Delisted by DuckDuckGo

While working on my blog as described in my recent post Blog internals, I came across the possibility to include a search engine into the blog directly. The Nikola documentation gives examples for DuckDuckGo and Google, and as I am skeptical of the data collection of Google, of course I tried DuckDuckGo first. The experiment returned no results whatsoever, so I was not sure if the integration into the website failed or if DuckDuckGo really did not return any results for my website.

Entering the search term site:lazy-evaluation.net into the search input field on the regular DuckDuckGo website showed that indeed there are no results whatsoever for my website. Ouch.

Trying the same search term with Google search reassured me that at least Google is still indexing my site.

As the other things regarding my blog were solved successfully, I returned to research the situation today.

Searching the web I found other blog posts also describing that (small) websites are no longer shown in DuckDuckGo searches. Studying those posts I found out that there is actually no way to submit an URL to the DuckDuckGo search engine, as it seems to be based solely on the results of these search engines:

• bing.com by Microsoft
• yandex.com

So all the articles that I found about missing results in DuckDuckGo actually suggest submitting your website to these search engines and then hope for the best that the results also turn up in DuckDuckGo. So let's see the results for searches on those services:

• site:lazy-evaluation.net on Yandex (returns ~260 entries)
• site:lazy-evaluation.net on Bing (returns 0 entries)

So the problem seems to be that Bing currently does not carry any references to my website. Ah, further research shows that DuckDuckGo "paused" its relationship with Yandex over the Ukrainian war at the beginning of March. So the fact that Yandex knows my site has probably become irrelevant for the DuckDuckGo search.

Pondering on this for a while, I checked other search engines claiming to be more privacy oriented and here is the total summary:

• ✔️ Google
• ✔️ Startpage
• ✔️ Yandex
• ❌ Bing
• ❌ DuckDuckGo
• ❌ Quant
• ❌ Ecosia

Maybe if I somehow get Bing to look at my site again, all the others will follow. Somehow I have the feeling that there are not many real players in the field of crawlers and if your site is not listed it is not straight-forward to find out to how to get it into the indexes again…