
Searching for 'VK' shows only a single result on DuckduckGo. Why? - ffpip
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=vk
======
DevKoala
Google 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
One 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

~~~
ffpip
Instagram is just AI. Take what the AI gives you.

There is no sorting. Nothing. The comments are ranked by the AI, the posts are
ranked by the AI, the explore section is ranked by the AI.You can't sort by
time or likes.

------
ffpip
Manually 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/duckduck...](https://www.reddit.com/r/duckduckgo/comments/a7nl1v/duckduckgos_relationship_to_yandex/ec50ai7?context=3)

~~~
bhrgunatha
> 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
"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.

~~~
samatman
I understand the discomfort, but people have been describing a page of bad
search results as "infested" for a long time.

Perhaps it was intended as a slight against Russians, but I'd ask you to
assume good faith.

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

~~~
garmaine
What the hell? Serious wtf. Can anyone explain this?

BTW, NSFW warning!

~~~
time4hn
It's unfortunately not uncommon for such images to appear on the Russian
internet. The Youtube thumbnails are possibly things that were linked to from
VK communities. Or maybe there are links in the content somewhere.

If I go on Yandex and search "img " and then a bunch of random numbers, I get
almost all pictures of young women, and many pictures of underage girls in
provocative poses.

This sort of thing does happen. A few months ago, people discovered similar
results on Google Images(!) by searching "TV television and film". The results
were being pulled from a 4chan archive of the board with that name.

I don't think it's related to the "VK" web results problem though. If you
search "VK," or "VK!" or VK with any punctuation, all the web results come up
as expected.

------
annoyingnoob
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.

~~~
bachmeier
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.

~~~
Taek
Same 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
Heh, 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
Congratulations on your moral superiority

~~~
GoblinSlayer
Hygiene is important for me on its own, unrelated to other people.

------
prophesi
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/](https://samharris.org/podcasts/213-worst-epidemic/)

~~~
chroma
I 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.

~~~
prophesi
It's been a few weeks since I listened to the podcast, but I thought Dance
explicitly mentioned how sad it was for Facebook to get a bad rep for
releasing those numbers when such transparency is a positive thing. It shows
that they're at least trying to get it off their platform. And if more people
knew the numbers, this issue would finally become too large of an elephant to
ignore.

And he did offer one concrete solution: platforms with easy discoverability
(in other words, easy to masquerade as and target teens) may not need end-to-
end encryption. Let FB and such run their algorithms on those messages. And it
may be safe to assume three letter agencies are listening in. End-to-end
encryption still serves its purpose for whistleblowing, privacy, and fair
democracy; it'll just be found elsewhere, like Signal and such.

This still isn't an ideal solution. I personally think it's an unwinnable
battle. Easily duplicated instantaneous secure multimedia communication is
ridiculously revolutionary.

------
Whitespace
Quoting 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
Note that Bing is only one of their sources:
[https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-
pages/results/so...](https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-
pages/results/sources/)

~~~
pb7
>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
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...](https://web.archive.org/web/20180203071252/https://duck.co/help/results/sources)

~~~
pb7
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.

------
smnrchrds
!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
!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
Prob someone at ddg wrote an if statement for yt and not for vk...

------
ilovefood
Well 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?

~~~
ffpip
[https://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
These results are not in the language I have my browser set to, so maybe it is
filtering based on language.

~~~
mrlatinos
No if you change the language to Russian, it still shows the single result in
English. Changing region is the only way around it.

~~~
IncRnd
That's not correct. You can show the proper results without setting the
region. Do this by adding an empty token that doesn't get stripped,
"[https://duckduckgo.com/?q=vk+%22%22"](https://duckduckgo.com/?q=vk+%22%22").
That also shows the results list.

------
mkl
Has it been fixed or something? I see lots of results. I'm in NZ.

~~~
glaucon
Also 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
The mystery goes deeper...

------
dredmorbius
This was also posted to the DDG subreddit a few days back, with little
response:

[https://old.reddit.com/r/duckduckgo/comments/i6ktu4/search_a...](https://old.reddit.com/r/duckduckgo/comments/i6ktu4/search_about_vk_social_network_returns_only/)

------
ricardo81
Mojeek 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

------
f154hfds
vk is the abbreviation for vulkan... I would think these should start showing
up eventually too. [https://devdocs.io/vulkan/](https://devdocs.io/vulkan/)

------
toto444
The images returned by the search look quite dodgy.

~~~
TheNorthman
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...](https://duckduckgo.com/?q=%22Index+of+%2F%22&iax=images&ia=images)

~~~
noobermin
is this region/area dependent? I just see pictures of people, nothing sexual
if that's what you mean.

~~~
TheNorthman
It shouldn't be, perhaps you have `Safe Search' turned on? (It is by default)

------
Yetanfou
I 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
It 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).

------
perryizgr8
My 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
Not 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

------
badRNG
I think this post should be tagged NSFW in some way.

------
1f60c
A couple months ago, this was happening for every search. Maybe this is
similar.

------
elvinn
Is anyone still even using VK?

------
mnd999
I’m surprised the VK (Vodka Kick?) alcopop doesn’t show up.

------
slezyr
Maybe 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?

------
ThePowerOfFuet
13:24 UTC, tons of results.

------
rjzzleep
I'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?

~~~
jameshush
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

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

~~~
chki
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...](https://support.startpage.com/index.php?/Knowledgebase/Article/View/180/20/how-
can-startpage-be-free-how-do-you-make-money) 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 (!)

~~~
jameshush
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.

------
SomeHacker44
Well, it works much better if you spell out what you're searching for in this
case. Try it?

Voight-Kampff

~~~
garmaine
There's a lot more things VK is an abbreviation for. Why aren't they showing
up?

------
html5web
Monopoly?

------
mr-ron
Ive 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.

~~~
majormunky
I think you can prepend your search on DDG with !g and it'll search google for
you, without leaking your info to google.

~~~
just-ok
You can use !s for StartPage for the “Google can’t see my queries” layer.

~~~
ffpip
I don't believe startpage. Either they are lying to users about the Google
results, or google is lying to them.

Search for '5vh9ld'. It is reddit post's URL.

[https://startpage.com/do/metasearch.pl?query=5vh9ld](https://startpage.com/do/metasearch.pl?query=5vh9ld)

[https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=5vh9ld](https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=5vh9ld)

~~~
basch
5/7 google results are spam that should have been removed. I wonder if the 0/7
on start page is that sort of spam filtering run amuck.

------
urtrs
In 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.

------
marban
DDG'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.

------
BMSmnqXAE4yfe1
Moved on from DDG long ago (currently it's mostly Qwant for me).

------
theandrewbailey
What were you expecting?

~~~
bhupy
Something more similar to the Google or Bing search results for "VK"?

~~~
theandrewbailey
Change region to Russia. There are lots of results.

------
s9w
As 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.

~~~
ffpip
DDG is bing+others.

~~~
sp332
Some of the web scrape data is from Bing, but they don't use Bing's ranking.

