Bing Search and Bing Custom Search APIs will be retired on 11th August 2025.
This is a very low-information announcement here but if this is taken to the extreme, it means that DuckDuckGo, Qwant, and many other so-called "alternative" search engines are going to either have to look for a new provider of results, or die.
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/bing/search-apis/Open linkView original on lemmy.world221
Comments50
Wonder what their reason for this is.
Something something AI
Something something money.
AI is just the latest hype train they're hopping in the hopes of making more money.
I use Opera on a Mac for all my Bing-based Edge-recommending needs.
https://www.spacebar.news/stop-using-opera-browser/
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/updates?id=492574
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/bing/apis/pricing
So all tiers are getting discontinued.. Unless there is an unlisted custom tier? It's hard to imagine duckducgo only processing 250 requests per second. But then maybe that is enough and didn't they make their own index anyways? Maybe that was to ease the load
Oh and they suggest using ai instead
DuckDuckGo, Startpage, Qwant, Ecosia... the last two have been working together to make their own index, hopefully it's going to be usable by then.
I hope so, I don't trust MAGA owned Brave.
Shiiit, I really don't want to go back to Google and all their sponsored/AI/tracking bullshit. Any other privacy-focused search engines out there that don't rely on this?
Kagi
American company though. Not supporting that
Yeah I'm far too used to getting my search for free to pay for it. I'll fuckin' use chatgpt before I pay a subscription fee for that shit, even if it is a substantially better option.
Look at you having standards.
That's what I said before I used it, you can try it free for 30 days
I looked at it briefly, the only free option I saw was 100 free searches, which will not last your average user anywhere near 30 days. Shit that might not last me 3 days depending on what I'm doing.
I think you overestimate the average user
3 searches a day? Most people probably clear that just satisfying idle curiosity while sitting on the damned toilet.
This is why tech communities suck.
Too many shills and useful idiots trying to viral market bullshit.
Answers still Kagi. You get use of the basic tiers for all the big ai services.
You ever wanted to blacklist Quora from search results? You can do that too.
Not unless you have some way to get me a free lifetime membership, cause I've already made it pretty clear I'm not paying for it, and it wouldn't even let me use it without making an account when I checked it out.
Yeah buddy, i have answers i don't like too. Sucks sometimes.
It's less that I'm unhappy with the answer and more that I'm confused about why you would give an answer that I've already said I won't use. But if screaming into the void is your jam then you do you.
I can tell you with confidence that I simply just won't.
What's the alternative? I guess you can use chatgpt or whatever as a sort of search engine? shrug
people who use LLMs as search engine make me go 😨
my colleagues are doing it too, and I just want to yell at them that LLMs have no idea about reality, they will confidently tell you to eat glue
I admit I haven't tried it myself, but I've heard it's a thing, apparently? shrug But I've noticed in my other uses that they're a lot better about citing sources for their claims now, so I guess you could just go 'Hey what's the capital of Vermont?', ignore its answer, then click on the source link below it, and voila: search engine?
My point was more: is this just the way things are going to go, we're going to get funneled into using AI for everything whether we want to or not?
If you tell the o3 reasoning model to just search the web and give you the top results instead of answering your query it can actually be really useful for obscure queries. I was able to find specific spec sheets for my model of monitor when a google search would only produce the specs for basically any other model the manufacturer made. Even with the model number in quotes
At the end of the day, it’s still an agent searching the web like a person, and its results are only good if search is decent.
searx, because it queries multiple engines that are accessible, and perhaps google frontends (whoogle, libre y, and that new mullvad thing).
but for the past years I was exclusively using duckduckgo and it would be very said if it would go away :( I started recommending it to others too
Yeah I've been using duckduckgo for a few years now and loving it, I really hope it doesn't go away. Still waiting to hear from those guys about how this affects them.
Try using Startpage.
That anonymizes Google results. It's Google, all the way down.
You think Microsoft gives you privacy?
They make billions on targeted ad revenue.
No, I use duckduckgo which is powered by Bing's API. Hence why I said other privacy-focused search engine.
Mullvad Leta is at least google minus the tracking.
Is that something built into the browser? i dropped Brave when I heard Google was forcing the adblock-gimping shit in Manifest V3 into Chomium. Also I was never entirely keen on their crypto-hawking bullshit.
Thurott's article on this implies that "big customers like DDG will be unaffected". Though he also says information is scarce.
So..... let's see what we can work with→
I have no clue TBH, but there needs to be a community-funded initiative to have a (De)Centralized repository of search-indices
Swisscows I don't believe has an index, Mojeek does.
I've heard that Swisscows does, although you won't find any 18+ stuff.
Bing? People use Bing?
If you use DuckDuckGo, you're essentially using Bing.
I did not know this. I find duckduckgo to be more useful than Google most times now. It's crazy how bad Google has become.
Qwant is also good. And it's building their own index together with Ecosia.
qwant is region locked
(some) alternative search engines use Bing because building an index is hard and the only project I know of doing this work from base is Mojeek: https://www.mojeek.com/
brave search, ecosia and qwant are all in various stages of having their own index
Brave bought their index. The other two did a PR announcement that they are gonna build one, you seen much else? Point very much still stands.
You don't? It is by far the best search engine for porn in existence, especially Bing Video.
This is true. Omg. I forgot! I haven't searched for porn in so long! I just to live shows now.