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Comment by sjs382 | Hacker News Reader

No surprise, as both DDG and Blekko disclose that they use Bing for long-tail queries, but it works at both of those engines, too:

  http://duckduckgo.com/?q=hiybbprqag
  http://duckduckgo.com/?q=mbzrxpgjys
  http://duckduckgo.com/?q=indoswiftjobinproduction

  http://blekko.com/ws/hiybbprqag
  http://blekko.com/ws/mbzrxpgjys
  http://blekko.com/ws/indoswiftjobinproduction

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Ouch, you're totally right. So you're saying that because Blekko and DDG are powered partly by Bing, the rankings on all three engines are showing the results that Google inserted?

They shouldn't be in DDG. That's one of the pieces of intelligence we try to add on top. We try to not "correct" your query. Here's another example of a real search my wife did the other day that illustrates this point on both Google & Bing: http://duckduckgo.com/?q=suttle+renal vs. http://www.bing.com/search?q=suttle+renal vs. http://www.google.com/#&q=suttle+renal

I love that you don't try to correct queries. I hate when Google auto-corrects my query and I need to click another link to get to my actual query. Thanks for that!

But in this case DDG does give Google's auto-corrected (without even telling you!) and I bet it happens to many terms as it is mostly a proxy/filter of Bing.

No, actually they shouldn't be in there. Are you seeing them? If so it is a bug. It is not showing up on my computers.

I'm still seeing it on tmbg, but thor and www seem fine:

http://tmbg.duckduckgo.com/?q=hiybbprqag

http://thor.duckduckgo.com/?q=hiybbprqag

http://duckduckgo.com/?q=hiybbprqag

Edit: The same appears to be true for mbzrxpgjys and indoswiftjobinproduction

Edit 2: Hey, that's weird. Adding a comma, semicolon, period, or other symbol to the beginning or end of the query makes the gamed results show up on top at thor and www as well. Seems to work for all the terms at issue:

http://duckduckgo.com/?q=hiybbprqag%2C

http://duckduckgo.com/?q=----hiybbprqag----

You're finding the edges of my intelligence layer :). Should be fixed now.

Note that some of those servers don't get updated often.

Ah. They were loading the same results as Google and Bing when I posted that. They aren't now.

There were a number of bugs around the first result that this whole thing uncovered, so it could have been intermittent. Our backfill in the case of no results can vary. It shouldn't have been showing anything ever beyond the first result though.

Thanks for the clarification. I use DDG as my primary search, and love reading about how it works.

It was there using those links when I posted, but not anymore.

Or you just "quote" your original misspelled query and Google will search for the misspelled version without any additional click.

It wasn't a misspelling though! That's the point. She is a cancer researcher and she meant that. Renal is for kidneys and Suttle is an author on various papers in the field.

Quotes provide you with exact match results. Putting quotes around an entire phrase isn't what I intend sometimes, and quoting each term in the query is just excessive. In that case, I'll just click the extra link...

A timesaver that might be useful on the edge cases is to prefix terms with a plus sign. +the +quick +brown +dog is easier to type than "the" "quick" "brown" "dog", and should have the same results.

You're totally right, nice find.

Just happy that my current SE favourite does not seem to copy and to actually have their very own results: http://entireweb.com/#q=hiybbprqag

But the 3rd result (at the moment) is "Vanessa fox Nude"...

Well, I'm not seeing that result now, likely because the results are now filled with actual news about hiybbprqag. But if Vanessa Fox Nude was ranking then that likely means that some signal was associating hibbpraqag with Google and that either they're using (at least in part) a really old index or the crawler they're using doesn't follow redirects very well.

vanessafoxnude.com has been redirecting to my current site for several years now, but back when the original site was active, much of the incoming anchor text was related to Google and search.

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