Techdirt keeps being removed from Bing and DuckDuckGo

[bilateralrope]

Techdirt Has Again Been Removed From Bing And (Mostly) DuckDuckGo

from the not-this-again dept
Wed, Aug 16th 2023 09:31am - Mike Masnick

Welp, here we go again. Last month I wrote about how Techdirt had been deleted from both Bing and DuckDuckGo. Over on the discussion at HackerNews, DDG’s CEO and founder, Gabriel Weinberg, jumped in to the conversation to note that this wasn’t intentional (which we never suspected it was). The resulting conversation on HackerNews is actually pretty interesting, as it appears there was some level of misunderstanding among many users about how much DuckDuckGo relies on Bing for its underlying web search.

Either way, a few hours later DuckDuckGo added back… a single link(!) to Techdirt’s front page, which we mentioned in an update. The next day, I heard from a couple people who said they had reached out to people at Microsoft, and I was told that this sometimes happen, and that the Bing team will eventually fix it (though it might happen faster if something gets public attention). Either way, about a day after I had written about Techdirt being erased, we were back in both Bing and DuckDuckGo and I considered it a one-off bug that had been fixed.

But… it’s back. I happened to just check on Bing and saw that we’re gone again (though now there’s also a big obnoxious box trying to get me to chat):

But, this time it’s weird, because it says there are 2,030 results (should be a lot more!) and then says “some results have been removed,” but it shows no results at all. If you click on the “2” at the bottom, it just takes you right back to this exact same view.

As for DDG, it still displays the one single link to our homepage and nothing else:

While that may be better than nothing, it’s pretty close to nothing. We do still get a fair bit of traffic from people searching for particular stories and now neither Bing nor DDG will send people to those stories. I did some searches on our most popular articles, like the Elon speedrun and the “you’re wrong about 230” and… all the results send people to other sites talking about our article.

Which isn’t really great.

Meanwhile, Google returns 94,900 results which is much closer to our total number of pages.

I’d really like for there to be real competition for Google out there in the search market, but it shouldn’t require me having to nag a trillion dollar company in Redmond every few weeks to put me back into their index.

I'm mainly posting this because people here have praised DuckDuckGo in the past. Here we have its search results being directly affected by whatever reason Microsoft has for delisting Techdirt and probably other sites.