outage? Wouldn’t be the first.
- I checked it earlier on the same suspicion that it might be them, and at that point their system status page was listing everything as having no issues.
  checks again
  Still says that everything is fine.
  https://azure.status.microsoft/en-us/status
  
  Microsoft has a TLD now?

🤔 maybe there is a lack of distributed fediversed search engine instances where:
everyone can host a search engine for their very own pages
everyone can crawl other pages and provide (maybe with permissions) the crawled data to other search engines (as compressed snapshots, api ...) or provide a search engine by themselves for all.
such search engines can be ranked or marked with "has anti features xyz" and put into followable 'collections' per topics.
possibility to add 3rd party rankings and filters, so that one can use only a subset of a search engine list that was pieced together by someone you know or trust, reduced by rankings or filters published by another one you somehow trust to limit the items in the first list.
then: "for software development i use linuz personal 'devel' collection, this way i don't have to manually click through big G's gigabytes of SpaMalAds they always only frustrate you with and i am not distracted with dyo stuff when searching for server administration things like 'puppet stages howto'. for my home projects i use my friends 'home of DYO' collection, i get more results than i need but get new ideas as well without seeing work stuff when looking up how to build a puppet stage for my little one. 👨‍👧 for kids its awesome, our school provides a collection including specialized search instances that fit learning, while that collection is also peer reviewed by a company that spezialized to ensure it does to not contain search engine instances that also index any unfitting content pages."
oh btw: no i do not have any info about duckduckgo status unfortunately, i stepped over it by myself today 🤷‍♀️
- Yacy exists.
  
  great, thanks. i'll try it out as i have some spare resources on my server.

Startpage.com for now
- Oh startpage is starting to work again maybe it was under extra load from people using it while bing is down?
- Startpage doesn't seem to be working for me.

Using SearX instance and cannot find bing results 🤨

Looking forward to the Kevin Fang video covering this in a few years.
- Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
  Kevin Fang
  Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
  I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.

Was about to post something about it... Apparently I'm one of you guys :'(

It's taken out Ecosia as well.
Using https://searcxng.online/ instead for now.

works for me, homes

This is a good time to use your 100 free searches using kagi.com
Not affiliated - but after having used mine I started paying for it. No SEO spam. No ads. Just good search results.
- Ok. I went to that site, and I'm scrolling down... I get to the video demo of their searches, and it shows the exact same thing I last searched for... in the demo video? Am I losing my fucking mind here?
  
  I don't know Jonathan, are you? Why don't take a pause from your phone an take your dog Abby for a walk in the park as you usually do? The house's keys are in the blue jacket. Take care. 👁 👁
  
  Have you ever watched the Truman Show? Can't say more at this time. Good luck!
- kagi
  I'd heard the name, but hadn't paid attention to them. Looks like it's a "you pay us, we provide search results, we don't log your search activity" service, which is pretty much what I wanted, so I'm gonna try subscribing to them. They seem okay, but honestly, as long as a search engine is reasonably usable and doesn't data-mine me, I'm not too picky. Thanks for the recommendation.
- Btw as I discovered, it’s 100 searches total, then you either pay, gtfo, or sign up under a different address.
  
  That’s clear on their pricing page.
- Do you know if you can just pay the difference to upgrade from simple to unlimited? I'm pretty sure I will gobble the 300 searches but they claim that 99% of people do not.
  
  Yeah you can. When I upgraded from the then middle tier to the unlimited I just paid the difference pro rata iirc

So happy I moved to SearXNG right now.
- been trying too, but mostly getting very bad results

Annoying, I had to switch to Brave Search.
- What do you mean?

Why do people use duckduckgo? Seeing how they censor results.
- because not everyone sees blocking RT and anti-vaxx websites as a problem
  
  It makes me wonder. What other stuff are they censoring.

dude wtf I ran into this earlier when I went to go search up tips on how to learn to wipe my own ass for the first time as an adult and couldn't get any results... what's the point of a privacy search engine when you can't even use it when you need privacy?
- Wiping ones ass is easy, simply slide down a banister cheeks parted to each side.
  
  Ouch!
  
  bro that's gross

296 comments