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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 enti
by notRobot 2y ago
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.
- devit 2y agoThey probably start with Bing results and do custom filtering, ranking and presentation, so without the initial Bing results they can't do anything.
- ffhhj 2y agoSomeone please tell them they can wrap that code inside an "if" condition, and continue with the rest of the search.
- niutech 2y agoWhat would be the rest if they don't have their own index?
- niutech 2y agoSo basically DDG is the wrapper for Bing Search, not an "independent" search company as they claim.
- victor_z 2y agoProbably. But DDG at least offers more privacy, right? Right?
- niutech 2y agoDDG has a history of breaching privacy: https://techcrunch.com/2022/05/24/ddg-microsoft-tracking-blocking-limit/ https://techcrunch.com/2022/05/24/ddg-microsoft-tracking-blo... Meanwhile Brave Search or Mojeek provide more privacy, being independent at the same time.
- berkes 2y ago> Brave Search or Mojeek provide more privacy Do they? Or have they just not had that "history" yet? I don't see anything fundamentally different in Brave that protects your and my privacy better than on DDG. I don't know Mojeek enough.
- syklep 2y agoBrave explicitly claims not to.[1] Brave also does not rely on Bing for results. [1] https://search.brave.com/help/privacy-policy https://search.brave.com/help/privacy-policy Edit: mojeek claims the same.[2] [2] https://www.mojeek.com/about/privacy/ https://www.mojeek.com/about/privacy/
- kunley 2y agoLast time i checked, Brave was insisting on convinving me to use certain cryptocurrency platforms and it was more intrusive with it than typical web ads, which seemed really twisted, as the same Brave claimed to give ad-free experience. Are they still doing that?
- NayamAmarshe 2y agoThey don't. The cryptocurrency options are all disabled by default and are opt-in.
- somenameforme 2y agoIt literally never did that. There's some crypto wallet button that you get in the address bar that you can disable with a right click, and that's pretty much the extent of it. All crypto and other related functionality is completely opt-in.
- decide1000 2y agoYes, those ads are still part of Brave.
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- kornhole 2y agoYes it is one of many metasearch sites and not actually a search engine. Other engines include Kagi, Yandex, Brave, Mojeek, Quant, and something called Google.
- niutech 2y agoQuant also relies on Bing API.
- decide1000 2y agoQuant or Qwant? Qwant does not rely on the Bing api but has its own index.
- mardifoufs 2y agoAre you sure about that? It doesn't completely rely on it but didn't it use bing as one of the search providers? I'm probably completely wrong and my info is outdated but I'm asking because it would be pretty special (in a good way!) if they use their own index exclusively.
- pythux 2y agoQwant was not usable yesterday during the Bing outage so that pretty much shows they cannot function without Bing (even if they do have some auxiliary indexes of some sort)
- niutech 2y agoQwant, sorry. On Wikiledia they mention Bing multiple times: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qwant https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qwant Qwant was also out of service today due to Bing API outage: https://www.gamingdeputy.com/bing-outage-exposes-qwant-and-duckduckgos-lack-of-independence/ https://www.gamingdeputy.com/bing-outage-exposes-qwant-and-d...
- gregw134 2y agoPretty sure kagi is a bing wrapper too, although they blend in some other datasets.
- Minor49er 2y agoThe industry term is "whitelabeling" Sometimes it pays to pretend
- elevatedastalt 2y agoThe legal term is "deception".
- ThrowawayTestr 2y agoTaking someone else's product and making it better is a useful service.
- arrowsmith 2y agoIt's not deception if you tell people you're doing it.
- elevatedastalt 2y agoDDG massively oversells their own contribution to the search results. If you look at their marketing material, they claim to "use a variety of sources, 500+ to bring you your search results". This is of course technically correct, but the truth is they are a relatively thin wrapper on Bing results. So yes, I'd claim it is a form of deception.
- autoexec 2y agoAnd Bing lifts their results from Google (https://www.wired.com/2011/02/bing-copies-google/ https://www.wired.com/2011/02/bing-copies-google/) so in the end it seems like the internet only has one search engine.
