Microsoft has acknowledged this is in error...[1] (though the error seems to be that censorship meant to just apply to China is being applied everywhere)
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27395635
[1] https://www.vice.com/en/article/qj8v9m/bing-censors-tank-man
> DuckDuckGo distinguishes itself from other search engines by not profiling its users and by showing all users the same search results for a given search term.
Also note that DDG doesn’t just rely on Bing.
> DuckDuckGo's results are a compilation of "over 400" sources, including Yahoo! Search BOSS, Wolfram Alpha, Bing, Yandex, its own web crawler (the DuckDuckBot) and others.
That seems worse, honestly, since before it was obvious to anyone something was being censored. Was the "error" that the search was completely blank instead of full of faux-result clutter?
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There is no way this is due to an accidental human error. The lying on this point is infuriating.
There is no way to know if it is true, but it is definitely possible. This is probably an interface that isn't used incredibly frequently and may not be as polished as one might hope.
I don't see how it could've possibly been an accident when they "fix it" by slightly obscuring it. It's intentional deception and censorship by Microsoft. And it is particularly galling, because Microsoft, a massive and powerful international company without serious risk is cowering in fear of the same organization that one man, with everything to lose, stood against alone. Microsoft is trying to hide that he did so.
So either way, as a user of DDG from day one - it's dead to me.
I'm definitely not seeing the same search results from DDG on my PC as on my phone (using different networks). So they do show different results based on something.
Maybe they can somehow detect censorship real-time and have their own hot image cache for a certain sized corpus.
This is a fun problem for them to solve for us now that it's a failure mode they didn't fully appreciate until now. They are a search engine aggregator, they need another feed for internet images. This is an engineering problem to do cheaply centrally or distributed.
DDG's main search results mostly come from Bing, as the source for that Wikipedia statement reveals:
https://help.duckduckgo.com/results/sources/
> 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).
Anyone can see this for themselves by comparing a number of Bing and DDG searches.
That's a succinct way of putting it.
But why would someone be asked to block it today - if it's to be blocked in China, wouldn't it be blocked all through out the year?
Why specifically would they ask it to be blocked just now and not years ago? I can't know for sure, but it just feels like a rogue employee deciding to block "tank man" globally on the anniversary ...