Searching for 'VK' shows only a single result on DuckduckGo. Why? • Hacker News Board

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

#181

Post by prophesi » Tue, Aug 25, 2020, 7:51 PM UTC

One thing that rocked me to the core and changed my stance on privacy recently is how child porn/abuse/trafficking/grooming/etc is simply swept under the rug by the Tech Giants. Safe Harbor laws have been used to push the problem elsewhere, and the issue is accruing exponentially. These images are absolutely everywhere; Facebook removes millions every year from their platform. And these are just the ones posted in plain sight.

No idea what the solution might be, or if it's even possible to be solved. It's a depressing topic, and you have to have really good opsec to do any journalism on the matter without landing in serious legal trouble.

https://samharris.org/podcasts/213-worst-epidemic/

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

#182

Post by goblin89 » Tue, Aug 25, 2020, 7:55 PM UTC

prophesi wrote: post #181

One thing that rocked me to the core and changed my stance on privacy recently is how child porn/abuse/trafficking/grooming/etc is simply swept under the rug by the Tech Giants. Safe Harbor laws have been used to push the problem elsewhere, and the issue is accruing exponentially. These images are absolutely everywhere; Facebook removes millions every year from their platform. And these are just the ones posted in pl…

If there was ever a discussion that should be heard by more people working in tech, that’s that right there.

DDG’s results are (perhaps decreasingly) heavily based on Bing, which as you will learn from that discussion had had significant issues with CP discovered (and reported to FBI) in its search results effortlessly—even while the same images were flagged by Microsoft’s own photo DNA algorithm.

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

#183

Post by jameshush » Tue, Aug 25, 2020, 7:56 PM UTC

retube wrote: post #109

jameshush wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Startpage.com is the one I use day to day (I work at the company that owns it). They use straight Google results through a proxy in their own data centers, it's anonymized before it hits anything

what kind of a deal do they have with Google? why would Google agree to this?

The deal is 15+ years old. To my knowledge it was made back when Google was still a very young company. There's a surprising amount of legacy contracts from Google/Bing/Yahoo floating around that power all of these search engines (Ecosia, DDG, etc).

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

#184

Post by toto444 » Tue, Aug 25, 2020, 8:02 PM UTC

goblin89 wrote: post #182

prophesi wrote: post #181

One thing that rocked me to the core and changed my stance on privacy recently is how child porn/abuse/trafficking/grooming/etc is simply swept under the rug by the Tech Giants. Safe Harbor laws have been used to push the problem elsewhere, and the issue is accruing exponentially. These images are absolutely everywhere; Facebook removes millions every year from their platform. And these are just the ones posted in pl…

If there was ever a discussion that should be heard by more people working in tech, that’s that right there. DDG’s results are (perhaps decreasingly) heavily based on Bing, which as you will learn from that discussion had had significant issues with CP discovered (and reported to FBI) in its search results effortlessly—even while the same images were flagged by Microsoft’s own photo DNA algorithm.

That is very concerning for the end user.

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

#185

Post by jtsiskin » Tue, Aug 25, 2020, 8:03 PM UTC

TheNorthman wrote: post #49

toto444 wrote: post #13

The images returned by the search look quite dodgy.

The images returned on DuckDuckGo are, in general, really dodgy. While debugging a web-server of mine, I recently found that various constant strings of file servers return similarly `dodgy' results, like for example "Index of /" [0]. [0]: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=%22Index+of+%2F%22&iax=images&ia=i...

What the hell?? What is the explanation for this?

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

#186

Post by jameshush » Tue, Aug 25, 2020, 8:04 PM UTC

chki wrote: post #144

retube wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

what kind of a deal do they have with Google? why would Google agree to this?

I'm also very interested in the details. According to their website they are paying Google to provide them with the results. But the revenue streams to startpage are not provided on their homepage (or at least I haven't found them yet). Edit: https://support.startpage.com/index.php?/Knowledgebase/Artic... This gives additional information. Apparently they are showing ads that are only related to the search terms. I g…

It's the same amount of ads. The hyper targeting Google does is incredibly profitable because of the scale they operate at. If you make the click through rate of an ad even 0.1% better over billions of searches it more than pays for the R&D of an engineering team.

Really the only way to compete against Google from a feature perspective is the privacy angle. You're sacrificing better click through rates to target a market that cares about privacy. Making something private requires a lot less engineering and product power than hyper optimizing tracking. By definition if you're not doing any tracking you don't need to employee people to set up tracking systems.

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

#187

Post by recuter » Tue, Aug 25, 2020, 8:13 PM UTC

Jenk wrote: post #125

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

I believe you but mostly I got pictures of tanks!

Is it picking up VK profile pictures? Sort of reminds me of myspace but with, err, Russian sensibilities. I also tried it with Bing and got literally the exact same results.

Google is definitely different, it shows mostly logos instead of photos.

I never used VK but I got the impression it is a real social network, for better or for worse. Should Bing drop them from its index? Now I'm morbidly curios what kind of weird crap searches of social networks from other cultures might dredge up. Like a Chinese VK.

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

#188

Post by [deleted] » Tue, Aug 25, 2020, 8:22 PM UTC

annoyingnoob wrote: post #93

DuckDuckGo isn't the best search engine. I really want it to be. I use it a by default and I use it often. However, especially when I'm searching for products/things to buy I end up on google search. DuckDuckGo is more like old school search, think Altavista - tons of results but not much useful.

[deleted]

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

#189

Post by pb7 » Tue, Aug 25, 2020, 8:22 PM UTC

bilkow wrote: post #170

pb7 wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>We also of course have more traditional links in the search results, which we also source from multiple partners, though most commonly from Bing (and none from Google). It's mostly just Bing.

Kind of, they have their own crawler (DuckDuckBot) and I'm not sure if that changed, but they used to source at least from Yahoo and Yandex. [0] Although yes, its usually Bing. [0] https://web.archive.org/web/20180203071252/https://duck.co/h...

That crawler is only used for Instant Answers for specific queries, not the standard 10 search result links. Yahoo has also been powered by Bing for a long time now as well.

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

#190

Post by gruez » Tue, Aug 25, 2020, 8:22 PM UTC

phaser wrote: post #122

bachmeier wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe it's because Google has very little data on me, but I find Google to be horrible in 2020. It's degraded considerably over the years to the point that I don't even try Google if DDG doesn't return anything useful. It's especially useless if I'm trying to buy something. If I search for a service business using my hometown, it'll return results from businesses everywhere other than my hometown.

I have the same experience. I started to notice about 6 months ago. It's happening a lot more often that i'm frustrated with results even when looking for trivial stuff. My last search frustration was: 'bitmitigate'. I had to make a benchmark of CDN services and their company site isn't on the first page like other products i'm searching for. I suspect it's because this company had business with alt-right imageboards…

>My last search frustration was: 'bitmitigate'. I had to make a benchmark of CDN services and their company site isn't on the first page like other products i'm searching for.

Seems to be working for me? SERP for me (not private browsing, but I'm not signed in and regularly clear cookies)

1. BitMitigate - CDN, WAF, DDoS Protection, Load Balancing, VPN 2. BitMitigate: What we know about 8chan's new web protection ...

3. BitMitigate (@bitmitigate) | Twitter

4. Epik reverses course, says BitMitigate will not support 8chan ...

5. BitMitigate becomes new security provider for 8chan ...