- barbazoo 2y agoThere's also Kagi
- bloblaw 2y agoThat article is from 2011. I can imagine that in 13 years this may no longer be true.
- pphysch 2y agoWhat would lead you to believe that in the last 13 years MS would make the titanic investment of reimplementing their (alleged) Google-based search backend? Given the trajectory of Bing this seems unlikely.
- adamomada 2y agoFor me it’s because DDG (aka Bing) results are vastly different than Google results. I use the !g and !s bangs often. I think you’re making a huge assumption that nothing would change in 13 years!
- politelemon 2y agoMakes me wonder, does this mean Bing is the Chromium or Firefox of search?
- somenameforme 2y agoBrave Search [1] is 100% independent. There's also Yandex [2] which also works excellently, but is biased towards more Russian language results. The image search is second to none though. [1] - https://search.brave.com/ https://search.brave.com/ [2] - https://yandex.com/ https://yandex.com/
- wannacboatmovie 2y agoWait till you find out who makes some store-brand food.
- SOLAR_FIELDS 2y agoIf they branded themselves as what it is, anonymized bing search with better features, I would be totally fine with that. As is, even if they don’t go with that branding, I have no problem using the service under those terms.
- red_admiral 2y ago"Bing but without copilot" alone would be a product worth having. But I think DDG has a few more things on top of that, like the `!bang` stuff and the bit where they don't send tracking data on you to Microsoft.
- arrowsmith 2y agoI really don't understand why any technically literate person would be impressed by the "!bang" stuff on DDG. You know your browser already provides this feature, right? Just configure some custom search keywords in your search settings. What does DDG offer that's better than this?
- afavour 2y agoHow do I set that up on iOS Safari?
- banish-m4 2y agoExactly. You can't except by setting DDG as the default search engine. Chrome, Brave, and FF for iOS also don't directly support this sort of feature either.
- opan 2y agoThey already set them up for a ton of sites, though, and often you can guess your way to a bang on the first try. I have only looked at the actual list once or twice. Plus it seems to match the closest one in cases of using one that doesn't exist. I can also go to a machine that isn't my own and take advantage of them there right away. I heavily use the quickmarks in qutebrowser, but also the ddg bangs. I just hit O for open in new tab and can put in a bang right there.
- malicka 2y agoJust to emphasize: When opan says ton, they mean a TON. Around 13 thousand, if I remember correctly.
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- mdp2021 2y agohttps://duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/sources/ https://duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/sources... > # Where do DuckDuckGo search results come from? // Most of our search result pages feature one or more Instant Answers. To deliver Instant Answers on specific topics, DuckDuckGo leverages many sources, including specialized sources like Sportradar and crowd-sourced sites like Wikipedia. We also maintain our own crawler (DuckDuckBot) and many indexes to support our results. Of course, we have more traditional links and images in our search results too, which we largely source from Bing. Our focus is synthesizing all these sources to create a superior search experience
- niutech 2y agoTheir previous answer: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40454640 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40454640
- throwaway425933 2y agoHow can a poor peasant start using Bing APIs? They seem to cost a ton. Do I have to raise money before I even attempt a metasearch engine.
- EasyMark 2y agothe most valuable service they provide is being a proxy for bing. they will never own up to it, but that in and of itself is an awesome service, as long as they're bing honest about your privacy.
- jamesrr39 2y agoI wonder if there are any duckduckgo/other search engine devs here to answer; why not keep a limited own index? Like, wikipedia, stack overflow, build up a cache of own-scraped sites for the top hits to popular search queries? Am a being naive with how much is possible without going all-in and building an index of the whole web, or is it possible to have some kind of in-house fallback?
- Vinnl 2y agoI believe that generally refers to all their custom answers, e.g. when you search for "weather <place name>". Nevertheless, those don't seem to work either.
