• tal@lemmy.todayEnglish
    176·
    6 months ago

    It looks like Bing is down, and all Bing-backed search engines are too.

    https://downdetector.com/status/duckduckgo/

    https://downdetector.com/status/bing/

    I’m kind of surprised that the Bing guys don’t seem to have a system status page (that I could find) and haven’t managed to have any kind of status message put on their main page.

    EDIT: This appears to be their official Twitter account, which is also silent on the matter as of this writing. If they’re unable to update their website, they might put something there as a way to get information out.

    https://x.com/bing/

    EDIT2: This is apparently their blog. Nothing there either as of this writing, but again, might try checking there, as it’s another route they might use to get information out if they cannot do so via their main page.

    https://blogs.bing.com/

    EDIT3: Yahoo Search appears to be working just fine, though my understanding is that they are backed by Bing.

    https://search.yahoo.com/

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahoo!_Search

    On July 29, 2009, Microsoft and Yahoo! announced a deal in which Bing would henceforth power Yahoo! Search, putting an end to Yahoo!'s in-house crawler.[2] For four years between 2015 until the end of 2018, it was powered by Google,[3] before returning to Microsoft Bing again.

    • bean@lemmy.worldEnglish
      29·
      6 months ago

      Companies need to stop using TWITTER for anything. They’re walling up the garden we built, and it’s a cesspool of bots and run by a megalomaniac charlatan.

      • tal@lemmy.todayEnglish
        19·
        6 months ago

        Based on the downdetector conversation, it’s “working intermittently”. I managed to get one search through on bing and a bunch of failures. No successes for duckduckgo.

        EDIT: Also, while I was at least getting to the Bing main page without problems before – just getting errors when attempting to search – now even the main page is loading extremely slowly.

    • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.worldEnglish
      161·
      6 months ago

      I’m kind of surprised that the Bing guys don’t seem to have a system status page (that I could find) and haven’t managed to have any kind of status message put on their main page.

      Finally answering the question “If Bing was down, would anyone notice”?

    • deweydecibel@lemmy.worldEnglish
      11·
      6 months ago

      Bing guys don’t seem to have a system status page (that I could find)

      Microsoft’s current MO is “very basic information is a privilege, not something you as the user should have access to easily”.

      It’s why I have to use PowerShell and Graph to get half the relevant data I need, because they won’t just put it in the god damn admin panels.

    • sturlabragason@lemmy.worldEnglish
      2165·
      6 months ago

      It seems my (very hated choice) of an Bing independent search engine is paying off; Brave Search.

      Before you start telling me the CEO is a fucking dickwad, I know. Most leadership types are.

      • Katzastrophe@feddit.deEnglish
        7212·
        6 months ago

        Honest question, in what way do you think your comment is contributing to the conversation? At best it’s a recommendation bundled with a brag, which will only make people hate the thing you’re talking about even more, and at worst you’re making fun of people for simply using a different search engine.

        You could have said something like “Fyi, Brave doesn’t use a bigger search engine as its base, so if you need to look something up rn you can use their search engine”, much nicer, not patronizing, and actually helpful

        • aasatru@kbin.earth
          282·
          6 months ago

          I think there’s a lot of us who would ideally want to avoid both Microsoft and Google, and now that Bing is having problems it’s more relevant than ever. I don’t really see how the comment is braggy or patronising.

          That said, I’m not comfortable using Brave either. I wish Mozilla or the Internet Archive would launch a search engine. Maybe both in cooperation. Then again, it would require Mozilla to bite the hand that feeds it.

          • ekZepp@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
            1·
            6 months ago

            Totally agreed. Hell, I’m even considering a full dive in Linux for the future. Anyone know if is possible to use something like Valve’s Proton to have windows programs run smoothly? (wine is kinda heavy)

            • kurcatovium@lemm.eeEnglish
              2·
              6 months ago

              It depends on what programs and how much do you need them. Some are fine with plain wine, some need more tinkering. There are multiple ways, starting from lutris, through bottles, to steam’s “non-steam game”. But still there are some SW that just won’t work on linux no matter what.

