It’s also important to note that ChatGPT internet search and DuckDuckGo are experiencing similar issues because they use the Bing API.
UPDATE 2
Qwant, who claim that they have their own index, is also down. Coincidence…
Qwant works for me, so probably a coincidence.
Edit: nvm it only works intermittently
That is rather spooky
Annoying, I had to switch to Brave Search.
What do you mean?
I dunno, I told people I used Brave search and got down voted too. Lol
Yeah, some people here seem to be Firefox diehard.
But Firefox seems to be lagging behind other browsers.
Pretty much everything is based on Chromium these days.
“down” meaning up but displays no results, then yes, here in central europe too.
Same for Ecosia
🤔 maybe there is a lack of distributed fediversed search engine instances where:
- everyone can host a search engine for their very own pages
- everyone can crawl other pages and provide (maybe with permissions) the crawled data to other search engines (as compressed snapshots, api …) or provide a search engine by themselves for all.
- such search engines can be ranked or marked with “has anti features xyz” and put into followable ‘collections’ per topics.
- possibility to add 3rd party rankings and filters, so that one can use only a subset of a search engine list that was pieced together by someone you know or trust, reduced by rankings or filters published by another one you somehow trust to limit the items in the first list.
then: “for software development i use linuz personal ‘devel’ collection, this way i don’t have to manually click through big G’s gigabytes of spamalads they always only frustrate you with. for my home projects i use my friends ‘home of DYO’ collection, i get more results than i need but get new ideas as well. for kids its awesome, our school provides a collection including specialized search instances that fit learning, while that collection is also reviewed by a company to not contain search engine instances that also index any unfitting content pages.”
oh btw: no i have no info about duckduckgo unfortunately 🤷♀️
Yacy exists.
great, thanks. i’ll try it out as i have some spare resources on my server.
That’s one of the longest outages I’ve ever seen from a cloud company.
I picked a good day to switch to SwissCow lol
https://swisscows.com/en/web?query=%s
Free, uses it’s own index, focus on privacy. If there is anything bad about it though, please let me know. It can be hard to find unbiased data on search engines when you ultimately need to use a search engine to find the info, ime.
Will add to my search engine list. Thanks
Ah, because of this: https://lemmy.world/post/15710639
DuckDuckWent
DuckDuckGone
Someone finally found the Goose.
DDGTFO
Okay.
Now that we already know we are pretty much at the hands of one pupeteer, what options are there?
I already read about Kagi (apologies if mispelled) but I like to write as a hobby and 300 searches per month go fast.
What other options are there?
Was this news to you? Other than Google and Bing there aren’t any other significant alternatives. Even brave is a bit limited.
You can’t know everything.
Yes, I understand that, but still surprised. I thought it was well known that DDG used bing.
Today, I was the 1% getting to know something new.
Appreciate the edits
You’re welcome.
Just pay the extra for unlimited searches. It’s not much money, especially if it’s a tool for work.
It’s a hobby as it is.
If I ever manage to sell enough copies of it to be able to pay for a Kagi subscription, I’ll do it and make it public knowledge.
Listen sugartits, some of us don’t have much money. So if it’s not much money we still don’t have it
(Mostly i just wanted to point out your username by using it in a comment)
That was one of the most out of the blue comments I have ever read. It sounded so… unreal. Something out of a sitcom. Then I read “sugartits” is the name of the lemmy you were replying to. That’s was really top mark. Kudos for you.
Just letting you know kagi has a family plan with unlimited searches, so you can probably split it with family or friends! I have yet to see how searxng search holds up to kagi.
We may collect aggregated, non-personal search data to improve search algorithms, train AI models
ugh
Ecosia also uses Bing and was also down. That’s the one I use.
Mojeek is far from perfect, but also is 100% independent.
Thank you I tried Mojeek a few days ago but I forgot what it was called. the site for mojeek is mojeek.com btw.
Sometimes it’s a hard one to remember 😅
That’s a nice hobby
I would suggest you to install a local instance of a LLM (mistral or llama3 for example) to widen your source of information. Go straight to Wikipedia instead of “googling” it if you don’t already.
Anyway, I didn’t know about kagi so I might take my own advice and give it a try.
Brave search is independent. It was trained with google search but now it’s a thing of its own and doesn’t rely on google. I switched from DuckDuckGo a year ago and haven’t looked back
trained? like AI trained?
Yeah I was confused by that choice of words. Train is for ML and AIs. Search engines used to need crawlers to run regularly because, you know, shit changes.
No?
Nope, like it used to index from google but now it doesn’t. DuckDuckGo gets all its results from bing
I jumped back on ecosia. It’s nice there, but I’m sure there are issues that a non tech person like me may not know about
Read somewhere on the thread Ecosia is part of Bing ecosystem.
It is. That or it was very coincidentally down for the exact amount of time as DDG.
brave search is pretty good: https://search.brave.com/
There’s also mojeek.com running their own index. Not perfect, but sometimes usable.
you can also send us in queries where we’re not perfect, or let us know elsewhere, and we’re keen on fixing them
I noticed that bangs still work. For now I’m using !g until it’s back again
Well that just takes you to google and not through some proxy like ecosia or startpage
Yeah but google’s working fine. I need to get my job done
Apparently the whole ecosystem is down… DDG, Bing, etc.
Now we know what happen when someone in Google pray their AI Overlord to increase Google search traffic
…the AI just cut down the competition.
Still down.
Do you have any bread?
Dude we only have lemonade
And this is a Wendy’s
Look I’m a millennial; if I’m gonna drink fast food lemonade it’s gonna be the stuff from Panera that might kill me, and that’s (hopefully) final
But it’s good and it’s fresh and its all homemade
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
No, we just sell lemonade. But it’s cold and it’s fresh and it’s all homemade.
I thought it was just me, I thought something wrong was going on in my Windows installation.
EA app is also dead in the water for me, my library is not loading. It knows I have 4 games installed but all the names and icons are blank.
Can’t even launch the games directly from their own exe.