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Searching for 'VK' shows only a single result on DuckduckGo. Why?
- elvinn 6y agoIs anyone still even using VK?
- theandrewbailey 6y agoWhat were you expecting?
- bhupy 6y agoSomething more similar to the Google or Bing search results for "VK"?
- theandrewbailey 6y agoChange region to Russia. There are lots of results.
- monkpit 6y agoThere’s never been an article or post or anything written about VK ever?
- mgkimsal 6y agoperhaps other pages that link to VK or are about VK in some way?
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- graham_paul 6y agoit should show the website as well. Compare the results against Google's: https://www.google.com/search?sxsrf=ALeKk014TPUTX_G1C5HLUIyTG1Y1FQ-OZA%3A1598371258093&source=hp&ei=ujVFX4rmAdG8kwWajYWYDg&q=vk&oq=vk&gs_lcp=CgZwc3ktYWIQA1C5AVjBAmDoA2gAcAB4AIABAIgBAJIBAJgBAKABAaoBB2d3cy13aXo&sclient=psy-ab&ved=0ahUKEwiKq7f43LbrAhVR3qQKHZpGAeMQ4dUDCAg&uact=5 https://www.google.com/search?sxsrf=ALeKk014TPUTX_G1C5HLUIyT...
- tsukikage 6y agoCompare doing the same search in Google. Even a link to vk.com would seem like a relevant thing to include if nothing else?
- ISL 6y agoGoogle returns: "About 782,000,000 results (0.45 seconds) "
- PCChris 6y agoIf you actually click through Google's result pages, you will find that there are actually only about 87 results. Even if you "repeat the search with the omitted results included" Google returns only about 226 results. Google's estimated result count is routinely off by so much as to make it virtually useless.
- Scarblac 6y agoIn Dutch, "VK" is the abbreviated form of United Kingdom. There should be far more results than that.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- pheug 6y agoGoogle like all other web search engines never scan their whole index when searching, it's way too expensive. All sorts of tricks are used to aggressively prune matching results at every opportunity during retrieval until maybe a few hundred best scoring docs are left and that's what you're paging through. But yeah, estimated result count is still a big lie either way
- xVedun 6y agoI found that going to the last page showed a more realistic number for results. This would only be shown on that "last page" of results though. However, it does seem strange that there are only 447 results for a google search of "apple"[0] down from a whopping 4,070,000,000 results shown before that page. And that is with show omitted results. Seems like max result limiting for the 0.1% of users that want to look past page 10 of search results [0] https://www.google.com/search?q=apple&start=440&sa=N&filter=0&ved=2ahUKEwj3nObt3rbrAhWrc98KHXtxA684rgMQ8tMDegQIDBA_&biw=1792&bih=937 https://www.google.com/search?q=apple&start=440&sa=N&filter=...
- ffpip 6y agoIt is a popular site. Atleast vk.com?
- newacct583 6y agoOr the wikipedia page for the site? As others are pointing out, this is actually a popular site not just for russian content. Owing to the jurisdiction, it's actually a popular place for hosting various ripped/pirated PDFs.
- saagarjha 6y agohttps://www.google.com/search?q=vk https://www.google.com/search?q=vk
- mumblerino 6y agoAre you a bot? What a mindbogglingly-stupid question. Surely “vk” appears on more than 1 page on the web, so… show those pages? Like, y’know, a search engine. This feels worse than trying to explain a joke.
- ilovefood 6y agoWell 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?
- ilovefood 6y agoInterestingly, ВК (vk in cyrillic) gives also 1 result.
- mnx 6y agoA different one at that. But other 2-letter queries return normal sets of results.
- microcolonel 6y agoThe single result it gives is a link to VKontakte. Given that it's largely a walled garden, I think that's a reasonable result to give, with no other input.
- ffpip 6y agohttps://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=VK&kl=ru-ru&ia=web https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=VK&kl=ru-ru&ia=web Searching by putting region=Russia gives more results
- css 6y agoThese results are not in the language I have my browser set to, so maybe it is filtering based on language.
- toto444 6y agoThe images returned by the search look quite dodgy.
- ffpip 6y agoVK is the most popular social media site in and near Russia. It is like Facebook there. A lot of pirated content exists there. Mainly songs.
- tweaktastic 6y agoBut the image results are mostly little girls.
- ffpip 6y agoFuck. What have I gotten into now. It's all strange pics of little girls. I just looked at the image tab now. https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=VK https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=VK No strange meanings either.
- smt923 6y agoyeah there is some absolutely questionable stuff there, I wonder why searching for VK brings them all up, some of these seem like random direct-to-youtube uploads but there's so many of kids that it almost seems like someone's collection, but why does a search for VK return them all? seems like a strange coincidence that there'd be troubling image results and empty normal results
- djsumdog 6y agoMaybe a lot of people on VK post links to those videos and they get scraped up in a reverse index?
- TheNorthman 6y agoThe 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=images https://duckduckgo.com/?q=%22Index+of+%2F%22&iax=images&ia=i...
- 1f60c 6y agoA couple months ago, this was happening for every search. Maybe this is similar.
