DuckDuckGo was down - Hacker News

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.

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?!

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.

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.

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.

jmcnulty

They're aware of the problem.

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

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.

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.

benrutter

I use Ecosia (which Bing powered) and wondered why it was down earlier. Makes you realise just how few players there actually are in the search rankings space.

256_

If you look up "hacker news", it at least shows you an insert from the Wikipedia article, even if there are no normal results: https://html.duckduckgo.com/html?q=hacker+news

Brajeshwar

The movies were indeed way ahead and knew -- Mothership snaps and the entire fleet just collapse like an unplugged discharged device.

SushiHippie

According to the comments on this lemmy post [0] Bing, DuckDuckGo, Ecosia, StartPage, Qwant are/were affected

[0] https://lemmy.world/post/15708430

blackeyeblitzar

Ecosia is also down. I think all of these use Bing under the covers? If it is actually a Bing problem, it is pretty incredible that MS has an outage this long. Makes me think twice about the stability of Azure.

kbazbaz

From DDG: https://x.com/DuckDuckGo/status/1793557968027570527

naitgacem

I just experienced this as well. I had a giggle when I opened a new tab and searched "is duckduckgo down" and the default search engine is ... duckduckgo.

Still no results .. strange :P

jandrusk

How in the world is DDG dependent upon Bing to function? So glad I switched to Brave Search :)

philipov

Single point of faaaaiiiiiluuuuure - Sing it!

tokai

Whats up with the 'surprised' comments about ddg? I don't like ddg myself, but it has never been a secret that they base their results on bing.

rodondenderon

Nice to see https://search.brave.com/, https://entireweb.com and https://mojeek.com are still kicking it. In case anyone needs to know alternatives besides the monopoly that is Google.

udev4096

I hope duckduckgo tries to shift away from Bing. They were lying about the fact that "we rely on different crawlers apart from Bing"

IG_Semmelweiss

Question for OP. What would be your guess that someone like he article writer is able to make the inference that Bing being down was also impacting DDG or ChatGPT ?

Is it public knowledge that they use the Bing backend to do their work ?

Particularly for Bing Copilot, isn't the relationship the other way around (OpenAI has the core sauce, bing uses its API to power their copilot searches) ?

Kye

DuckDuckNoGo

sigmonsays

maybe it's time to centralize crawlers and search data, making it publicly available to anyone willing to process it.

Not only would that reduce crawler traffic on websites to a single crawler entity it would make page data available for any indexer.

The idea that one company owns this data is kind of silly, it should be a coalition or a group of companies working together...

BubBob

In the meantime you can try KARMA, the first search engine dedicated to protecting animals and biodiversity! It's powered by Brave Search so it's privacy friendly and independent from the GAFAMs. You can check it out here: https://karmasearch.org

datenyan

Looks like it's affecting anything Bing-related, at least over here in Australia. Same symptoms for Bing and Ecosia.

beretguy

Use Brave search for now instead.

https://search.brave.com

lowkey

I’ve started using search.brave.com instead of Duck Duck Go as my default search engine (which in turn replaced Google search, the spyware/adware posing as a search engine)

I was formerly a huge advocate of DDG but between the Microsoft ad tracking the company was paid to include without disclosing to users [1] and their pro-censorship stance on the Ukraine war [2], they lost my trust.

Turns out Duck Duck Go is not a serious company. They are not serious about privacy and they are not serious about censorship, two principles I hold dear.

"It takes years to build trust and seconds to destroy it." - Warren Buffett

Now search.brave.com is my default on both Desktop and iOS (using the excellent Safari extension Hyperweb)

nashashmi

I realized DDG was just a skin on Bing a couple of days ago. Bing's results have gone incredibly sour. Too many ads on bing. Bing speaks of censorship and fake results (repeated listings of the same garbage on 3rd, 4th pages).

The only thing DDG is good for: using bangs! search any and every search engine thru ![bang].

What other search engines are still good? Google hit the fan a couple of years back after the hire of Prabhakar Raghavan (https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/). Bing cowered to censored results. ChatGPT is muzzled.

weinzierl

Bangs still seem to work, so "[search term] g!" saves the day until this is fixed.

josemanuel

DDG has been down all morning (UK) on safari mobile and chrome on windows 10.

nobody9999

Yes. It certainly appears so, and has been down for at least a couple hours.

mrweasel

Is it just me or is it really weird that neither Microsoft, or ANY of the search engines that uses Bing on the backend has posted anything about this?

