- We have on the order of a million lines of search code at this point and have a lot of talented people working them. That code does a myriad of things across many indexes.
- As an example, mobile searches are the largest category of searches, and local searches are the largest category of searches within mobile. We don't get any local search module content from Bing.
- Similarly, on desktop, knowledge graph / Wikipedia-type answers come up the most and we don't get any of that module content from Bing either.
- Bing is our largest source of traditional web links, which have become less and less relevant/engaged with over time as more and more modules are in search results and put on top of traditional links (and people interact with things on top of the search results page about two orders of magnitude vs. things on the bottom).
- When Bing has dropped things out of the traditional web index, we have put them back, and we've been working with them so this happens less and less. In fact, there hasn't been hardly any reports of this in the past month or so, which is why I've asked for other examples in the comments.
As a long time DDG user I think it's cool you're personally engaged here. The disappointing part is it seems like TechDirt has had to resort to customer-service-via-social (Reddit/HN/Twitter) which sucks.
Once this particular issue is sorted out I'd would also be cool to see some sort of post-mortem report. Seeing why this sort of thing happens and a standard process for fixing it would be beneficial to all involved I think. Complex systems are complex and shit happens. But if this happened to a site far smaller than TechDirt (they're not even that big AFAIK) I don't think there would be any avenue to cure the situation for them.
It's great to see you on here answering/responding to all the unfounded rumours on here.
I'd be interested to know because it gets to the heart of the matter and why confusion seems prevalent. If we ignore the modules and local search, what differentiates DDG and Bing when returning bread and butter traditional web links?
- We have on the order of a million lines of search code at this point and have a lot of talented people working them. That code does a myriad of things across many indexes.
- As an example, mobile searches are the largest category of searches, and local searches are the largest category of searches within mobile. We don't get any local search module content from Bing.
- Similarly, on desktop, knowledge graph / Wikipedia-type answers come up the most and we don't get any of that module content from Bing either.
- Bing is our largest source of traditional web links, which have become less and less relevant/engaged with over time as more and more modules are in search results and put on top of traditional links (and people interact with things on top of the search results page about two orders of magnitude vs. things on the bottom).
- When Bing has dropped things out of the traditional web index, we have put them back, and we've been working with them so this happens less and less. In fact, there hasn't been hardly any reports of this in the past month or so, which is why I've asked for other examples in the comments.