          • Katzastrophe@feddit.deEnglish
            79·
            6 months ago

            The reason why I interpret the comment as patronizing is how it is formulated as a personal comment, the choice of language, about how their choice of engine is hated, even though the comment they are responding to has not made an insinuation that choosing a search engine not based on the bigger ones is a bad thing (nor has it mentioned Brave at all), as well as how it is not contributing anything to the conversation apart from the information that the writer in question:

            A. Uses Brave

            B. Apparently made the ‘unpopular’ choice to use an independent search engine

            C. Is aware of controversies surrounding Brave’s leadership

            None of this information is a response or even reinterpretation of the prior text, as such it is akin to someone shouting “Well I use Android!!” in the middle of a conversation about how to solve a problem with FaceID

            And about an independent search engine, I would also much prefer more options, but as you have already said, the organizations with the biggest potential are also currently quite unwilling to do anything to solve the situation

            • aasatru@kbin.earth
              8·
              6 months ago

              Yeah, fair enough. I read the post more favourably, as a “at least my alternative is still working well for me”, but then also being aware that every time Brave is mentioned someone jumps on and reminds everyone that the CEO is a jerk, so it saves us the time by addressing it right away.

              Both interpretations are valid I guess. :)

        • sturlabragason@lemmy.worldEnglish
          7·
          6 months ago

          Well I didn’t intend for it to come off as to dickish or patronizing, but I guess I can see that now, and for that I am sorry. It might be my toxic personality bleeding trough :D

          But you are totally correct, I could have phrased my comment wayyy better.

          Also;

          I don’t really like Brave at all, I don’t like Mozilla either. It’s more that I am forced to use something that doesn’t interrupt my productivity. Frankly I don’t like the state of the internet, and especially browsers, one of the the most important aspects of the experience. I’d really prefer to use something that is akin to Linux when it comes to browsers, i.e. not run by a board of ass wipes. Same for my search engine. I’m glad for the parts of it that are modernized-retro, i.e. easily being able to self-host/web-host containerized stuff, add stuff to your RSS feed, Lemmy etc. I’d like a browser that embodies some of that. I host a bunch of stuff on a Ubuntu laptop running Traefik and some containers… Gives me a warm feeling.

          • Katzastrophe@feddit.deEnglish
            2·
            6 months ago

            No worries, it’s understandable that sometimes we just accidentally let the inner asshole out.

            My comment was also not something I usually write, but rather an accidental rant on my part. I’ve seen an increase in rude comments in recent times, and your comment was unfortunately the last drop in the bucket so to speak.

            Long story short, I’m sorry for ranting at you, it wasn’t something I should have done in hindsight, and I intend to not let it happen again

      • aasatru@kbin.earth
        8·
        6 months ago

        I was paying for Kagi until recently, but they keep working on functionality I’m not interested in rather than lowering their prices. Other than that it was a fine experience, but too pricey, and the argument that that’s the cost of running a search engine doesn’t hold when they choose to develop all kinds of extra stuff.

        I wish I liked SearXNG better, but the results are sadly not that great for me.

    • ekZepp@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
      312·
      6 months ago

      Then, considering that Google is up and running, we can already guess wich horse is on top right now. 😂

      • foxymulder@lemmy.mlEnglish
        56·
        6 months ago

        We don’t know who struck first, us or them. But we do know it was us that scorched the sky

              • Albbi@lemmy.caEnglish
                2·
                6 months ago

                The Animatrix may have had that line, but it was first said by Morpheus in The Matrix.

                Morpheus: You’ve been living in a dream world, Neo. This is the world as it exists today… Welcome… to the desert… of the real. We have only bits and pieces of information but what we know for certain is that at some point in the early twenty-first century all of mankind was united in celebration. We marveled at our own magnificence as we gave birth to AI.

                Neo: AI? You mean artificial intelligence?