DuckDuckGo and Ecosia has not been working all morning (CET) but there is zero indication on their sites that they are even aware of the problem. DuckDuckGo has a single Reddit posts and that's it.

anoplus

Started about an hour ago (~1716454800000)

aeonian_8

"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":

    Google: !g why did youtube remove my subscriptions list
    Yahoo: !y why did youtube remove my subscriptions list
    Wikipedia: !w why did youtube remove my subscriptions list
    And many more."

This change just happened. I've been waiting on Ddg since ~10am in Frankfurt, Germany.

neogodless

Is there any possibility that the latest Windows 11 update which is going out to "Insiders" now could be massively increasing the load on CoPilot / Bing infrastructure?

nullndr

Ddg has been down for 5 hours. Quite a problem they got.

bhaney

Bing is down and the rest of those use Bing for results?

ffpip

What a coincidence!

I used it after 3-4 months and it didn't show any search results. Thought I had forgotten how to use their !bangs feature. Turns out it is down

drpossum

If you still want to search with bing you can use this URL

https://www4.bing.com/

mgoetzke

Teamviewer also seems to have issues. No one in our company can even log in, not even get past the email screen in their own web app

markbeare

This probably relates to the Bing Search API. A lot of these alternative search engines are using Bing for the organic results.

tanelpoder

I had been using DuckDuckGo for the last 2-3 years, but starting from early this year I noticed that their search index just didn’t index some of the things I searched for (enterprise tech stuff). These searches worked ok before and still worked with other engines. So I finally switched to Kagi and am happy with it.

camiat

Yup, I am also running into the same issue where duck duck go is returning the error message:

> Sorry, we ran into an error displaying these results. Click here to try again.

I thought it was just duck duck go, but I tried searching with bing, and was met with:

> It's not you, it's us

> Bing isn't available right now, but everything should be back to normal very soon.

cbovis

Non-Google recommendations in the interim?

binarymax

Unlikely, but perhaps this might motivate DDG into finally making their own index and eventually drop bing

biglyburrito

Kagi works just fine: https://kagi.com

DeathArrow

Maybe it was acquired by Google?

cooljoey

Oops lots of corporates MS Dyanmics platforms down as they rely on Bing address api!

feb

Actually Qwant.com uses bing API too and has a warning at the top of their homepage.

secondary_op

bing.com also down, looks like duckduckgo is frontend to bing

at least bing images, https://www.bing.com/images/search?q=katrina

CassisW

Hillarious! I was debugging a python script and didn't get results from duckduckgo and I was checking ANYTHING else first before checking their page manually.

Then checking if my IP perhaps is blocked.

Nope, down in general, no search results

n_ary

My conspiracy mind tells me, may be bing changed their search api with breaking changes or suddenly introduced massive billing(think Twitter API, reddit API et al.) hence all search-engines pulled an immediate break without having time to fix/update.

beretguy

I don’t see anybody mentioning Brave Search. I’m getting 500. Anybody else?

rendall

Bangs still work e.g. https://duckduckgo.com/?q=duckduckgo+search+not+working+!g

h2onock

Perhaps it's time to give Mojeek a try if you haven't already.

whitehat33

DDG Site responds, but gives and error and is not showing search results.

kbazbaz

Back: https://x.com/DuckDuckGo/status/1793652538476216398

altdataseller

Maybe this forces DDG and ChatGPT to make their own search engine index and corpus. Sure it might be a few years too late for the former, but thats probably what they said 5 years ago too.

maryShap

Get the same error with both Firefox and Edge. Very frustrating.

pluto_modadic

Hmmm... Is having a status page a sign of engineering maturity?

pixxel

Bing wrappers exposed.

phreeza

Did they stop publishing detailed traffic stats? They used to have a very detailed page if I recall correctly, but I can't find it any more.

jsemrau

I wrote a Langchain ReAct agent that searches the web for me using Wikipedia, Serpapi (google), and DDG. Works better than traditional search.

eth0up

I'm not sure why DDG has become such an acceptable google alternative. Even google returns less IP-based, irrelevant results. It's not terrible and sometimes it's good, but results are frequently absurd. I find an instance of searx, or even swisscows generally superior. DDG has no regard for specific queries and always seems to insert a handful of ridiculous IP-based results, however impossibly pertinent to the subject. I think DDG has IP tourette.

pcvarmint

It started failing on searches 1-2 hours ago.

