Techdirt has been deleted from Bing and DuckDuckGo

from the yeeted-from-search dept

A few months ago, Jack Yan pointed out to me that if they did a search for Techdirt on DuckDuckGo, it showed only one single link which was (bizarrely) to a random story from like eight years ago. There were literally no other results for Techdirt. I replicated it, but was travelling, and by the time I went back to write about it a few days later, everything seemed back to normal (in the interim there were a few days where it just found a couple hundred Techdirt posts). Jack wrote a short blog post on his own site about it.

This morning, however, someone alerted me to the fact that DuckDuckGo currently shows zero results for Techdirt. Not even some random old article. Zero. None. Zilch.

Of course, DDG is powered by Bing, so I went to check Bing, and sure enough there’s nothing there:

Bing appears to have deleted all links to Techdirt. Though at least it tells you that “some results have been removed.” Though it doesn’t say why.

At no point did anyone at Bing let us know that we’ve been removed from the search index. And, of course, BIng has every right to kick us out of their index for whatever reason they want. But it does seem odd.

So, hey, if you happen to know anyone at DuckDuckGo or on the Bing team, maybe ask them why they booted Techdirt? Apparently, I’m not the only person this has happened to.

Anyway, in the meantime, I figured I’d ask Bing’s space aged AI chat bot if it could tell me what happened. And… it actually provided a decent answer, first pointing to Jack Yan’s blog post:

And then coming up with a very speculative list of reasons why we got the boot:

I love that first one. Microsoft, a company with a $2.5 trillion market cap, “may not have enough resources” to crawl and index Techdirt? Cool. And the last one is of course possible: that Microsoft encountered “some legal or political pressure to remove or censor Techdirt.com, which is known for its critical and investigative reporting on various topics, such as technology, law, policy, and business,” but it would be nice if someone would just, you know, let me know?

I’m guessing it’s just a bug, but given that many Techdirt readers (for understandable reasons) prefer DDG to Google, it would be kinda nice if they could actually use it to get Techdirt results.

Now, of course, if this were a Trumpist nonsense peddler website, I’m sure there would be blaring headlines on Fox News and in the NY Post, and a whole set of hearings chaired by Jim Jordan about “censorship.” And we’d be hearing about it for years. That’s not going to happen with me. I’m sure the reality is much more mundane. I am guessing it’s just a glitch somewhere in the system.

But it would nice if it got fixed.

Updates: First off, I should note that it was Augusto Hermann who notified me this morning, and he’s now written his own blog post about it with some interesting additional info.

Second, after this story got popular on HackerNews, DuckDuckGo’s CEO chimed in to say this obviously wasn’t intentional and he was working on it. Later in the day, if you did the same search on DDG, it at least returned our front page… and nothing else. At least that’s some progress?

Bing, as of this moment late in the evening, still says it’s got nothing to show.

Filed Under: content moderation, search, search results



Companies: duckduckgo, microsoft, techdirt