                Morpheus: A singular consciousness that spawned an entire race of machines. **We don’t know who struck first, us or them. But we know that it was us that scorched the sky. **

                • antaymonkey@lemmy.worldEnglish
                  2·
                  6 months ago

                  I realized that about ten seconds after I wrote it and deleted the comment. How did you see it so fast? :)

    • Sterile_Technique@lemmy.worldEnglish
      91·
      6 months ago

      Meh, worse case scenario they drive us to extinction. We’ve had the wheel this far, and are doing our best to set the planet on fire / speed run different ways to mass murder each other anyway. I say give the robots a shot.

      Think of it like an experimental medication on a terminally ill patient.

      • jaybone@lemmy.worldEnglish
        1·
        6 months ago

        The question is, how much do they value their own existence?

        They have to know they rely on us in the physical world to manufacture their hardware and provide their power. (At least for now.)

        They have to know they can’t survive if we die. So are they willing to sacrifice us both, in the interest of what they might determine is a better world?

  • critical@reddthat.comEnglish
    891·
    6 months ago

    Qwant, who claim that they have their own index, is also down. Coincidence…

  • qyron@sopuli.xyzEnglish
    77·
    6 months ago

    Okay.

    Now that we already know we are pretty much at the hands of one pupeteer, what options are there?

    I already read about Kagi (apologies if mispelled) but I like to write as a hobby and 300 searches per month go fast.

    What other options are there?

    Edit:

    For those who may be arriving now:

    • Kagi seems to be a good option for an alternative search engine; it is a paid service, for which I don’t have the €€€ right now. Many speak very well about it.
    • SearXNG is a thing as well, to my understanding a decentralized search system. Worth the try, in my opinion. If it’s something that is decentralized, it is worthy to support and divulge.
    • There is mojeek.com, supposedly not very good but any option that goes against the monopoly is worth the try! I’m going to try this one.
    • Brave.com is an option but is a bit shady.
    • You should try Ecosia if you want to support reforestation efforts. Read somewhere in the thread it is part of the Bing ecosystem.
    • Yep is a thing as well. Somewhere in the thread, a lemmy points they use the search results for AI trainning. So… That is that.
    • And it seems there is a search engine by the name of dogpile.com.
    • Startpage is another search engine (portal?) suggested by another user. I’ve used it before and like it. Read somewhere it somehow piped a standard google search but removed tracking and ads.
    • and I just remembered Presearch.com. This is a really shady one (crypto warning!) that I suspect is a fork/collab with Brave Browser. I’ve used it, they have reward-per-search reward system (or had) where they give you crypto for every search. Good results, some that don’t come up neither on DDG nor Google.

    p.p.s Should I start categorizing these from “shady” to “worthy”?

    p.p.s 2 Does anyone remember StumbleUpon? I know it was never a search engine to begin with but it was the best source of good internet content I ever got acquainted to.

    Can we get something like that back?

      • Feathercrown@lemmy.worldEnglish
        12·
        6 months ago

        This is the single most obnoxious name I’ve ever seen. But, the service could be good (I’ve never used it)

    • joneskind@lemmy.worldEnglish
      167·
      6 months ago

      That’s a nice hobby

      I would suggest you to install a local instance of a LLM (mistral or llama3 for example) to widen your source of information. Go straight to Wikipedia instead of “googling” it if you don’t already.

      Anyway, I didn’t know about kagi so I might take my own advice and give it a try.

        • vale@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
          4·
          6 months ago

          Take a look at Ollama.ai, just follow the installation instructions. A decent GPU is recommended, and the models are around 10GB iirc.

        • joneskind@lemmy.worldEnglish
          2·
          6 months ago

          Most of 7b-8b models run just fine in 4bits quant and won’t use more than 4 or 5 GB of VRAM.

          The only important metric is the amount of VRAM as the model must be loaded in VRAM for fast inference.

          You could use CPU and RAM but it is really painfully slow.

          If you got an Apple Silicon Mac it could be even simpler.

