Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Searching for 'VK' shows only a single result on DuckduckGo. Why?

duckduckgo.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

171–180 of 215 posts

Re: Searching for 'VK' shows only a single result on DuckduckGo. Why?

#171

Post by samatman »

DevKoala wrote: post #115

Google forgets so much, and has a tendency to bias results, while DuckDuckGo is so incompetent at times. Add the walled gardens that can’t be searched unless you are part of them, and we have a worst search experience today than over a decade ago. I am confident that the amount of data that needs to be indexed plays a huge factor too. It just isn’t as easy as it used to be.

All of those things, and don't forget the steady arms race: the contemporary Web is stunningly adversarial to good search results.

Ten years ago, when Google screwed up, you'd land on a really obvious linkfarm page with a bunch of SEO spam: it was literally just a collection of keywords repeated over and over.

Now, when $search-engine screws up, which it often does, you land on a plausible-looking page, with bad but not terrible English, that just... doesn't tell you anything worth knowing. I know the smell of them, and it can still take me a section or two of precious time to figure out what's going on.

There's often not that much link juice, either: as far as I can tell, the business model is purely to put an ad or two in front of my eyeballs.

Re: Searching for 'VK' shows only a single result on DuckduckGo. Why?

#172

Post by x86_64Ubuntu »

garmaine wrote: post #153
Jenk wrote: post #125

Clicking the images tab probably explains why. There are many pictures of very young girls in various states of undress.

What the hell? Serious wtf. Can anyone explain this? BTW, NSFW warning!

I'm unsure why this post doesn't have NSFW flag/tag/marker from the get-go.

Re: Searching for 'VK' shows only a single result on DuckduckGo. Why?

#173

Post by samatman »

s0l1dsnak3123 wrote: post #83
bhrgunatha wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Might be a partnership with Yandex to not show russian results outside Russia? Quite the opposite. My search results from DDG over the past year or so have been infested with Russian sites, articles and even twitter account titles of English language accounts, despite not living there and not having any preference for Russian in any browsers settings or regions and never issuing a single query in Russian.

"infested" is a little much, don't you think? I can sympathise with frustration on having results that don't match your language preferences, but "infested"? Come on.

I understand the discomfort, but people have been describing a page of bad search results as "infested" for a long time.

Perhaps it was intended as a slight against Russians, but I'd ask you to assume good faith.

Re: Searching for 'VK' shows only a single result on DuckduckGo. Why?

#174

Post by OJFord »

theandrewbailey wrote: post #23
ilovefood wrote: post #8

Well that's weird. Searching vkontakte gives a lot of results (in the realm of what you would expect). Maybe it's a command or something else is happening with that query?

I thought that "VK" was too short to register as a query, but other capitalized two letter combinations return many results.

Usually you get a load of acronym/file extension semi-spam sites for any nonsense string of 2-4ch, at least.

Re: Searching for 'VK' shows only a single result on DuckduckGo. Why?

#175

Post by nemetroid »

ffpip wrote: post #20

Manually changing region to Russia gives many more results. https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=VK&kl=ru-ru&ia=web Might be a partnership with Yandex to not show russian results outside Russia? Because they use Yandex in Russia. https://www.reddit.com/r/duckduckgo/comments/a7nl1v/duckduck...

Searching for ”vk” should return a lot of things beside the Russian social network. Vodka Kick, Vulkan, Voight-Kampff, Västerbottens-kuriren, etc. etc. I don’t think this is intentional.

Re: Searching for 'VK' shows only a single result on DuckduckGo. Why?

#176

Post by dredmorbius »

nefitty wrote: post #59
h4l0 wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let me introduce you to a site called Reddit.

I think you’re implying that Reddit’s search is subpar, which I agree, although it seems it has improved slightly, recently. When I want firsthand perspective on something I usually append “reddit” to my google searches instead of searching reddit itself, even if I have a reddit tab open already.

On relatively sparse, self-post (fow or no link) subreddits, Reddit search is fairly useful for searchin posts only.

Comments are not indexed.

At volume and with links, search breaks down from both insufficient context (esppecially with editorialised, sensationalised, or vague titles) and excess low-yield content.

Re: Searching for 'VK' shows only a single result on DuckduckGo. Why?

#177

Post by hayleox »

BMSmnqXAE4yfe1 wrote: post #164
Jenk wrote: post #125

Clicking the images tab probably explains why. There are many pictures of very young girls in various states of undress.

Maybe DDG analyzes what you are interested in, and shows results accordingly?

DuckDuckGo's entire shtick is that they don't track you. Unless you have safe search on, you'll get the same result if you try it yourself.

Re: Searching for 'VK' shows only a single result on DuckduckGo. Why?

#180

Post by vmception »

pjc50 wrote: post #150
stephenr wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not if you’re a republican apparently.

They're only against Communism. Russians with money are just fine, apparently. The logical conclusion of "money is speech" is that foreign intelligence agencies can buy as much speech as they like.

Protip: its not just Russians playing around with sentiment in other countries for their own gains, and it is extremely easy to deflect all attention towards Russia. It can be long time allies that you harbor the least feelings about.
Post reply on HN