Although that is disturbing, it doesn't explain a thing for me. Why censor the text results and leave the images?

WTF. That was creepy beyond belief.

Those kinds of pictures only show up when I manually switch region to United States.

Such images are showing up for me with region set to Australia.

It’s because DDG = Bing, and Bing is known[0] to be really bad at filtering out this crap from they image search.

[0]: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/11/09/us/internet-c...

On the other hand search for pedobear gives text results, but no image results.

Same for "pedophile" so this seems to be a sort of blacklist.

If it is a blacklist, it's not a very good one. "pedobear." and "pedophile." work fine. I don't understand why they would want to block these anyway. One's just a meme, and the other is a bunch of mugshots of strange looking men.

They have been censoring any results vaguely related to pedophilia for the past year. If you search for "lolis" or "lolicon" which are fictional cartoons, that will be censored.

I believe you but mostly I got pictures of tanks!

Is it picking up VK profile pictures? Sort of reminds me of myspace but with, err, Russian sensibilities. I also tried it with Bing and got literally the exact same results.

Google is definitely different, it shows mostly logos instead of photos.

I never used VK but I got the impression it is a real social network, for better or for worse. Should Bing drop them from its index? Now I'm morbidly curios what kind of weird crap searches of social networks from other cultures might dredge up. Like a Chinese VK.

huh... looks like the default search is now showing multiple things for me (showed just one result first time I checked)

However I'm seeing lots of slightly uncomfortable pictures of young girls (not porn, but didn't want to scroll too far because it felt like there could be some mixed in) and tanks in the image search. This doesn’t change noticeably using the three strictness settings.

We hired a baby sitter once that was from Ukraine. I made the mistake of Googling her unique name. Her VK profile was a whole different person from the sitter at my house.

Haha her name is probably far less unique than you think. My Slavic name is fairly unique in the Western world but there are literally thousands of people with it on VK.

When you want to add a friend on VK, you have to ask them for things like city, school, and age just to narrow down the results!

Nothing more after disabling NFSW filtering, so doesnt explain anything to me?

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

BTW, NSFW warning!

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.

I'm unsure why this post doesn't have NSFW flag/tag/marker from the get-go.

I'm a bit conflicted on this. I don't want content like this appearing in search results. But I don't think a clumsy keyword filter will make it go away. And it might push pedophiles looking for a quick fix to places with harder content or echo chambers.

VK is the Russian "social media and social networking service" so it tracks that there would be a lot of images, frightening as they may be.

Is there a way to report this? If yes, where/how?

Maybe DDG analyzes what you are interested in, and shows results accordingly?

DuckDuckGo's entire shtick is that they don't track you. Unless you have safe search on, you'll get the same result if you try it yourself.