cross: https://lemmy.ml/post/233095
Article is in Italian.
Famous privacy blog Le Alternative (!lealternative@lemmy.ml here on Lemmy) was de-indexed from Bing and from all Bing-dependent search engines, including DuckDuckGo. At the moment it is impossible to search for their useful articles and the reason for this de-indexing is unknown. The owner of the blog is still trying to find out the reason for this removal.
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Please check if this is once again Bing. DDG has brought onto itself a lot of bad light by censoring news outlets, but put the blame on correct entity. It makes all DDG criticism look like hoax.
We can’t know for sure but the owner checked that the site was unreachable from Bing. Good news is that it is now accessible again!
Not surprising coming from DDG (yes, i know they use bing, but other search engines using bing don’t have that issue, because those alternative search engines actually know a little bit what they’re doing).
DDG is a joke and considering the amount of money they seem to be pulling in (to be able to afford those large and long ad campaigns in major cities around the world), they are very, very shady.
Bing often removes websites from their index but this does seem very weird. I don’t know why Bing would remove a privacy blog from their search results but this also shows how so many search engines are dependent on Bing or Google for results. The only search engine which isn’t dependent on Bing or Google right now seems to be Mojeek and Metager (Searx is just a meta-search engine). Mojeek is probably the most promising but right now it’s results aren’t the best but the results have been getting better. But I do wish that DuckDuckGo indexed search results themselves so they don’t have to deal with Microsoft’s decisions (also being reliant on big tech to start with isn’t a good thing for a independent privacy-focused search engine.
I think writing a search engine on top of an existing index is not hard. The more difficult and expensive part is crawling the web.
Yeah crawling the web is the web is definitely the hard bit
I wonder if this is ripe for disruption. Any value in a startup that sells a web index?
That’s weird as hell I’d like to see a follow up on that. What could be the reason?
We would like to know, but it seems a algorithmic decision… I’ll update you if it is resolved. Meanwhile we would like to get this news so that Bing or DuckDuckGo notices it… If someone has Reddit (I’m shadowbanned) could please post it there too (maybe on DuckDuckGo’s subreddit)?
On the DDG’s subereddit, they’ll call you a Putin Russian bot if you question the holiness of DDG. I advise against it.
It’s definitely time for Searx MetaSearch or projects like https://yacy.net/
Definitely is… The only thing that keeps me going back to DDG is bangs, would love to see this implemented in Searx instances 🙄
SeaarXNG already has that
https://searx.ebnar.xyz/info/en/search-syntax
Great, Thanks! Will try it then 😁 It even supports DDG’s ones!
not really, they just have a few that look similar to DDG’s. for example, the link above shows
!wpas a Wikipedia bang, and while it works, DDG’s!wdoesn’t.My source was this paragraph, I don’t know if they are all from DDG, but I tried and some are the same:
What’s going on with Duckduckgo? They have been doing a lot of really questionable stuff lately.
True… It already had some issues, but since the pro-Russia news de-ranking it’s starting to implement more and more manipulation to the results, it’s starting to go in Google’s direction in terms of bubbling, the thing (I think) they were against… I don’t know if it’s just Bing’s fault, but I hope they distance themselves as soon as possible by using their own crawler or more crawlers (which they claim they do, but it’s hard to believe at this point).