Bing is Down

[Ben]

This is interesting. I was trying a search on duckduckgo and kept getting "website down" errors (and still am). I just now saw on the news that Bing is down, and apparently several search engines, including DDG, rely on Bing, so several other search engines are down as well.

I don't know much about search engine backbones, but I always thought DDG and similar "independent" search engines were completely self-contained. I'm just curious about the privacy implications of a "privacy" search engine using Bing (or maybe Google too) as their backbone.

[WLJ]

Just came up for me

[cordex]

I always thought DDG and similar "independent" search engines were completely self-contained. I'm just curious about the privacy implications of a "privacy" search engine using Bing (or maybe Google too) as their backbone.

Crawling and indexing the internet is a major undertaking and if Duck Duck Go had to do it themselves they probably wouldn't have gotten off the ground.

An "independent" search engine still submits your query to one of the big guys, but doesn't provide them with tracking cookies or your IP address, which means that what you are searching doesn't get tied to you and your advertising profile in the same way that searching using the first party site would.

[BobR]

I just remember when Webcrawler came about and allowed searching by text.These kids these days don't know how easy they have it, just type something in the search bar and bam, 1.2 million choices! I think it was eventually bought by AOL.

bob