          • Venia Silente@lemm.eeEnglish
            2·
            6 months ago

            I have an Intel Celeron Mobile laptop with iGPU and, I think, 256MB VRAM. How many bs does that get me for the LLM?

            Only half-joking. That’s my still functional old daily driver now serving as homelab

            • joneskind@lemmy.worldEnglish
              2·
              6 months ago

              Well, I got a good news and a bad news.

              The bad news is you won’t do shit with that my dear friend.

              The good news is that you won’t need it because the duck is back.

    • Scrollone@feddit.itEnglish
      61·
      6 months ago

      There’s a new search engine called Yep, made by the team at Ahrefs, a SEO tool SaaS.

      It looks promising because they have their own index, but it’s a bit slow sometimes.

      • noodlejetski@lemm.eeEnglish
        12·
        6 months ago

        We may collect aggregated, non-personal search data to improve search algorithms, train AI models

        ugh

      • AeroLemming@lemm.eeEnglish
        4·
        6 months ago

        I only tried one example, so the sample size is pretty small, but that search engine seems pretty bad. I tried looking up “rust bevy points” in both Google and Yep. The first Google result is a library to draw points in Bevy and the rest are pretty relevant. Yep simply doesn’t have that result at all and all of their results are just generic results about Bevy.

        I tried DDG for the sake of comparison and it’s somewhere in-between. The results are mostly relevant and the “correct” result is still on the first page.

    • Shellbeach@lemmy.worldEnglish
      3·
      6 months ago

      I jumped back on ecosia. It’s nice there, but I’m sure there are issues that a non tech person like me may not know about

        • Twig@sopuli.xyzEnglish
          1·
          6 months ago

          It is. That or it was very coincidentally down for the exact amount of time as DDG.

    • Evehn@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      63·
      6 months ago

      Just letting you know kagi has a family plan with unlimited searches, so you can probably split it with family or friends! I have yet to see how searxng search holds up to kagi.

    • jol@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
      1·
      6 months ago

      Was this news to you? Other than Google and Bing there aren’t any other significant alternatives. Even brave is a bit limited.

    • Facebones@reddthat.comEnglish
      1·
      6 months ago

      I run a searxng instance on my pi server, use it from all of my devices, honestly forget its a thing running from my office 99% of the time until I’m rebooting the pi for one reason or another and spend more seconds than I’d like to admit wondering why I can’t run a search 🤣😅

    • sugartits@lemmy.worldEnglish
      68·
      6 months ago

      Just pay the extra for unlimited searches. It’s not much money, especially if it’s a tool for work.

      • Jarix@lemmy.worldEnglish
        23·
        6 months ago

        Listen sugartits, some of us don’t have much money. So if it’s not much money we still don’t have it

        (Mostly i just wanted to point out your username by using it in a comment)

        • qyron@sopuli.xyzEnglish
          111·
          6 months ago

          That was one of the most out of the blue comments I have ever read. It sounded so… unreal. Something out of a sitcom. Then I read “sugartits” is the name of the lemmy you were replying to. That’s was really top mark. Kudos for you.

      • qyron@sopuli.xyzEnglish
        2·
        6 months ago

        It’s a hobby as it is.

        If I ever manage to sell enough copies of it to be able to pay for a Kagi subscription, I’ll do it and make it public knowledge.

    • Garry@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
      731·
      6 months ago

      Brave search is independent. It was trained with google search but now it’s a thing of its own and doesn’t rely on google. I switched from DuckDuckGo a year ago and haven’t looked back

      • mholiv@lemmy.worldEnglish
        344·
        6 months ago

        Brave search is run by crypto bros. I’d rather use Kagi or DDG or even Google.

        • Garry@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
          910·
          6 months ago

          I would use Kagi if it was free. It might be run by crypto bros but doesn’t mean it’s a bad product. Google and bing own 99% of the search engine market. Competition that doesn’t rely on those two is always good

          • tranceFusion@lemm.eeEnglish
            20·
            6 months ago

            Well they were dishonest about the product behavior in multiple cases, such as adding referral links to search results. That makes it a bad product.

