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…
Well it ses that bing is down too, and most independent search engines are a warper arround bing so…
*wrapper
*rapper
You gotta believe!
“independent”
That’s just Bing down with all of it’s puppets rebrands.
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
The Bing frontends are down.
Its about time we make a federated search engine and indexer
Isn’t that searx / searxng?
SearXNG is a fork from the well-known searx metasearch engine which was inspired by the 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 the SearXNG sources and run it yourself!
Add your instance to this list of public instances to help other people reclaim their privacy and make the internet freer. The more decentralized the internet is, the more freedom we have!
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.
Dogpile.com is back
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.
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)
Smth like yaCy?
It’s bing all the way down
Wait it’s all bing? 🌎👨🚀🔫👨🚀
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
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.
I find it significantly better than Google. 90% of the time.
Kagi works fine.
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 ☀️
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
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.
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)
Lol wow. It is 2024 and apple still doesn’t give you basic browser v1.0 functionality
I have never used iOS but I’d guess that makes browsing on it a little less convenient than on a terminal with
curl.You’re implying that the first browser was curl? I don’t think people called that a browser. And even if they did, they obviously weren’t using it like we do now.
Obviously not the first but might win a “most basic browser currently maintained” competition if it qualifies (not if HTML rendering is a criterion).
I mean, it’s an http client, I’ll give you that, but I don’t see how it could be considered a “browser” since all it handles is the server interaction
Yandex is working
They have meta engines that search instances of searx
Seems to be related to bing using AI now…
“We’re totally not just rewrapping Bing results!!!”
Yet, DuckDuckGo and Startpage seem down, too.
Even though DDG supposedly uses its own results, and SP supposedly is a FE for GoogleDDG uses Bing results and SP aggregates Google and Bing results
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)
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
Shocker.
Bing is down, and every engine that uses bing api.
I found out what was going on from Yahoo! Lol. https://uk.finance.yahoo.com/news/bing-api-down-taking-microsoft-090532873.html
DDG was working earlier today, but for the past hour it just throws an error “There was an error displaying the search results. Please try again.”
Fascinating, Duckduckgo isn’t working for me aswell.
