Well, folks, here’s someone who’s done the maths. The stats in the last post suggested as much but the sample was so small.
Maurice de Kunder at WorldWideWebSize.com has a definitive graph:
His methodology is explained at his site.
I’d say late May or early June was when I noticed Duck Duck Go queries on Lucire become largely useless. After a month of seeing no improvement, I began looking into alternatives.
No one knows why, since Bing’s not going to admit any of this. If I was Duck Duck Go, I’d be looking into alternatives smartly. Anyone want to get in touch with Alltheweb and Inktomi? Their indices in the early 2000s were bigger than this.
PS.: I tried to tell the SEO sub-Reddit, but no joy. It was immediately removed.
The original text:
Since June I noticed that our internal site:domain.com searches powered by Duck Duck Go were not returning many results any more. As DDG is powered by Bing, I checked it out there, and, sure enough, we dipped from thousands of entries to 50 (and even 10 at one point). This is a 25-year-old site with decent inbound links.
I did a lot of investigating which I wrote up on my own blog (which I won’t link here due to sub-Reddit rules) and came across this website, which seems to suggest Bing has tanked. The person who runs it is pretty clued up on statistics.
I have run a small sample of 10 sites through the search engines as well and these back up their findings.
At this rate, Bing is smaller than Inktomi and Alltheweb in the early 2000s. What strikes me as weird is that all the Bing licensees haven’t done anything, either, so Duck Duck Go, Ecosia, Qwant, and Onesearch have all shrunk, too. (Swisscows is still reasonably sized.)
Anyone else been through something similar in the last two months?
Why don’t they wish to know? I would have thought this was rather serious for an SEO group.
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Hi Jack,
Thanks for sharing this on Twitter. Something is wrong and they know about it. It seems to me that they are trying to avoid some kind of lawsuit by staying mum.
And why other SEOs are not talking about this is weird! I haven’t noticed any of the the big SEO bloggers talking about this.
Thank you for stopping by. It was when I was searching for news about this that I came across your Tweets. I think you are right: they are staying mum to avoid any legal claims. I find it curious Reddit would block me from telling people about this, too.
It makes me wonder if some of the big SEO bloggers even know what they’re talking about. This is pretty big news.
I will say that 8-9 out 10 of the SEO gals and guys are full of shit. They don’t know anything and just rewrites what Google already said on their search central blogs.
Super odd that all these guys and gals who are “gurus” haven’t written blogs or twitted about this.
It might even be higher than 8 to 9 out of 10—closer to 99 out of 100!
DuckDuckGo used to rely heavily on Yandex for site:domain.com search results. DDG cut their association with Yandex this year due to the War in Ukraine, so I wonder if that had something to do with it?
Still it is disturbing that Bing is letting their index shrink. Thanks for pointing that out.
Hi Brad, my pleasure, and thank you for your comment. I remember when Duck Duck Go pulled from Yandex as well. So I’d say you’re absolutely right. Do you remember what month they cut their ties?
I never used Bing before I started investigating what had happened to Duck Duck Go (which we used for internal searches). I just took a look now, and Yandex’s site: search is really good.