Is it just me or are many independent search engines down? Duckduckgo, my go to engine, qwant, ecosia, startpage… All down? The only hint I got was on the qwant page…

Edit: it all seems to be related to bing being down. I hope the independent engines will find a way to get really independent…

  • RustyNova@lemmy.world
    852·
    5 months ago

    Well it ses that bing is down too, and most independent search engines are a warper arround bing so…

    • HootinNHollerin@lemmy.world
      361·
      5 months ago

      Isn’t that searx / searxng?

      SearXNG is a fork from the well-known searx metasearch engine which was inspired by the Seeks project. It provides basic privacy by mixing your queries with searches on other platforms without storing search data. SearXNG can be added to your browser’s search bar; moreover, it can be set as the default search engine.

      SearXNG appreciates your concern regarding logs, so take the code from the SearXNG sources and run it yourself!

      Add your instance to this list of public instances to help other people reclaim their privacy and make the internet freer. The more decentralized the internet is, the more freedom we have!

    • WhatAmLemmy@lemmy.worldEnglish
      12·
      5 months ago

      I was thinking about this and imagined the federated servers handling the index db, search algorithms, and search requests, but instead leverage each users browser/compute to do the actual web crawling/scraping/indexing; the server simply performing CRUD operations on the processed data from clients to index db. This approach would target the core reason why search engines fail (cost of scraping and processing billions of sites), reduce the costs to host a search server, and spread the expense across the user base.

      It also may have the added benefit of hindering surveillance capitalism due to a sea of junk queries from every client, especially if it were making crawler requests from the same browser (obviously needs to be isolated from the users own data, extensions, queries, etc). The federated servers would also probably need to operate as lighthouses that orchestrate the domains and IP ranges to crawl, and efficiently distribute the workload to client machines.

      • 🇦🇺𝕄𝕦𝕟𝕥𝕖𝕕𝕔𝕣𝕠𝕔𝕕𝕚𝕝𝕖@lemm.eeEnglish
        4·
        5 months ago

        Shit man thats exactly the kind of implementation i was thinking about. Had the idea for a couple years now but now that the fediverse is starting to gain traction i think it’s probably about time some code gets written. Unfortunatly due to CORS u cant just start serving people a js script that starts indexing in the background.

      • intensely_human@lemm.ee
        2·
        5 months ago

        The theory with crawling is it has discovery built into it, no? You follow outbound links and discover domains that way. So you need some seeds, but otherwise you discover based on what other people already know about.

        To me the problem seems like a few submarines in a cave. They can each see a little bit of what’s around them, and then they can share maps. Like the minimum knowledge of the internet is one’s own explorations. As one browses the web, their sensors are storing everything they see. It also actively searches with other agents, automatically crawls on its own like active sensors on a submarine always mapping out the environment.

        Then, in the presence of other friendly subs, you can trade information. So one’s own personal and small map of the internet can get merged and mixed with others to get a more and more complete version.

        Obviously this can be automated and batched, but that’s sort of the analogy I see in the real world: multiple parties exploring an unknown/changing space and sharing their data to make a map.

    • Icr8tdThis4ccToWarn@lemmy.ml
      71·
      5 months ago

      I’ve also thought about this, but I don’t know what would be the costs to do such a thing. (I’m ignorant on the subject)

  • Kyouki@lemmy.world
    45·
    5 months ago

    They all use Bing’s, idk how i feel about that fact actually. Curious what you others use. Just as a thought experiment.

    Been an avid ddg user but hate how it sometimes does push this micropoop nonsenses. Like msn news

    • cosmicrookie@lemmy.world
      201·
      5 months ago

      I’ve been using Kagi, and although it has a pricetag, and not quite as good as Google, I am happy with it and has worked well for me.

    • frunch@lemmy.world
      181·
      5 months ago

      Well isn’t that great, mr. moneybags

      /S

      Yes I’m making a stupid joke bc it’s a paid search engine, something i never would have imagined would be a thing. Now I’m going to price it and perhaps finally pull the trigger on an acct there because fuck google, fuck bing, and fuck all these sites being “wrappers” of them. I come from the dial-up days when lycos, webcrawler, altavista, yahoo–hard searches that would separate the men from the boys. Now we just get this “A.I.” bullshit instead and it falls apart under its own weight. Excuse me while i wave my cane at the sun ☀️

      Edit: so it turns out you can get 100 free searches on their site here: https://kagi.com/onboarding?p=choose_plan

      Otherwise, it’s $5/month for 300 searches, $10/mo for unlimited, and $25/mo for their “ultimate” exclusive experience…whatever that may be. I’m gonna try the freebies and see what happens. I’m still on the fence about paying for search, but I’m really tired of bs coming from these companies leading to things like we’re experiencing today

      • themoonisacheese@sh.itjust.works
        6·
        5 months ago

        I was there too. Do try the freebies and see how you like it, there’s nothing to lose. Personally, that convinced me and I switched to 300 searches, then I got a new job for which I was making lots of searches and outgrew it so now I’m on the unlimited. IMO ultimate is useless unless you really like the vision or something, I just pay for a working product.

        • Lemmykoopa@lemmygrad.ml
          1·
          5 months ago

          How much more useful is it? I’m paying for chatgpt, because it filled the role old search engines used too, but that’s garbage nowadays as well.

    • ClassifiedPancake@discuss.tchncs.de
      12·
      5 months ago

      I hope Apple will finally allow custom search engines because the current workaround when wanting to use Kagi as default in iOS Safari is a shitty user experience (and I’m not blaming Kagi for that)

      • TrickDacy@lemmy.world
        261·
        5 months ago

        Lol wow. It is 2024 and apple still doesn’t give you basic browser v1.0 functionality

          • TrickDacy@lemmy.world
            31·
            5 months ago

            You’re implying that the first browser was curl? I don’t think people called that a browser. And even if they did, they obviously weren’t using it like we do now.

            • ChaoticNeutralCzech@feddit.de
              5·
              5 months ago

              Obviously not the first but might win a “most basic browser currently maintained” competition if it qualifies (not if HTML rendering is a criterion).

              • TrickDacy@lemmy.world
                3·
                5 months ago

                I mean, it’s an http client, I’ll give you that, but I don’t see how it could be considered a “browser” since all it handles is the server interaction

  • olutukko@lemmy.world
    8·
    5 months ago

    huh, my duckduckgo did piss in my eye yesterday so to speak, don’t know why I said that but I didn’t get my search result is what I meant

  • Chahk@beehaw.org
    6·
    5 months ago

    DDG was working earlier today, but for the past hour it just throws an error “There was an error displaying the search results. Please try again.”