- rekoil 2y agoI bet their engineers are currently discussing how to make any such answers possible without Bing working, assuming the upstream data for them is not in fact also Bing.
- notRobot 2y agoIf the upstream data isn't Bing then why did they stop working in the first place?
- mda 2y agoNo they always downplayed and tried to obscure the fact that it is basically a bing wrapper. Smoke and mirrors seems to be the main business strategy.
- tinyhouse 2y agoAbsurd. They have been doing search for so long and couldn't build their own search index? I understand it's a huge investment, and clearly for some data sources you need to create partnerships and depend on others (e.g., youtube videos). But you would think that a search engine company would invest more in this area.
- skeeter2020 2y agoDo you really understand the scale of this (ongoing) investment? I'm not sure I'd classify this as "Absurd" - the value of DDG is not yet-another (tm) search index but the specific values they add on top. When you have limited resources I'd say they're making the right choice.
- somenameforme 2y agoBrave rolled their own completely independent search [1] on what I assume is a relatively limited budget. It seems that regularly grabbing the data would be pretty easy. The harder part would be searching/ordering it in an efficient and meaningful way while avoiding SEO, but that seems more like a fun problem than a difficult one (if not both). [1] - https://search.brave.com/ https://search.brave.com/
- tredre3 2y agoThere are two things the general HN sentiment genuinely believes is impossible to build unless you have billions of dollars: - Search Engines - Browser Engines I don't quite understand how we got there because neither of those things are impossible. Both are achievable with a small team and a couple years of runway. As proved by Brave and Ladybird.
- adamomada 2y agoIt’s easy to make a crappy search and crappy browser, I think the sentiment is aimed at producing a useful alternative to google and chrome
- npteljes 2y agoI definitely felt misled, when I first learned about this, back when they censored Tank Man the same time Bing did[0]. I did remain a user though, mostly because I haven't felt like keeping up who the current good guys are. Lately I have been considering Kagi, but I don't like it that I need to log in on all my devices, and then I have to have a fallback, for when I'm not on my own devices. So yeah, for my intents and purposes, DDG is a frontend to Bing. I do appreciate how uncluttered it is though, in comparison. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tank_Man#Censorship https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tank_Man#Censorship
- freedomben 2y agoI do wish Kagi had less friction getting logged in on each device, but they have gotten it as streamlined as possible without patching the browsers. Your key goes in a query string so you can put it in any browser's new/default search engine config[1]. [1] https://help.kagi.com/kagi/getting-started/setting-default.html https://help.kagi.com/kagi/getting-started/setting-default.h...
- pmlnr 2y agoI just left Kagi. At first, it looked very nice, but for some reason, in a few weeks both Google and ddg gave me much better results. The new g web filter is actually quite good as well.
- bambax 2y agoYeah, exactly. They're mostly a front end for Bing. I know they have their fans, and this remark will probably anger them, but I have never understood the point of DDG.
- victor_z 2y agoI'm not angry but: privacy? Isn't that the point they're blasting all over their page and apps?
- SassyBird 2y agoDDG UI is a lot calmer. Opening Bing feels like entering a Middle-Eastern market.
- forthewwwpoints 2y agoI created this account just to say thank you for this comment.
- elevatedastalt 2y agoThere are only 3 planet scale search indices I think. Google, Bing and Yandex. Everyone else is just rehashing those results.
- 4ggr0 2y agoMojeek has its own index as well.
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 2y agoData point: Bing was not down for me.
- stanislavb 2y agoThis. At some point in the past I was giving a "test drive" to DuckDuckGo. And the moment when I realised that they are a Bing wrapper was the end of it.
- EasyMark 2y agocomparing their search result with bing for at least the first 3 or 4 pages you'll see a very high correlation to bing's result (as long as you're logged out of bing). The main thing is they proxy your search for you and give half way decent results like bing.
- xnx 2y agoI keep meaning to make a Chrome extension called DDGoogle that would reskin Google results in the style of DuckDuckGo. This way people who insist on using DDG wouldn't have to endure Bing-quality results.