Oh, was this why DuckDuckGo was down yesterday?
Yeah. It was pretty funny to me because downdetector.com (run by the speedtest.net folks) had 4 times the error reports submitted for DDG than Bing. Bing has a bigger market share, so I think it's purely down to DDG users being more technically-minded.
I always thought that people using searx etc over duckduckgo were just gluttons for punishment. Having gone an entire morning without search, maybe now is the time to dive down that rabbit hole...
Seems like most search engines these days are primarily Google-based or Bing-based. Mojeek has its own crawler, I think...
Alexandria and Stract use their own open source crawlers. Brave is also independent, if I recall correctly.
Brave does have an option to use anonymous Google results as a fallback if their index doesn't return enough results, but it will ask you before it does it.
This is correct, we are independent and have been since all the way back in 2004, 8bn-page index and growing 😀
I just read your profile and can't believe you guys have been on lemmy for 3 years. What made you guys join before lemmy got popular?
people interested in alternative search tend to be in spaces that aren't your GAFAM big tech networks, we've been on masto since 2018 also
not to come off as overly dismissive of people elsewhere, but you also find that the quality of discourse and people's willingness to think about things are both considerably more elevated
🙂👍
Nice! Mojeek looks great. Thanks for the tip!
Kagi.com has its own I believe. But you have to pay a subscription to use it.
My understanding is that Kagi relies on the likes of Bing and Google but since it uses more than one of them it can keep functioning if one goes down.
TIL. I thought they had their own crawler. I’m a little disappointed.
They do both, their own index focuses on the "small web", more info here:
https://help.kagi.com/kagi/search-details/search-sources.html
I'm one of those guys. Searx itself is just a meta search engine, using Google and many other search engines. You don't need to dive into any rabbit hole, just use a pre existing server for easy access. From time to time I switch the instance. You can then still decide if you want go the full rabbit hole and host it yourself, but that is not a requirement. At least its fully open source and your data/search queries are not sent to Google or Microsoft. In the settings can be specified which engines you want to use:
Try it out here: https://searx.space/ and for some information about SearxNG: https://docs.searxng.org/
Wait, it supports bangs? That's the #1 thing that keeps me specifically with DDG, once i have some time i'll have to explore this (probably not earlier than a couple weeks though)
I was used to the bangs in DuckDuckGo too, but stopped using them. In example I have duckduckgo search engine disabled here, but can still do a ddg only search with !ddg hello . But don't get your hopes too high, because I think it only supports the few bangs and nothing else. It does not support ddg bangs. I registered a DuckDuckGo bang !retro to point to RetroPie forum, but it does not work in Searx.
Edit: It would have been a true banger if we could combine them in Searx like this: !ddg!retro
That combination works in Brave to search the forum (prefixing !ddg or !d) I’m surprised it doesn’t in Searx.
I've just tested this in Brave and it works. And it does not require the combination, !retro on its own is enough. Nice!
Alternative you may consider is the brave search. Supports many bangs (?all of what ddg supports). It is independent of other search engines as well. But its picture search is poor.
Thank you.
I've switched to this from DuckDuckGo right during the downtime and, so far, it's been working out great.
Literally did this this morning and now searx is the default search engine on all my devices. Works great so far
I'm using Kagi and can't be happier.
I too use Kagi but it's worth noting that Kagi gets most of its results by paying and using other search engines including Google and Bing, so it's not 100% independent or immune from say Bing's outage. Still the best option by far though.
It could become independent with sufficient funding. I think that's part of the idea.
Though, being able to use other indexes is likely still helpful.
I just started using it today after seeing a comment on it, it may have been yours and it seems fantastic, I took a look at their demo searches and it reminded me of old google while still keeping elements from new google I find useful, and being able to disable or disable any feature I want is amazing.
I haven't dug in too deep on making my own lenses yet, since they had some very sensible defaults (I mean seriously they have a default lemmy/fediverse lens) but that feature seems incredibly cool and useful if I want to set up something to easily search a variety of niche, focused websites on a subject I want to search on a regular basis.
I was worried about it not featuring conversions/math stuff but prepared to use WolframAlpha for that, but it included them, the only thing is oddly after providing the answer to my test math query of 88+17 it showed search results from the quran and the bible lol. But I suppose that was just a minor oddity.
I feel like this article took a quick turn from "Bing went down" to "Google bad".
I am glad more people realize who's actually behind DDG and such.
DDG and others don't really hide the fact that the results come from Bing. People really underestimate how hard it is to make a search engine.
I haven't opened the article yet, but are you complaining that the article talks about what's in the headline?
Pretty much. Is there an alternative?
I'd go for a SearXNG instance, since its a meta search engine, its gonna work unless all other search engines shut down.
Also nice benefit of being FOSS and of no charge.
I have been using Metager more and more lately. Most of the time, it seems that the results are better than or least as good as DDG and Google.
Metager uses Yahoo and Yandex in the free version, when you pay you can also get search results from bring, mojeek and brave, but you can select which search engines you want to use in the settings.
While we're on the topic of search engines, does anyone know how to install your own private Whoogle instance? I've been a little confused by the instructions I've found; do I need my own server to set this up?
If you just want to use it from your home computer / network you can run it locally, either installing it directly or in a container. You only need a server (or a way to connect to your home network) if you want to access it from elsewhere.
Thanks! Will give it a try (but may have more questions as I try to set it up).
I use startpage as my primary search engine. It's also privacy based and has an A rating from TermsofService;Didn't Read.
🤖 I'm a bot that provides automatic summaries for articles:
Click here to see the summary
If dismay about AI's hallucinations, power draw, or pizza recipes concern you—along with perhaps broader Google issues involving privacy, tracking, news, SEO, or monopoly power—most of your other major options were brought down by a single API outage this morning.
Moving past that kind of single point of vulnerability will take some work, both by the industry and by you, the person wondering if there's a real alternative.
Bing offers its services widely, most notably to DuckDuckGo, but its ad-based revenue model and privacy particulars have caused some friction there in the past.
Before his company was able to block more of Microsoft's own tracking scripts, DuckDuckGo CEO and founder Gabriel Weinberg explained in a Reddit reply why firms like his weren't going the full DIY route:
The same is true for maps btw -- only the biggest companies can similarly afford to put satellites up and send ground cars to take streetview pictures of every neighborhood.
It's in Microsoft's interest to keep its search index stocked and API open, even if its focus is almost entirely on its own AI chatbot version of Bing.
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