Duck Duck Go serving a page after using the !lucire bang. The second result is a frameset that has not been linked to in over two decades, a sign of Bing being a Wayback Machine.
As some of you know, I used Duck Duck Go as my principal search engine between 2010 and 2022, for 11 years, 11 months. But when the Bing index tanked, Duck Duck Go (as basically a Bing skin) became useless.
The connections run a bit more deeply than being a search user. We had our own internal search for most of the 2000s. It was run by an outside company but they spidered our sites and we could deliver intra-search results. For Lucire, Duck Duck Go very kindly offered (after I got in touch with them) a !lucire search parameter for these internal searches. This was back in the day when Duck Duck Go had a Zoho forum and everyone would discuss grass roots’ methods of getting the search engine better known. I was among their top 10 (I think even top three) referrers.
When that company closed down, I wrote back to Duck Duck Go, and said that from that point (say around 2012?) Lucire’s search box would deliver Duck Duck Go results but with site:lucire.com. They were fine and the change was made almost immediately.
That experience was not mirrored in 2022 when I requested that, as Bing had tanked and Duck Duck Go was only capable of serving between 10 and 55 results for the entire site (down from thousands), we were switching to Mojeek for the internal search.
It is now 2025 and Duck Duck Go has still not changed it.
Granted, Bing has since recovered as far as Lucire is concerned, but it remains very poor when it comes to other organizations, such as, well, Microsoft. Both Mojeek and Google have larger indices.
So interesting that the usually vocal Duck Duck Go went quiet when Bing tanked, even when Techdirt was affected, and they’re this scared of a competitor with far less publicity and share of mind serving search results. Which can only mean they see Mojeek as a real threat. And rightly so, since Mojeek has its own crawler, its own database, and an older privacy policy about not tracking users. Duck Duck Go was incapable of creating its own search database despite all that money.
I’m always drawn to independents who achieve what conventional minds say cannot be done.
Weirdly, for my domain, Bing actually indexes it far better than Google does – which means even DuckDuckGo users will get better results than Google users (where usually people would think the opposite).
It was refreshing to see Qwant and Ecosia – two EU-based search engines – will be teaming up to make their own search index. I sure hope they don’t disappoint on that front; it’ll be great to have a fourth large scale index floating around other than Google, Bing and Mojeek (does Brave count as having it’s own index yet or is it largely still pulling from other APIs?)
Hi Coxy, that is really interesting, as I had been running tests for a bunch of domains (really the first that came to mind) for a couple of years, and Bing had been doing terribly. However, on a few domains in the last test in June 2024, Bing did indeed do better than Google. What surprised me regularly was how badly it did on microsoft.com!
That is indeed good news that Qwant and Ecosia will build their own index. I believe Brave’s does count, though at one point their site: searches were from Bing. I believe that’s stopped. Yep might have its own as well. Seirdy has kept track of them all—he regularly updates his 2021 blog post to reflect any changes.