7d ago

Every news result on duckduckgo links to MSN

I noticed this for a longer time but I just thought MSN flooded the web with its shit. It didn't came to my mind it is actually duckduckgo trying to shove these msn links into my face...

I guess this is similar to google amp links, just stealing the content of other websites.

It annoys me big time, -msn doesn't seem to help

68 comments

Duck Duck Go uses Bing so that tracks.
- This is the answer. Might be a (new?) part of their agreement
  I still like DDG and recommend it. But I also recently switched to Kagi, a paid search engine, and have been quite happy.
  
  Kagi seems kind of expensive. $5 a month is pretty high compared to the costs of other subscriptions and that doesn't even get you unlimited searches. I am definitely interested in this idea but I can't see the value being there at the prices offered.
  
  Search something on duckduckgo and then refresh, it will list a different order of results. Very annoying if you check multiple links to not know which ones were in what order.
  
  DDG has been hot garbage for a while since Bing jacked up their prices.
  
  SAME!
- i've been using Qwant when i search news
- Its like Google's amp links, it is for for the ad tracking purposes

DDG uses Bing. What did you expect?

This is weird. The links all show other news agencies, and you see the same at the top of the page when you follow the links. Is MSN re-hosting the stories from all these agencies or are the agencies opting in for this?
Nothing like seeing an Associated Press link and having it open on msn.com!! 🤡
- It's a syndication partnership with MSN. Publishers provide their articles to MSN via RSS. It's increasingly difficult to draw traffic to independent sites, so publishers are all seeking to diversify their traffic sources.
- here when i search for something or someone 'newsworthy' i get links to other sites ahead of msn, those links do go to the expected sites, and the favicons (that are all msn in the posted image) are also correct. in fact, only one first page out of the five searches i tried even had an msn link at all--at #9.

Aren't they sourcing the search results from Bing?

Not saying this doesn’t suck, but it is also a soft paywall dodge for sites like WaPo.

DDG is going to shit anyway. Feels like bing 2.0 at this point. The results aren’t what they used to be. I’ve been getting better results from my searxng instance or using like startpage.

https://qwant.com/
- Seconded! And unlike DDG (based in the US), Qwant is in the EU
- What about searxng?
  I've been hearing more about it and you can apparently even self host it.
  
  Searxng is nice, but every now and again, it won't load results until I refresh the page. I need to mess with it again, but haven't considered needing it.
- Would be nice if it had a built in calculator and unit converter, that's a ddg feature I use a lot

I searched "Trump" and switched to the news tab on DDG and get a variety of sources.
MSN isn't even in the top 20 for me.

I remember when they switched map links to (ew) Apple Maps. That was a huge downer.
- Absolutely! Especially because the map is always broken on my phone, I want to move the area and end up somewhere hundreds of kilometers away. I guess it's time for a new search engine...
- It is probably the most polished map. I would rather use something open source, but it makes sense why they switched.

Duckduckgo is absolute shit. I'm tired of seeing blogspam AI shit. I'm tired of searching for things like "Trump tariffs 2017" and seeing 50,000 articles about what Trump said yesterday. Search engines are shit. It hurts I had to use Google AI for info on "articulation in architecture" because everything else was useless.
- Unless we figure out how to open source, distribute and maintain an indexer, we're going to suck on the AI tit for the foreseeable future.
  All these meta search engines are eventually doomed to be shut down is the tech companies that maintain the handful of actual indexers that exist slowly shut down streams that don't provide them revenue.
- https://www.udm14.com/

Try searxng

Switch to Kagi. It's worth the money.
- Seconded. The only reason I use Google is if I actually want an ad served to me.
- Do you really want your porn search results linked to your credit card + name? oO
  
  I mean, the ad services plugged into every website have already cross referenced each other and know who you are even if you use a service like DDG that supposedly doesn't track. Incidentally, Kagi supposedly doesn't track either, (which they'd better not since you're paying them), so while it doesn't mitigate the above issue of your being traceable by pure virtue of browsing the web, it certainly isn't "tying your porn results to credit cards and search results."

so I get results from all the major news outlets but many have bing icons on them lolwtf

Duck Duck Go was never really good at showing results in my experience. Currently using Ecosia and switching between the Googl and Bing index. I hope they get their own index soon

How are you guys getting all the hits from MSN exclusively? I've tried insistently and I get an assortment of El Confidencial, CNN, Sky News and then maybe some MSN. Heck, I'm getting Yahoo before MSN.
- It seems to depend on the country, if I set US or Germany I get the MSN results, if I set Spain I set none...

As others say, it’s Microsoft AMP. There’s normally a box with an arrow next to the logo at the top that will take you to the original article. I don’t think there are enough ddg/msn users to create an ampsplosion equivalent extension, but it could be done.

Ok what the fuck is happening with DuckDuckGo?
I've been using it since the beginning of last year, because fuck google, and it's been steadily degrading in usefulness.
- Microsoft

In eastern US, first time using DDG on this device, it shows normal links (searched "Ukraine drone attack")

DDG has been shit since 2022
- What happened in 2022?
  
  tldr after the beginning of the russian invasion into Ukraine, DuckDuckGo began explicitly down ranking "Russian disinformation", with the exact definition for "Russian disinformation" not being given https://archive.is/g2eL9 https://archive.is/laxkZ

Not sure why you're getting those. None of mine are msn icons.

Front page is always full of sponsored crap. You learn to ignore it. Work around it.

Looks like there various news agencies and there was a bug dieting the msn icon. The publisher names are all different.
WaPo, "metaphor"? No child, try again.

Bring back Alta Vista!!
- Ask Jeeves
  
  I tried, but he kept saying things like, "my name is not Jeeves" and "I rented this suit for a wedding who are you".
  Things were just simpler in the past :'(
  
  Carrier pigeons.

None of those sources are MSN.com
- Look at the small logo left to the name of the news agency. All links refer to msn.com.

♪ MSN
♪ MSN
♪ Who said MSN?
♪ If you go on MSN
♪ A terrible thing will happen to you
♪ You will sit and stare for hours
♪ And people you don't like will talk to you
♪ Don't go on MSN
♪ Don't go on MSN
♪ Don't go on MSN
♪ Don't go on MSN

DDG targets users based on browser fingerprints.
You must have previously clicked on MSN links
- I mean this post is up for more than a day, you could have read some of the other explanations, as yours is pretty poor

Not for me
- well, the icons for the links are the MSN logo and i bet if you click on them it will open the MSN website
- All of them are. See that colored butterfly next to the name of the news agency?
  
  Oh shit, you're right 😂 I had no idea they just scraped other news sites articles.

68 comments