Hat tip to Leighelse on this one, when she alerted me on Mastodon.
@DuckDuckGo @yegg Would either of you know, please, and is DDG in a position to help? Our search box is a DDG one (and has been for a long time) and seeing it come up empty constantly since March is disheartening. https://t.co/Wg8CoTq8cg
— Jack Yan 甄爵恩 (@jackyan) July 17, 2022
@yegg @duckduckgo Really concerned about this—no wonder our site: searches became so ineffective during this period. Please could you look at some alternatives to keep the index size up?
Twelve years of using DDG this August … https://t.co/02a7DhW7kd
— Jack Yan 甄爵恩 (@jackyan) July 24, 2022
Since I found that Bing had effectively collapsed in 2022, I notified Duck Duck Go and its CEO, Gabriel Weinberg. Nothing happened. But they have known about this since last year.
It took Techdirt once again to get the tech world responding, including Gabriel.
Normally vocal, Gabriel was silent when I pointed out that Lucire was down to 50-odd results in Duck Duck Go and Bing, instead of the thousands they once had. But now that Techdirt has dropped from one result in January to none at all, and Techdirt founder Mike Masnick has written his article about it, Gabriel has taken notice.
Not that Duck Duck Go can do much since they are yet another Bing proxy, so if Bing has collapsed, then things aren’t going to get fixed overnight. They certainly haven’t been fixed for over a year.
So there may be some truth that Microsoft, with a US$2·5 billion (long scale) market cap, ‘may not have enough resources,’ as Mike found when asking the Cat, I Farted chat bot. When the tech is buggy, when the databases are shot to hell—things I’ve seen with big tech sites—and when Microsoft has no culture for technological precision, then it won’t have enough resources. Bing will need reprogramming, and that would mean admitting that something was wrong. Or someone at Redmond needs to plug some servers back in.
I haven’t looked for a long time but site:lucire.com is still around the 50 mark at Duck Duck Go, with some seriously ancient articles (a few from the first half of the 2000s). Bing claims 1,760 and actually manages to show all 1,760, which must be a record. (Mojeek chose 1,000 as its limit.) I clicked on each page at Bing till I surpassed 1,000, and then headed to the URL to put 1,731 as the starting result number, taking it all the way to 1,760. That’s really impressive and it helps us a lot—though not so much Techdirt.
It’s not enough for me to switch back to anything Bing-based and Mojeek continues to be more reliable. When Mojeek says it has 4,047 results, I believe it, and I believe they will be accessible via our own search box.
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