- ffpip 6y agoManually changing region to Russia gives many more results. https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=VK&kl=ru-ru&ia=web 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/duckduckgos_relationship_to_yandex/ec50ai7?context=3 https://www.reddit.com/r/duckduckgo/comments/a7nl1v/duckduck...
- slezyr 6y agoI don't think this is it. VK has an english version as well. I've seen it being used by the English-speaking people.
- ffpip 6y agoYes. It definitely has more than 100 million users. It might be a Yandex partnership to not show outside Russia
- bhrgunatha 6y ago> 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.
- s0l1dsnak3123 6y ago"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.
- vmception 6y agoRussia only bad. It's a generational thing.
- rjzzleep 6y agoI've been trying to use duckduckgo for almost a year, but I can't really justify it. I've even gotten used to just adding !g at the end of each search. It has terrible results for anything non english and pretty bad latency where in asia it seems. Does anyone have a recommendation for another search engine that does decently well in terms of privacy and also supports chinese results?
- grahamjpark 6y agoAnother search engine I recommend is Ecosia. They’re slightly better than average with privacy, and focused on the environment. I think they just use straight bing results so I’m not sure how well it handles Chinese searches.
- jameshush 6y agoStartpage.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
- retube 6y agowhat kind of a deal do they have with Google? why would Google agree to this?
- chki 6y agoI'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/Article/View/180/20/how-can-startpage-be-free-how-do-you-make-money 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 guess they are showing more ads than Google? Otherwise this wouldn't really make sense. Or maybe individualized advertisements in the search results aren't that much of a big money-maker for Google (!)
- Whitespace 6y agoQuoting it yields the expected result: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=%22vk%22&ia=web https://duckduckgo.com/?q=%22vk%22&ia=web Compare with Bing (where DDG gets its search results from) https://www.bing.com/search?q=vk https://www.bing.com/search?q=vk
- bilkow 6y agoNote that Bing is only one of their sources: https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/sources/ https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/so...
- pb7 6y ago>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.
- bilkow 6y agoKind 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/help/results/sources https://web.archive.org/web/20180203071252/https://duck.co/h...
- pb7 6y agoThat 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.
- croes 6y ago+vk has the same effect
- djsumdog 6y agowoah .. don't click on the images tab .. that's .. that's creepy as fuck.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- mr-ron 6y agoIve been using DDG as a default search for a while now. My conclusion is that the results are just NOT as good as Google's. I find myself using Google searches for time sensitive or mission critical searches, which totally defeats the purpose of a search engine. As an example, I was playing around with Phaser and found that DDG just does not surface the entire Phaser documentation or forums correctly, and had to switch my default browser search for when I was putting time there. I want to want to support DDG, but the lack of quality around searches makes it difficult.
- mostlysimilar 6y agoWhy not use DDG to find the correct site, and then use that site's built-in search for finding things within it? Better yet, if I already know I want a particular doc or site, I'll go directly to that site instead of hopping through a search engine first.
- h4l0 6y agoLet me introduce you to a site called Reddit.
- nefitty 6y agoI 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.
- dredmorbius 6y agoOn 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.
- smnrchrds 6y ago!vk is one of DDG Bangs. This may have something to do with it. https://duckduckgo.com/bang?q=vk https://duckduckgo.com/bang?q=vk
- ffpip 6y ago!yt is also a bang for Youtube. Searching YT gives results https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=yt https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=yt
- sheeshkebab 6y agoProb someone at ddg wrote an if statement for yt and not for vk...
- urtrs 6y agoIn other weird search results if you search for 4chan with tor you get wikipedia and news results. If you search without tor you get the real website and in general more relevant results.
- s9w 6y agoAs unpopular as it might be, but DDG is just a very bad search engine, and always has been. Bing really is the best at the moment IMO.
- mnd999 6y agoI’m surprised the VK (Vodka Kick?) alcopop doesn’t show up.
- slezyr 6y agoMaybe search bots hosted in Ukraine? It's banned there and you can't resolve the host. Images come from another provider. They voluntary banned to be available in Ukraine?
- marban 6y agoDDG's raison d'etre is to position itself as the Gutmensch of search engines but when it comes to providing peace of mind that I'm getting the best and most relevant results, there's a reason why my grandmother hasn't heard of it.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- shaniamama 6y agoWhy? Because DDG sucks and has for many years. Don't drink the mozilla kool-aid.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- annoyingnoob 6y agoDuckDuckGo 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.
- bachmeier 6y agoMaybe 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.
- Taek 6y agoSame boat here. More often than not DDG has substantially more useful results than Google does. Sometimes Google is better though, especially when I'm looking for something specific (an article I know I read or a video I know I watched, etc)
- GoblinSlayer 6y agoHeh, I don't even know how google feels, much like I don't know how ransomware and heroin feels. We don't really have to try everything in life, do we?
- monkpit 6y agoCongratulations on your moral superiority
- GoblinSlayer 6y agoHygiene is important for me on its own, unrelated to other people.
- html5web 6y agoMonopoly?
- mkl 6y agoHas it been fixed or something? I see lots of results. I'm in NZ.
- smnrchrds 6y agoStill broken in Canada.
