“Tank Man” | Hacker News Reader

“Tank Man”

duckduckgo.com

325 pointsTurukawa54 comments

This is probably related to Bing not showing results because, as far as I know, DuckDuckGo uses Bing as its underlying search engine. I’ve always chuckled at this from the Apple and Linux users railing against Microsoft but then they use DuckDuckGo.

Interestingly, Bing shows plenty of relevant search results for their web results, including images, but doesn’t show results for an image search.

Link to Bing: https://www.bing.com/images/search?q=tank+man&qs=ds&form=QBI...

This is scary because censorship is reaching to all over the world.

That deserves a whole page in itself :-) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overseas_censorship_of_Chinese...

Although nowadays the bar to be shocked is quite high ..here are some remarkable examples:

European Union : "The organisation agreed to censor references to the Chinese origins of the COVID-19 pandemic, with research suggesting that self-censorship on sensitive topics that may offend the PRC is commonplace."

NASA: "The American space agency faced criticism in China for listing "Taiwan" as a country in a drop-down menu on a website about Mars."

World Health Organization: "Senior advisor Bruce Aylward faced criticism for saying he could not hear a question from RTHK journalist Yvonne Tong about whether Taiwan could join the WHO, asking her to move onto the next question then terminating the interview when she repeated it"

But why does Bing filter this?

Who knows. There’s another post/thread on that I believe. My assumption or guess is that Bing operates in China and whatever filter they use there made it to the outside system by accident. But then again, it's still like that now, which is surprising.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27394925

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27395635

Interestingly, when I follow that link I first get "Images blocked by safe search", but when I turn off safe search, I then get "no results".

Same here.

that's odd -- i also turned off safe search, and got decent links to wikipedia and a bunch of news articles...

The image search is broken.

derp, i see that now...

Same here

Unsurprising given DDG simply repackages Bing results

“DuckDuckGo gets its results from over four hundred sources. [..] we also source from multiple partners, most commonly from Bing”

[1]: https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/so...

The omitted [..] bit is kind of relevant, since it makes clear that the hundreds of sources are not for the main results.

Yes, it is relevant, but I was replying to a statement which wasn't accurate.

We can have different opinions of what “results” mean, but the linked DDG FAQ piece is on their view of Results Sources and what that is.

Their results for “Tank Man” (and others) though, has the same shortcomings as Bing proper – so their reliance on Bing is absolutely a limiting factor for all to see.

That's marketing speak, in reality the overwhelming majority are simply Bing results.

Yes, most commonly so.

I've been using DDG as the default search for years and this is the first time I've been disappointed in them. DDG: don't let disappointment gain momentum because it's hard to stop.

DDG sources from bing, so if bing removes something, DDG won’t get it either.

What is DDG going to be able to do about it?

Never having looked into it, I always wondered how DDG could financially support indexing the web and running a search engine. Now it makes sense.

Broad internet search is probably outside the ability of anything other than Fortune 100 companies today.

The regular DDG results for 'tank man' are baffling bad too; it amounts to little more than entries on Wikipedia that have 'tank' in them.

I get the Wikipedia link to Tiananmen Square Tank Man.

But the image search is concerning.

When I do a search on DuckDuckGo for "Tiananmen tank man" I do get a few image results of the famous photograph.

This must be a locality thing because if I follow the link, I get the original tank man images, and also images that complain about MS censoring the tank man images. This is with safe search: Moderate setting too.

Why is DDG going this to traffic coming outside of China?

Same with qwant https://www.qwant.com/?t=images&q=tank+man

I've noticed this recently around several topics. Including, but not limited to, virus reporting. Particularly, related to Fauci's FOIA requested emails.

They didn't appear to be doing this even 3-4 months ago. Although, I'm not sure how it is related to "tank man".

Any examples?

China is the common factor in tank man and fauci's emails

For comparison: https://www.google.com/search?q=%22tank+man%22&tbm=isch

Speaking as someone who's used ddg for the last three years, this is a compelling reason to switch back to google.

Definitely agree. I'll switch back as well.

https://startpage.com/ uses google’s results rather than Bing.

WTF. Is DDG helping China in censorship?

No, Bing is.

Link here: https://www.bing.com/images/search?q=tank+man&qs=ds&form=QBI...

Yes. As a consequence of relying on Bing, DDG is also assisting in the censorship. It makes them part of it. They are not required to use Bing, they choose to.

It puts more emphasis on DDG's need - if their morality play is to continue to be believed - to build their own full-fledged search engine and stop relying so much on Bing & Co.'s results.

>It puts more emphasis on DDG's need - if their morality play is to continue to be believed - to build their own full-fledged search engine and stop relying so much on Bing & Co.'s results.

Umm yes, they should just find a few billion dollars in their couch cushions to fund just the infrastructure for that.

Since your other comment here [1] got flagged and dead I can't reply to it, so I am replying here. I just wanted to say thanks for sharing here on Hacker News - glad that there are those here who stand up for the truth - very much ironic (in an Alanis way) that it would be on this very thread.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27397967

Same result at Yahoo! - no images.

https://search.asynchronousexchange.com/search?q=tank%20man&...

lots of image results that include "tank man", many of the photo, turn up for "tank ma", "tankman", etc. Shows clearly that it is not a lack of indexed content, but a search filter.

I got the same result as everyone else, safe search, no images, but then when I went back it had all of the articles. Something weird is happening

Counting down the seconds till this gets flagged and removed like the rest

Yep. Only way this story stays on the HN homepage is if Dang specifically protects it from being flagged away.

This story is already on the front page elsewhere: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27395635.

Fake privacy

I don't think thats whats going on here. This is more like highlighting that DDG is a rebranded/privacy focused Bing.

That's funny, when I search from my own DuckDuckGo link, I get plenty of results.

plenty of text results (including wikipedia as top link) but no images

I believe the search will work but the image search will return zero results.

Yeah https://duckduckgo.com/?q=%22tank+man%22&ia=web works fine but if you press 'images' you see no results (or, at least I see nothing). "Tank Woman" works fine.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com