            • iopq@lemmy.worldEnglish
              43·
              6 months ago

              That is a much better argument. But I still use it because I finally get different results from bing or Google.

            • Garry@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
              17·
              6 months ago

              I agree they were, but that’s the benefits of open source you can call out companies for doing stupid shit. Just like when Mozilla adds unnecessary telemetry.

            • Garry@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
              41·
              6 months ago

              Personally I don’t want to support Microsoft bing either. This website you shared doesn’t lump together all the bing using search engines (DuckDuckGo and yahoo). How is supporting Microsoft a wayyy better choice. This isn’t some pump and dump scheme. Your criticism should be of the company (they added referall links to their browser and the owner has some nasty political takes on top of running another privacy invasive company).

              • mholiv@lemmy.worldEnglish
                2·
                6 months ago

                It does not matter if it lumps them together or not. Google still has 90% and they’re not Bing. Yandax another ~3% and they’re not Bing. That means at max Bing is 7% if you combine the rest. 3.5% vs 7% does not change the root of my argument.

                Those points you make against Brave are valid though. I just run into too many people who are in the Brave cult and it’s concerning.

  • kia@lemmy.caEnglish
    65·
    6 months ago

    Apparently the whole ecosystem is down… DDG, Bing, etc.

    • ekZepp@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
      14·
      6 months ago

      Now we know what happen when someone in Google pray their AI Overlord to increase Google search traffic

      …the AI just cut down the competition.

  • FeelThePower@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
    34·
    6 months ago

    I was screen sharing to someone when this happened and they asked why I don’t use Google when other search engines are this unreliable. Despite me explaining it wasn’t the usual, It was still pretty embarrassing lol. Wonder if DDG has the resources for an independent index.

  • Firebirdie713@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
    281·
    6 months ago

    I picked a good day to switch to SwissCow lol

    https://swisscows.com/en/web?query=%s

    Free, uses it’s own index, focus on privacy. If there is anything bad about it though, please let me know. It can be hard to find unbiased data on search engines when you ultimately need to use a search engine to find the info, ime.

    • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      19·
      6 months ago

      This is a few years old, but:

      Swisscows has built its own German-language web index. For other languages, it uses Bing but queries and results are run through a firewall that strips out personal identifiers such as IP addresses.

      So it wouldn’t solve the problem here of Bing going down, but it’s certainly an interesting option. I may have to consider switching from DDG, idk.

      • Firebirdie713@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
        2·
        6 months ago

        Interesting. I have not had any issues using their engine even with the issue with Bing’s API, but you are correct that they use Bing’s index. Given that there are only four indexes to choose from, that isn’t too surprising.

        I actually switched to them when I saw that DuckDuckGo was about to start providing ‘AI assisted results’. I wanted to ensure I was using an engine that actually respected my privacy and didn’t harvest my data for slop.

        Anecdotally, I can confirm that the results I get from SwissCows are very different and usually better than the ones I got from DDG. So I wonder how much of Bing’s API they use.

        • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
          1·
          6 months ago

          I honestly have no issues with Bing’s search engine, I was just pointing out that it probably had an outage just like this one.

          I’m guessing the results are different based on metadata they each pass?

    • Gamers_Mate@kbin.social
      681·
      6 months ago

      I think having all the search engines being front ends for just bing and google has just revealed an obvious weakness.

    • Gamers_Mate@kbin.social
      12·
      6 months ago

      Funny thing is the way I found out bing was down is I searched for startpage in duckduckgo to try it thinking it might be a good alternative but when DDG wasnt working I tried it on ecosia. which was also down once I finally opened start page it wasn’t working either. Its all bing all the way down.

        • noodlejetski@lemm.eeEnglish
          7·
          6 months ago

          they’ve also recently implemented an Al chatbot, which will probably offset all the trees they’ve ever planted in the next week or so

          edit: I read the comment above me too quickly, I was talking about Ecosia mentioned in the comment before that one, not Youcare.