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

Ask HN: “Tank man” image search blocked on Bing and DuckDuckGo

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 138 posts

Re: Ask HN: “Tank man” image search blocked on Bing and DuckDuckGo

#22

Post by kstrauser »

That’s very odd. In DDG, searching for “tank man” with “Safe search: moderate” returns 4 pictures of men in or next to tanks. Setting “Safe search: off” returns 0 pictures, not even the 4 utterly safe images from the “moderate” search.

Re: Ask HN: “Tank man” image search blocked on Bing and DuckDuckGo

#23

Post by kevincox »

tyingq wrote: post #12

I get the image if I'm more specific on DDG, via "tank man tiananmen square". Maybe just DDG needing more context than Google?

In general a less specific query should return more results. It seems like Bing is explicitly blocking that search.

Re: Ask HN: “Tank man” image search blocked on Bing and DuckDuckGo

#24

Post by sct202 »

Bing is usually allowed in China past the Great Firewall so it's not too surprising that it's censoring.

I think this is what people were afraid of happening with Googles project to reenter the Chinese search market if some of the censorship rules would leak back into the US by accident.

Re: Ask HN: “Tank man” image search blocked on Bing and DuckDuckGo

#25

Post by sireat »

I can confirm that in Eastern Europe Bing and DDG image bring nothing on 'tank man'.

However 'tank man' brings the relevant wikipedia as the top result in regular search.

So Bing and by extension DDG must have forgotten to turn off their CCP flag globally. At least that's my somewhat charitable interpretation. I am guessing DDG is piggy backing off Bing and therein lies the problem.

Re: Ask HN: “Tank man” image search blocked on Bing and DuckDuckGo

#27

Post by aj3 »

srmarm wrote: post #10

Does surprise me to be honest, of course the CCP no doubt does exert power over companies that want to work in China and this can influence behaviour outside the country too. But surprised to see this so blatant and really quite clumsily too as easy to find in other contexts without difficulty.

This is definitely clumsy. Compare with searching for "坦克人" which gives all sort of tanks just not the one you're looking for (Google shows the same image for both English and Chinese search term).

Re: Ask HN: “Tank man” image search blocked on Bing and DuckDuckGo

#28

Post by xvector »

Multicomp wrote: post #8

I confirm the symptoms happened for me as well. I used the !s bang to have startpage search it and startpage returned the image in the carousel and image results. I'm not certain I can continue to use duck duck go if it is going to give me results subjected to CCP censorship. I switched to it from Startpage as it had a less shady reputation than the latter, but Startpage hasn't messed with my actual searches like DDG…

Abhorrent behavior by Bing. Hopefully a provider issue on DDG’s end.
Post reply on HN