I use duck duck go. Recently someone showed me their screen where they were using google to do a search. I was absolutely aghast. The last time I used google when you searched for something you saw a simple text list of sites (which is how DDG still works). Instead the google results were… a disaster. You had to scroll through some much garbage before finding actual search results - a list of sites. It was like google was saying, “here, look at all this trash instead of clicking a link and going to a different site”. When did google become so bad?
Yes? Offering ad space (and placing affiliate links) is how they make money.
Difference to Google is how they position themselves in regards to privacy, and that Google actually built a search engine. Both make their money by providing ad space.
Bing still refuses to index one of my pages, telling me to follow their rules. They won't tell me what rule I'm in violation of, though, and I can't tell that I'm in violation of any of them.
And this is educational content, text only, no ads or popups, no SEO hacking. Bing's analysis tool told me only that I was missing the "lang" attribute from my HTML tag. So I added it, but of course that wasn't the issue.
I reached out to them, and they replied saying that the page didn't meet the requirements for listing, but didn't elaborate.
It certainly makes me wonder what content their broken algorithm is missing.
And it sucks because it means DDG is missing that content, too.
No. It’s Bing in the same way that Uber is Elastic Search. It’s built on Bing and other tools and adds, tweaks, adjusts, etc. Calling DDG a Bing proxy is somewhere between misleading and dishonest.
Whoogle is best in class, but doesn't provide much benefit unless combined with a rotating VPN. It also doesn't solve the "GBY" problem, where the majority of search engines rely on Google/Bing/Yandex's indices instead of using their own.
This is especially dangerous because it propagates an illusion that there's dozens of engines to choose from. The reality is these three companies control more and more of humanity's ingress to information, censoring what they see fit for political/financial gain.
Funny, I find them to be identical to Google's results localized for Sweden. Are you possibly using Google Search logged in or saving cookies between closing tabs (i.e. not using Cookie AutoDelete)?
I do too. However, I am responsible for a couple of sites that Bing absolutely refuses to even index. Google has no issues with them, not for 10 years running. Those sites are effectively invisible in Bing and therefore DuckDuckGo. I’m not talking about low ranking, the entire domain is ignored.
My own personal website for example is not even listed in the search engine I use. Microsoft support see the issue but have no explanation and escalate and quote “quality requirements” for weeks now. A human review yielded positive results regarding quality. Meanwhile, I see lots of SEO spam on DDG when searching for generic technical terms.
Sure. A very simple one would be https://ipbl.herrbischoff.com, a public blocklist page referencing a resource used by a couple dozen users. The HTML doesn't get a lot simpler than that and is entirely valid markup. It's (unsurprisingly) low ranked in Google but it's there.
Not so in Bing, it's simply not there. The page exists since March 2021. Bing Webmaster Tools reads "Discovered but not crawled. URL cannot appear on Bing", giving no further reason. Also: "Last crawl attempted 01 Feb 2022 at 19:35", which means that Bing did not bother to retry for months, despite me submitting it manually on a regular basis. Clicking the "Live URL" tab results in entirely green checkmarks along with "URL can be indexed by Bing".
Another example would be my personal site: https://herrbischoff.com. Same issue. That one is listed on Google for more than 10 years.
This is fascinating, thanks. Have you experimented on allowing the bing ad bot that you have blocked? If they have some kind of retaliatory non-crawling?
Interesting theory. But the IPBL doesn’t even have a robots.txt and a different, larger site from a German celebrity I host does have the same directives and is indexed, although incompletely.
My working theory is that Bing’s selection algorithm is biased towards large and already popular sites. In the server logs, I don’t see Bing even attempting to crawl the sites I mentioned, except requesting robots.txt and the root page. Bing appears to be excruciatingly slow to update anything but high traffic sites.
Again, Microsoft Support was unable to explain this behavior even after manual, human review found everything to be in order.
I tried deleting robots.txt entirely and got only Chinese crawlers and SEO bots, but still no Bing crawl. All organic traffic comes from blogs linking directly and Google.
Bing constantly prioritizes the content to be indexed that will drive highest users satisfaction. Please follow Bing Webmaster Guidelines to better understand criteria for most valuable content.
Honestly that is probably safer. Having a typo in the url could Easley give you a phishing link. However, I also have gotten fishing adds when looking websites up so it’s not cut and dry at all.
For a good while if one searched for a (Dutch) gov institution or business google shows you the (free to call) phone number as a clickable link but the anchor has a different link to a paid per minute redirecting service. I know plenty of people who found the weird 15-50 euro entry on their bill.
Oh no, it's not. Google's ads have been used to do phishing a lot. And - at least a few years ago, it was extremely difficult to report such ads.
Perhaps it has improved recently, but it used to be a plague in crypto - people getting ads for phishing sites instead of legitimate ones, losing money, and Google being unresponsive to reports.
Honestly I think while this seems absurd if you're relatively knowledgeable about the internet, it's really not something that should be surprising or even particularly shameful? Like, why wouldn't they if it works, is easier to remember, and makes sense to them?
The reasons this is actually potentially bad are pretty deep in the internet wonk weeds, where you get into questions of gatekeepers and provinance of information and it shouldn't be surprising most people don't care about those things: those of us who do have failed to provide them with better tools.
On some level it's a little like saying "my dad sent me an email and he didn't use pgp! Can you believe it!??"
I know where DDG gets the results from, but in all the years using it, it has never failed to find what I am looking for. Or, I’ve never needed to check google because DDG didn’t find what I was looking for.
i have a guy in digital marketing tell me that his friend does SEO and he does wonders with obscure keywords and shit. that friend is a freelancer and earns a good payday.
When you want to insert your brand in every fucking imaginative keyword as opposed to people "searching for something",
why does internet advertising revolve around everyone assuming every person googling something "WANTS TO BUY SOMETHING"?
If every heavily SEO’d result was produced by a company that produced a directly relevant product, I don’t think we’d be as disappointed with the content.
The truely garbage content is produced as cheaply as possible (scraped, generated from a data source or generated via “ai”) to capture advertising revenue, often via sub prime advertising networks (or a number of middleman networks).
But to your point, not everyone wants to buy something, and not everyone needs to.
Much of the content out there is simply trying to capture your attention and make you available to some of the worst advertising and ad networks (read scams, lead gen, fake buttons, affiliate crap).
> why does internet advertising revolve around everyone assuming every person googling something "WANTS TO BUY SOMETHING"?
Rather I think it’s because everyone who buys ads has something to sell.
Search ads are “direct action”. You click a link to do something. Ads on eg. TV are more about “brand memory” - reminding you they exist. When you watch tv you’re passively taking in information, but when you’re searching you’re actively trying to click something already. It’s a better fit behaviorally.
