cross: https://lemmy.ml/post/233095
Article is in Italian.
Famous privacy blog Le Alternative (!lealternative@lemmy.ml here on Lemmy) was de-indexed from Bing and from all Bing-dependent search engines, including DuckDuckGo. At the moment it is impossible to search for their useful articles and the reason for this de-indexing is unknown. The owner of the blog is still trying to find out the reason for this removal.
Tried searching it using my searxng instance, and I can still find it (still indexed by duckduckgo, yahoo and Alexandria).
Don’t know if has been fixed, but I guess it’s an argument for using metasearch engines: get some redundancy, don’t rely on just one source.
Probably because this post is one year old ;)
Bing often removes websites from their index but this does seem very weird. I don’t know why Bing would remove a privacy blog from their search results but this also shows how so many search engines are dependent on Bing or Google for results. The only search engine which isn’t dependent on Bing or Google right now seems to be Mojeek and Metager (Searx is just a meta-search engine). Mojeek is probably the most promising but right now it’s results aren’t the best but the results have been getting better. But I do wish that DuckDuckGo indexed search results themselves so they don’t have to deal with Microsoft’s decisions (also being reliant on big tech to start with isn’t a good thing for a independent privacy-focused search engine.
I think writing a search engine on top of an existing index is not hard. The more difficult and expensive part is crawling the web.
Please check if this is once again Bing. DDG has brought onto itself a lot of bad light by censoring news outlets, but put the blame on correct entity. It makes all DDG criticism look like hoax.
