I’ve been using DuckDuckGo for years now, worked fine. Today it’s down – and now I’m learning that it runs on Bing? 😳

https://www.searchenginemap.com/

Why do I keep getting hits by a DuckDuckBot then?

www.uninformativ.de 20.191.45.212 - - [23/May/2024:03:00:48 +0200] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 200 659 "http://www.uninformativ.de/" "DuckDuckBot/1.1; (+http://duckduckgo.com/duckduckbot.html)"

@movq@www.uninformativ.de It’s always been powered by Bing right? 🤔

@prologic@twtxt.net I wasn’t aware of the extent. 😞 The whole thing is down now that Bing is down.

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Hah it’s down for me too! 😱

@prologic@twtxt.net Going to be interesting to find out what caused this. 🤔 Bing (like, the real bing.com) is still down for me as well.

DuckDuckGo’s help page doesn’t really make it clear that they rely on Bing that much:

https://duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/sources/

I guess this outage is a good thing. 😅 Lots of people now read up on this.

@movq@www.uninformativ.de I will take this as pretty clear:

“we have more traditional links and images in our search results too, which we largely source from Bing”

Emphasis mine. Of course, they could have spelled “links” as “results”. We all know that was done purposely. 😅

@movq@www.uninformativ.de @prologic@twtxt.net @bender@twtxt.net Oh, I neither noticed the DDG downtime nor was I aware of their partnership with Bing. O_o Oh dear! Never heard of most search engines in this linked graph.

@bender@twtxt.net In retrospect, it looks pretty obvious, yeah. 🫤 Or at least like a red flag.