- amateurdev 6y agoI see just one too. In the US
- Pedrit0 6y agoWhen searching from France, there is only this single link to the wikipedia page for VK and nothing else... weird.
- perryizgr8 6y agoOnly one result for me in India.
- glaucon 6y agoAlso in NZ and as you say lots of results but almost entirely related to the Russian social network 'vk'. Using mojeek, as suggested upthread, gives a much more diverse set of results. Which leaves the question why does NZ get a different set of results than some other places ?
- Pedrit0 6y agoThe mystery goes deeper...
- bluedemon 6y agoI'm in the US and I'm getting a lot of results. Guess it was fixed.
- jesterson 6y agoPlenty of results. Singapore
- f154hfds 6y agovk is the abbreviation for vulkan... I would think these should start showing up eventually too. https://devdocs.io/vulkan/ https://devdocs.io/vulkan/
- ricardo81 6y agoMojeek with a smaller index displays alternatives: https://www.mojeek.com/search?q=vk https://www.mojeek.com/search?q=vk I appreciate it's a smaller index and smaller player but it's providing the true results for that query. Disclaimer: I work for Mojeek
- DevKoala 6y agoGoogle 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.
- tayo42 6y agoOne of my issues with instagram is it cant be searched other then using hashtags. Those are just really crappy key words. So many artists put their art on there and its just sucked into a blackhole of pictures to never be seen again. It's impossible to search and find anything specific or anything that occurred more then a few hours ago
- samatman 6y agoAll 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.
- Jenk 6y agoClicking the images tab probably explains why. There are many pictures of very young girls in various states of undress.
- GoblinSlayer 6y agoOn the other hand search for pedobear gives text results, but no image results.
- Lambdanaut 6y agoSame for "pedophile" so this seems to be a sort of blacklist.
- time4hn 6y agoIf it is a blacklist, it's not a very good one. "pedobear." and "pedophile." work fine. I don't understand why they would want to block these anyway. One's just a meme, and the other is a bunch of mugshots of strange looking men.
- buisi 6y agoThey have been censoring any results vaguely related to pedophilia for the past year. If you search for "lolis" or "lolicon" which are fictional cartoons, that will be censored.
- growt 6y agoAlthough that is disturbing, it doesn't explain a thing for me. Why censor the text results and leave the images?
- tomcam 6y agoWTF. That was creepy beyond belief.
- smallchungus 6y agoThose kinds of pictures only show up when I manually switch region to United States.
- perryizgr8 6y agoMy main problem with ddg is that it's much slower than Bing to load the results. Bing is just so much snappier than even Google for me. I wonder if there's something wrong with my internet.
- ffpip 6y agoNot just for you. Bing is very fast. MS wants people to use it. It is the page that loads the fastest for me.. Not that DDG, google is slow. Bing is just fast
- SomeHacker44 6y agoWell, it works much better if you spell out what you're searching for in this case. Try it? Voight-Kampff
- garmaine 6y agoThere's a lot more things VK is an abbreviation for. Why aren't they showing up?
- BMSmnqXAE4yfe1 6y agoMoved on from DDG long ago (currently it's mostly Qwant for me).
- badRNG 6y agoI think this post should be tagged NSFW in some way.
- dredmorbius 6y agoThis was also posted to the DDG subreddit a few days back, with little response: https://old.reddit.com/r/duckduckgo/comments/i6ktu4/search_about_vk_social_network_returns_only/ https://old.reddit.com/r/duckduckgo/comments/i6ktu4/search_a...
- prophesi 6y agoOne 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/ https://samharris.org/podcasts/213-worst-epidemic/
- goblin89 6y agoIf 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.
- chroma 6y agoI really think Sam had the wool pulled over his eyes by Gabriel Dance. Around 17 minutes into the podcast, Dance says that he's been investigating tech companies for years and goes into issues with ad targeting, Twitter bots, etc. Then when he's relating the story about getting a tip, he effectively admits that he's pursuing this because he wants to make tech companies look bad. This explains why he always quotes absolute numbers (instead of percentages of all images/video shared), and why he never says what fraction of that content is teens sexting. It also explains why he avoids suggesting concrete solutions to the problem: there aren't any good ones. The only solution to the problem of child pornography is backdoors in all encryption. Facebook must be able to scan the messages you write. Apple must be able to scan the photos you take. AWS must be able to scan your servers. The US Government must be able to intercept your communications and decrypt your devices. If there is any consumer device with real encryption, it will be used by perverts, sadists, revolutionaries, psychopaths, and a few weird principled nerds. And the problem of child pornography will still exist, except now the government will be able to spy on everyone's private communications and use that to exert much more control over them.
- Yetanfou 6y agoI get loads of results, both related to VKontakte and other things (e.g. a "Roland VK-8 and VK-77 Combo Organ"), "Vaartkapoen", etc. I live in Sweden, maybe the VK-limiting filter is set on US search results?
- ripply 6y agoIt seems to have been fixed, I refreshed the tab I had open when this first popped up on hn (that had empty results) and the results look normal now (US).
- ThePowerOfFuet 6y ago13:24 UTC, tons of results.