It turns out way fewer people knew search engines like DuckDuckGo are just whitelabel versions of Microsoft Bing than I thought. Today, in most of Europe and Asia, search engines like DuckDuckGo, Ecosia, Qwant, other alternative search engines, ChatGPT internet search, and even Windows Copilot were all down. It turns out the culprit was Microsoft Bing; and when Microsoft Bing goes down, everyone who uses it goes down too.
Alternative search engines often try to be vague about their whitelabel status, or even outright hide it altogether. Bing is a popular search engine for whitelabeling, so when Bing goes down, almost the entire house of cards of alternative search engines comes tumbling down as well.
DuckDuckGo, for instance, places a lot of emphasis on using specialised search engines like TripAdvisor and direct sources like Sportradar or Wikipedia, as well as its own crawler and other indexes. However, as we saw today, as soon as Bing goes down, DuckDuckGo just stops working entirely. DDG happens to be my main search engine – a case of less shit than everyone else – so all throughout the day I was met with the error message “There was an error displaying the search results. Please try again.”
I don’t begrudge DDG or other search engines for repackaging Bing search results – building a truly new search engine and running it is incredibly hard, costly, and you’ll always be lagging behind – but I was surprised by how many people didn’t know just how common this practice really was. My Fediverse feeds were filled with people surprised to learn they’d been using Bing all along, just wrapped in a nicer user interface and with some additional features.
Qwant only uses bing to suplement its results, it has its own engine as well.
What is a “fediverse?”
The fediverse is a collection of social networking services that can communicate with each other (formally known as federation) using a common protocol.
https://fediverse.party/
It’s the only place that the internet exists anymore.
Problem is, they can’t communicate with each other, things like search or searching for usernames don’t work across instances (you can follow users from other instances if you already know their username and the instance they’re on and this will allow you to search for their posts, but you can’t discover users or their posts).
On a place like Twitter (sorry, X), every user who identifies as a Twitter user is searchable and their posts can appear in the search results, there is no fragmentation. Unlike users who identify as “fediverse users”.
When a Twitter user has an “@” in their profile name, I just treat the part after the “@” as decoration, much like any emojis they may have.
Yeah, I don’t know, I don’t use Twitter.
Aside from my work and family conversations, I have no idea what people are talking about anymore and what’s supposed to make me angry.
You could try searching for it on…oh wait.
It would be great to have a really good search engine alternative, but I guess they just don’t exist.
Brave search seems to get a bit better every time I try it, and they are supposedly truly independent. They’ve also talked about eventually moving it to a free software license after some unknown number of years in the future, which would be nice.
I’ve been using Presearch for 1 year… and it works good for me.
Thom.
Can you please write an article about *REAL* Bing and Google alternatives not relying on them? Do they exist? At first, I had hopes you would mention a few of them!
Yandex.com with VPN. Works great, Gives me beter results then Bing, DuckDuckGo and even Google
I dare you to go *REAL* crazy with that 😀
https://yacy.net/
DSearch/Presearch
Thank you for this!
I understand the “less worst” concept, and I also used DDG back in the days (until Ukraine). I tried Brave for a while, not bad, but somehow I really distrust Brave, don’t know why, as I kind of like the political views of its founder. So I finally settled on Startpage, which is a whitelabel for Google. So far so good, it’s been a bit more than a year.
Same as it ever was. back in the day there were a lot of search engines powered by infoseek or excite. Google itself used to provide the search results for yahoo. Web search engines have always been difficult to write and expensive to maintain.
it reminds me of aws outage few years ago which revealed that several cloud providers were simply the middlemen relying on aws.
There is a new search engine that is truly independent and it being built by one person, Marginalia Search: https://search.marginalia.nu/
What about metasearch?
https://github.com/searxng/searxng