this post was submitted on 23 May 2024
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Search engines down? (discuss.tchncs.de)
submitted 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
 

Is it just me or are many independent search engines down? Duckduckgo, my go to engine, qwant, ecosia, startpage... All down? The only hint I got was on the qwant page...

Edit: it all seems to be related to bing being down. I hope the independent engines will find a way to get really independent...

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[–] [email protected] 100 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Wait it's all bing? πŸŒŽπŸ‘¨β€πŸš€πŸ”«πŸ‘¨β€πŸš€

[–] [email protected] 6 points 5 months ago

Always has been. Chk chk

[–] [email protected] 88 points 5 months ago (1 children)

That's just Bing down with all of it's puppets rebrands.

[–] [email protected] 27 points 5 months ago

As I stated here https://ttrpg.network/comment/7065350

It seems search engines supposedly using their own data, or acting as FE for Google, are down, too

[–] RustyNova 79 points 5 months ago (2 children)

Well it ses that bing is down too, and most independent search engines are a warper arround bing so...

[–] [email protected] 37 points 5 months ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 34 points 5 months ago (1 children)
[–] sanguinepar 8 points 5 months ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 4 points 5 months ago

You gotta believe!

[–] [email protected] 23 points 5 months ago

"independent"

[–] Evotech 72 points 5 months ago

It's bing all the way down

[–] [email protected] 63 points 5 months ago

The Bing frontends are down.

[–] [email protected] 59 points 5 months ago (4 children)

Its about time we make a federated search engine and indexer

[–] HootinNHollerin 35 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Isn’t that searx / searxng?

SearXNG is a fork from the well-knownΒ searxΒ metasearch engineΒ which was inspired by theΒ Seeks project. It provides basic privacy by mixing your queries with searches on other platforms without storing search data. SearXNG can be added to your browser’s search bar; moreover, it can be set as the default search engine.

SearXNG appreciates your concern regarding logs, so take the code from theΒ SearXNG sourcesΒ and run it yourself!

Add your instance to thisΒ list of public instancesΒ to help other people reclaim their privacy and make the internet freer. The more decentralized the internet is, the more freedom we have!

[–] [email protected] 23 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (1 children)

Not at all. This just searches multiple search engines at once and presents you with the results from all of them on a single page.

[–] OldManBOMBIN 7 points 5 months ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 5 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Dogpile.com is still there, actually.

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[–] [email protected] 16 points 5 months ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 4 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (1 children)

Looks interesting why have i never heard of this. Are there any websites that rank search engines to get some concrete metrics? I had a look at what people have been saying about it seems it has poor search results unfortubatly.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (1 children)

idk about any ranking sites, but from what I understand, YaCy gets better the more ppl participate in it

other ppl already mentioned Searxng which is also great

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[–] WhatAmLemmy 12 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (2 children)

I was thinking about this and imagined the federated servers handling the index db, search algorithms, and search requests, but instead leverage each users browser/compute to do the actual web crawling/scraping/indexing; the server simply performing CRUD operations on the processed data from clients to index db. This approach would target the core reason why search engines fail (cost of scraping and processing billions of sites), reduce the costs to host a search server, and spread the expense across the user base.

It also may have the added benefit of hindering surveillance capitalism due to a sea of junk queries from every client, especially if it were making crawler requests from the same browser (obviously needs to be isolated from the users own data, extensions, queries, etc). The federated servers would also probably need to operate as lighthouses that orchestrate the domains and IP ranges to crawl, and efficiently distribute the workload to client machines.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 5 months ago

Shit man thats exactly the kind of implementation i was thinking about. Had the idea for a couple years now but now that the fediverse is starting to gain traction i think it's probably about time some code gets written. Unfortunatly due to CORS u cant just start serving people a js script that starts indexing in the background.

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 5 months ago

I've also thought about this, but I don't know what would be the costs to do such a thing. (I'm ignorant on the subject)

[–] Kyouki 42 points 5 months ago (1 children)

They all use Bing's, idk how i feel about that fact actually. Curious what you others use. Just as a thought experiment.

