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My only issue with DDG (which doesn’t stop me using it) is if you turn off safe search (eg to prevent false positive blocks for something you want to find) holy

My only issue with DDG (which doesn’t stop me using it) is if you turn off safe search (eg to prevent false positive blocks for something you want to find) holy shit does a lot of porn show up - for completely non-sexual terms. I’m a big boy, I’m not offended by most of it (the frequency of bizarre Simpson’s porn is a little weird) but it’s somewhat weird the way it appears. I searched for “power Mac case door”, all fine (with safe search off), as you’d expect. Change “type” to gif, expecting to see images of the hinged door on the g3/g4 series... oh wow that’s a lot of porn. And lots of other weird unrelated stuff.

marcosdumay 8y ago
Do you find false positives after turning the filter off?
- stephenr 8y ago
  In the example search the first two “pages” of image results (with the adult filter off) have no actual matches for what I wanted - two contain laptops I think.
hrktb 8y ago
> “power Mac case door” I have the same results for animated gifs with safe search off, but I think it’s more because of the presence of “power” or “mac” in so many of these gifs or related pages, compared to the number of gifs of computer related stuff. Put it another way, I think these are legit results, and not false positives or usurping the search terms.
- creato 8y ago
  This is probably why people tend to think google search sucks. It's probably true that most search terms are not going to give you want you want to see. Google disregards the precise terms because they aren't useful to search for, and instead tries to understand the intent of your search. For nerds, this makes google search suck, because they still construct search queries they way they did in 2000 (that's me too). For most people, it makes google search magically good compared to what they would get from a more "precise" search engine.
andrewprock 8y ago
It seems that "gif" is bound strongly to "animated gif" which is bound more strongly to porn than other image types, possibly due to Tubmlr. If you just click the image tab, things look fine. FWIW, when I search for "power Mac case door" on Google, I only get crap above the fold. I have to scroll before I get to the results, scrolling one page only gets me to the first two results.

marcosdumay 8y ago

Do you find false positives after turning the filter off?

stephenr 8y ago
In the example search the first two “pages” of image results (with the adult filter off) have no actual matches for what I wanted - two contain laptops I think.

hrktb 8y ago

> “power Mac case door” I have the same results for animated gifs with safe search off, but I think it’s more because of the presence of “power” or “mac” in so many of these gifs or related pages, compared to the number of gifs of computer related stuff. Put it another way, I think these are legit results, and not false positives or usurping the search terms.

creato 8y ago
This is probably why people tend to think google search sucks. It's probably true that most search terms are not going to give you want you want to see. Google disregards the precise terms because they aren't useful to search for, and instead tries to understand the intent of your search. For nerds, this makes google search suck, because they still construct search queries they way they did in 2000 (that's me too). For most people, it makes google search magically good compared to what they would get from a more "precise" search engine.

andrewprock 8y ago

It seems that "gif" is bound strongly to "animated gif" which is bound more strongly to porn than other image types, possibly due to Tubmlr. If you just click the image tab, things look fine. FWIW, when I search for "power Mac case door" on Google, I only get crap above the fold. I have to scroll before I get to the results, scrolling one page only gets me to the first two results.