DuckDuckGo was down

[npteljes]

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.

[notRobot]

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.

[ReadCarlBarks]

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).

[gpvos]

Took them several hours to put that message there though.

[iechoz6H]

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

[banish-m4]

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.

[realfeel78]

I thought I was easily entertained.

[Simon_ORourke]

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.

[shaan7]

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

[tomphoolery]

get it because ducks

[kawfey]

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.

[keybits]

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...

[michael9423]

So much about DuckDuckGo's claim that Bing is only a part of their search results.

[mhuffman]

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.

[FerretFred]

> "Update 1: Microsoft has confirmed an issue where users may be unable to access the Microsoft Copilot service"

So not all bad then?!

[TechDebtDevin]

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.

[BirAdam]

So, uh, Copilot+PC, how much of their AI computer thing would be completely useless right now?

[dewey]

> 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.

[alentred]

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

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

[tgv]

DDG runs on bing, so that squares. Apparently, MS uses Bing for their portal, because I can't search inside Azure portal neither.

[mrweasel]

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

[wannacboatmovie]

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.

[beretguy]

https://xkcd.com/2347/

[kuro_neko]

Does it vary by region? Mine works fine for bing.

[1vuio0pswjnm7]

It has not been down for me.

[windowshopping]

works for me 8 minutes later, idk

[ikt]

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

[farmdve]

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.

[ramenbytes]

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/

[renegat0x0]

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

[__jonas]

https://search.marginalia.nu/

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

[ColinHayhurst]

Mojeek, fully independent index. self-disclosure: CEO

[niutech]

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

[fp64]

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"?

[PascLeRasc]

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

[1vuio0pswjnm7]

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

[mrweasel]

It seems to be all search engines powered by Bing. Ecosia isn't working either, and they also don't have a status page.

[opem]

yep

[jmcnulty]

They're aware of the problem.

https://www.reddit.com/r/duckduckgo/comments/1cynfft/duckduc...

[mrweasel]

It's disappointing that a "meeh" Reddit post is total sum of communication from Bing, DuckDuckGo, Ecosia and others.

[devnonymous]

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.

[enkrs]

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.

[gunapologist99]

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.

[dvh]

It was me. I asked it which pigeon has orange beak and it crashed it.

[voidUpdate]

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

[knifie_spoonie]

It's probably because Bing is down

[nobody9999]

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

[az09mugen]

Startpage [0] search also is not returning web results. But image search is working. I wonder what's happening.

[0] https://www.startpage.com

[Mountain_Skies]

DuckDuckGo also is unable to provide search results, which seems to confirm they use Bing as a base for their searches.