_tk_me

Microsoft outage

is_true

Probably nothing, or a rogue AI is taking over MS.

This is the real world...if a tree falls in the forest and no one hears it

biglyburrito

Kagi works just fine: https://kagi.com

bun_terminator

They lost all relevance after they gleefully announced their manipulation of search results 2 years ago

Ophuscado

I rediscovered Yahoo thanks to it.

maelito

So, Kagi's not relying on Bing ?

mnuu

DDG down here

IceWreck

Yes, ddg is just a bing frontend which anonymizes results before sending them to MS.

vondur

I was getting an error from Bing not working earlier today. Possibly related?

hi-v-rocknroll

Yup. Maybe it's a NS, LB, or IPv6 only problem because it works eventually.

maryShap

Duckduckgo doesn't work on Windows 11 but does work on Windows 10

maryShap

Sorry, should have said that it was with the Safari brower

dudeinjapan

Bet their site reliability team was saying “F*k F*k No!”

mrkramer

Death by outsourcing.

mistyvales

Maybe it's an issue with their Bing connection..

nazgulsenpai

I have been meaning to check out Brave search anyhow.

MatthiasPortzel

Luckily !g still works, but this is pretty by bad.

nalinidash

Weird, it still is not working for me.

edit: working now.

kernelsanderz

down for me. doesn't get search results

noman-land

It's still down... crazy.

I had to use Yahoo today, ew.

maryShap

Duckduckgo is working fine on my iPhone15.

kunley

Bing is working though, DDG still down

divyaranjan1905

Even startpage.com shows no results

nirse

Is it just me, or has DDG been having trouble often lately? Or is it just a combination with some outage + degradation of search results lately that makes me g! regularly these days? Didn't use to need that.

sidcool

Still down.

beretguy

I also sometimes get 500 on Brave Search, but not always? Kagi works fine. Yeah, something is wrong with bing. That’s what you get when you rely on others instead of building your own. A jenga tower. https://xkcd.com/2347/

cooljoey

Oops, lots of corporate MS Dynamics platforms are down as they rely on Bing address api

dgan

Same for Startpage

hpeter

same. I just noticed it too, about 30 minutes ago

teekert

Yes, seeing it too, for about an hour already! Came here to check. Nothing on their xitter page but this thing is spiking: https://downdetector.com/status/duckduckgo/

GRBurst

yeah seems like at least for many that is the case. I wasn't aware that so many engines are using bing! under the hood. Afaik qwant uses their own thing and that startpage is using google under the hood, but that might have changed

hilux

22-May-2024 ... the day privacy (finally) died.

jraph

DDG is back.

CTOSian

bing as well

spaniard89277

keyword !brave works though

allanrbo

not down for me.

sixthDot

what a quack

dgan

Same for Startpage.

Using Kagi now

Neroilek

[dead]

aaron695

[dead]

khana

[dead]

derryman

[dead]

TheRealNGenius

[dead]

blondie9x

[flagged]

BubBob

[flagged]

blondie9x

Is it just me or is search terribly broken on the internet.

It’s Google or Bing and Bing imposters.

Why aren’t there more broad search options? Search was better when we had page rank algorithms. It’s gotten over condensed into 2 companies.

secondary_op

That's it, ddg is gone from my Firefox and hopefully from my browsing habits.

Speaking about Firefox, it is insane how needlessly complicated it is to add new search engine to Firefox [1]

    1. Open a new tab and type about:config in the address bar
    2. In the search box type: browser.urlbar.update2.engineAliasRefresh
    3. Click on the little + symbol on the right. It should look like after you pressed it: boolean true value
    4. Go to firefox Settings → Search. Or enter this in the address bar: about:preferences#search
    5. In the "Search Shortcuts" section you should notice a new "add" button. search add button
    6. Press the add button and fill in the name, search engine url and a keyword(optional).
    7. Go to the "Default Search Engine" section and select the engine you just added.

[1] https://superuser.com/questions/7327/how-to-add-a-custom-sea...