• sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      0·
      10 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
        1·
        10 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.

  • tal@lemmy.todayEnglish
    0·
    10 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.

    • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.worldEnglish
      01·
      10 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”?