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Tin foil hats? /?q=wikileak works, /?q=wikileaks returns an error. It's a politically sensitive topic involving the death of two press employees, possibly unet
by aphyr 17y ago
Tin foil hats?
/?q=wikileak works, /?q=wikileaks returns an error. It's a politically sensitive topic involving the death of two press employees, possibly unethical conduct by the military, and the government has attempted to suppress its release. What more do you want?
It seems pretty obvious to me that their search dept is trying to stop people from finding the story. Either that or their search is broken in a truly bad way--given that those words should stem to the same query, it's suggestive to say the least.
[edit] Looks like their article search is working again.
[edit] You know what? I'm sorry, that was premature. It is suggestive, but there are other plausible (and, to my mind, preferable) explanations. "wikileak" returns web results, whereas "wikileaks" returns article results. MSNBC may have a local index for their stories and a fallback to Bing. Perhaps it's a failure for a newly-emerging search term that only applies to the local index, which does not stem queries. Or perhaps they're doing extra processing for stories which failed, for any number of reasons.
- deleted 17y ago[deleted]
- conflux0 17y agoJust think about it this way. How many people using msnbc will actually make the query that will match the regex "/^wikileaks$/i". If they were truly trying to prevent people from accessing information about it they would have done a better regex. "It seems pretty obvious to me that their search dept is trying to stop people from finding the story. Either that or their search is broken in a truly bad way--given that those words should stem to the same query, it's suggestive to say the least." It really doesn't. I'm going to take a big guess here and say that the good people over at MSNBC are not that inept.
- buster 17y agoMy guess is: There is a list of searchterms which now looks like that: 1. Wikileaks 2. Obama 3. Sex 4. Reef 5. Oil . . . 32. wikileak There is probably a simple "ban this word" textbutton and the person in charge will naturally just ban wikileaks.
- aphyr 17y agoMy guess is they're not doing regexes. Someone in charge probably said "Stop people from searching for wikileaks" and they added that term to a hacked-together blocklist ASAP. Either that or they added it to a special list of queries that get extra processing (topic summary for the top of results, perhaps) which was crashing, and deployed without checking the results. Either way, it looks like their search is working now although the error persists, which suggests things over at MSNBC are much in flux. :)