Yeah idk why someone would type in the full URL of a site and not just the term they're looking for in a search engine...what a dumb way to test that on their part.

The point isn't that you can't reach the website by typing in the search term, the point is that they've deindexed the site. If you search for youtube-dl, neither youtube-dl.org nor yt-dl.org come up in the results, as far as I can see.

You can still access it from the results via other sites, like github and wikipedia (which even makes the real website pop up in the info square, funnily enough), but the search results themselves do not contain any links to the main website.

Absolutely! Why on earth would you test a dumb way of doing things on a user-facing service?! slams hand on desk Irrelevant!

The article doesn't explain it well, but if you search for just `youtube-dl` (without the "site" prefix), the main youtube-dl.org site is still not present in the search results.

What if I want to search what sites have mentioned those urls?

That's still the wrong syntax.

They don't rely solely on Bing. If a popular site doesn't appear, it's definitely a conscious decision on their part.

... or the domain list comes from Bing and they additionally feed some of that to their own crawler or...

This seems like an oversimplification of things you don't know.

Not for actual search IIRC. Last time I checked, they only used their own index and crawlers for the "smart search" and instant answers. Almost all of their search results are still sourced from Bing.

That's pretty easy to check for yourself, usually whenever something does not show up on Bing it won't on DDG either. A good example of that was when the "tank man" picture disappeared from Bing and the exact same thing happened on DDG.

Yandex was also previously used for search, largely of Russian sites.

That relationship has reportedly been "paused":

https://www.protocol.com/bulletins/duckduckgo-yandex-ukraine