Been an avid ddg user but hate how it sometimes does push this micropoop nonsenses. Like msn news

[–] cosmicrookie 18 points 5 months ago (1 children)

I've been using Kagi, and although it has a pricetag, and not quite as good as Google, I am happy with it and has worked well for me.

[–] ripcord 5 points 5 months ago

I find it significantly better than Google. 90% of the time.

[–] [email protected] 24 points 5 months ago (3 children)
[–] frunch 17 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (1 children)

Well isn't that great, mr. moneybags

/S

Yes I'm making a stupid joke bc it's a paid search engine, something i never would have imagined would be a thing. Now I'm going to price it and perhaps finally pull the trigger on an acct there because fuck google, fuck bing, and fuck all these sites being "wrappers" of them. I come from the dial-up days when lycos, webcrawler, altavista, yahoo--hard searches that would separate the men from the boys. Now we just get this "A.I." bullshit instead and it falls apart under its own weight. Excuse me while i wave my cane at the sun β˜€οΈ

Edit: so it turns out you can get 100 free searches on their site here: https://kagi.com/onboarding?p=choose_plan

Otherwise, it's $5/month for 300 searches, $10/mo for unlimited, and $25/mo for their "ultimate" exclusive experience...whatever that may be. I'm gonna try the freebies and see what happens. I'm still on the fence about paying for search, but I'm really tired of bs coming from these companies leading to things like we're experiencing today

[–] [email protected] 6 points 5 months ago

I was there too. Do try the freebies and see how you like it, there's nothing to lose. Personally, that convinced me and I switched to 300 searches, then I got a new job for which I was making lots of searches and outgrew it so now I'm on the unlimited. IMO ultimate is useless unless you really like the vision or something, I just pay for a working product.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (1 children)

I hope Apple will finally allow custom search engines because the current workaround when wanting to use Kagi as default in iOS Safari is a shitty user experience (and I'm not blaming Kagi for that)

[–] TrickDacy 24 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Lol wow. It is 2024 and apple still doesn't give you basic browser v1.0 functionality

[–] [email protected] 4 points 5 months ago (3 children)

I have never used iOS but I'd guess that makes browsing on it a little less convenient than on a terminal with curl.

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 5 months ago

Yandex is working

[–] [email protected] 20 points 5 months ago

Try http://searx.space

They have meta engines that search instances of searx

[–] [email protected] 15 points 5 months ago (3 children)
[–] Carighan 27 points 5 months ago

"We're totally not just rewrapping Bing results!!!"

[–] [email protected] 9 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (1 children)

Yet, DuckDuckGo and Startpage seem down, too. ~~Even though DDG supposedly uses its own results, and SP supposedly is a FE for Google~~ DDG uses Bing results and SP aggregates Google and Bing results

[–] [email protected] 16 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (1 children)

Has ddg ever really claimed to use its own index? I've always thought of it being a bing frontend

edit: Apparently start page pulls from Google and Bing (going off of this)

[–] [email protected] 8 points 5 months ago

I recall that DuckDuckGo bought data from Yahoo and then used that on its own, but if that was ever true it no longer is:

Of course, we have more traditional links and images in our search results too, which we largely source from Bing.

https://duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/sources

[–] rayquetzalcoatl 11 points 5 months ago (1 children)

I hate when I can't Qwant "blubb" cos Bing is down

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[–] [email protected] 10 points 5 months ago

Bing is down, and every engine that uses bing api.

[–] olutukko 8 points 5 months ago

huh, my duckduckgo did piss in my eye yesterday so to speak, don't know why I said that but I didn't get my search result is what I meant

[–] MrsDoyle 8 points 5 months ago
[–] [email protected] 4 points 5 months ago

Fascinating, Duckduckgo isn't working for me aswell.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 5 months ago
[–] [email protected] 3 points 5 months ago

Yeah DDG was struggling for me too.

[–] cosmicrookie 3 points 5 months ago

Kagi works fine πŸ‘

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