The search shows images now, but none of them are related to Tienanmen. They're generic images of tanks.

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?

A Microsoft spokesperson told Motherboard in an email that "This is due to an accidental human error and we are actively working to resolve this."

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There is no way this is due to an accidental human error. The lying on this point is infuriating.

Why not. A human was asked to fulfill a request to block the "tank man" search in China and forgot to add the country restriction.

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.

We certainly know that explantation isn't true because they are continuing to censor the results after "fixing it". Searching "tank man" now gets you images of tanks and men and not the iconic image. We know they could get it right if they wanted to because the non-image search for the phrase works.

The iconic image comes up for me, could just be rolling out to massive infrastructure takes a hot minute

> A human was asked to fulfill a request to block the "tank man" search in China and forgot to add the country restriction.

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 ...

Was it blocked today, or did someone notice and make noise about it today?

The thing that pushes this more towards incredulity is that today is the anniversary of the famous photo.

Accidentally applied worldwide instead of just China sounds possible (or more possible than "my fingers slipped on the t, a, ... keys")

It is still not giving the correct results. Now Bing is pretending not to understand and giving innocuous pictures rather than the famous one. We can tell it's not just because of Bing's poor quality because similar searches, but slightly reworded get the iconic picture.

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.

I didn't know DDG uses Bing's search index. What exactly is their value proposition over Bing then?

It's a search proxy service. You can use a VPN to mask your traffic's origin behind your VPN provider's IP, you can use DDG image search to mask your queries behind DDG.

No profiling.

> 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.

Source: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/DuckDuckGo

Those other sources are mostly used for special results such as "Instant Answers".

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.

Well either it uses only Bing for images, or it also censors. Because I sure wasn't able to find the picture on DDG.

So either way, as a user of DDG from day one - it's dead to me.

This is concerning.

>showing all users the same search results for a given search term.

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.

"doesn't rely on bing" but actually mostly rely on bing, they want to create this illusion to hide this ugly fact.

neither did I - not using DDG again. Back to Google :(

I don't think going back to Google because DDG is not large enough to have its own fully independent index is really the right play. Given their reputation and usually lax attitude towards censoring, I'd say this akin to a supply chain attack, not active censoring.

Agreed, I bet as users of ddg we could press the team at duckduckgo to prioritize a fix for this failure mode of censorship.

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.

I believe DDG does not track you.

> error seems to be that censorship meant to just apply to China is being applied everywhere

That's a succinct way of putting it.