DDG is thinking too hard

Or Is it just me?

[blend27]

Why does DuckDuckGo is serving me some search results in Russian Language?

I just searched for "Senator from West Virginia" and am served with links to sites that are in Russian language about "Сигареты Manitou Verginia Gold"?

..where "Сигарет&#1099" is cigarettes spelled in Russian.

[lucy24]

Do you have a history of searching in Russian? I just tried the same thing--singular and plural for good measure--and got the usual suspects. (The other name, in case anyone wondered, is Shelley Moore Capito. Whether correctly or incorrectly, the search engine assumes that’s not the Senator I’m looking for.)

[blend27]

My searches are 95% in English, some in Spanish/German, some were in Russian just to translate, but for what gives other that English I really do not use any other except JavaScript, ColdFusion and SQL queries syntax.

And why do they remember?

[Keys4]

I realize this is an old post but DDG uses results from Yandex (a Russian search engine) along with Bing and Yahoo.

I too get Russian spam mixed with results... usually when there any not many results.

A few days ago DDG put their use of Yandex on hold due to due to war in Ukraine.

[blend27]

To comeback to this subject for just a moment, @Keys4, you are right, no more of that for me at this time.

On the other side, I also blocked Yandex from accessing all of our NET properties until... on Day 1.

I speak the Language fluently but almost never search using it, just no need for it... so in several other ones and a just a bit of English.

What was throwing me off were searches in English, and sometimes in Spanish, that returned pure innocent nonsense.

[Brett_Tabke]

Interesting. Since DDG gets most (all!?) of it's results from Bing, it begs the question, "how did they id you as a Russian visitor"?

> DDG uses results from Yandex

Got a DDG search I can try that uses Yandex as results? I've never seen anything but Bing results in DDG.

[not2easy]

DDG dropped the Yandex results since a few months ago this year.

[nickZ]

DDG dropped the Yandex results since a few months ago this year.

That fits since a few month DDG is throwing ouit similar garbish than all the other mayor Searchengines.

[brotherhood of LAN]

A decent test is searching for the likes of 'my ip address is' or variants. You can see with DDG that it's msnbot. They do crawl but IIRC it's just to validate instant answer links. Their marketing is quite good in quoting 'hundreds of sources' are used, but that seems to relate to their instant answer boxes that used to be an open source project and via wikidata (which does have hundreds of sources).

Yet to see anyone notice an organic result that wasn't from the Bing API, now that Yandex is no longer used.