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Searchability with DuckDuckGo - "site:" directive

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Wistuplu

Regular Contributor
Dear,

Thank you very much for the forum platform and the community.

I recently noticed that searches on DuckDuckGo don't always return the expected result for snbforums.com. I have no clue if this is on your side, but I felt like reporting it.

Search engines allow you to add directives like "site:". At least both Google and DuckDuckGo do (https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/2466433?hl=en , https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/syntax/ ).

For instance:
site:snbforums.com media bridge : 7000+ hits on Google, seemingly recent; 0 hits on DuckDuckGo
site:forums.smallnetbuilder.com media bridge : 1000+ hits on Google, seemingly less recent; 0 hits on DuckDuckGo
site:reddit.com asus media bridge : not tested on Google; plenty of hits on DuckDuckGo

I'm not aware that this would be a typical issue of DuckDuckGo. Might be something to do with robots.txt on the site/forum or whatever technique guides the action of crawlers in general or non-Google ones in particular. NB: I don't really expect that the number of hits would match between different search engines. But "non zero" is more desirable.

Best regards

PS:
- I don't think this is the same issue as https://www.snbforums.com/threads/site-removed-from-duckduckgo-results.78170/

- Trying to put the details of domain names and redirections out of the equation, I searched for keywords only
"media bridge service stop_dnsmasq cron dhcp nvram RT-AC68U" (based on some random thread, https://www.snbforums.com/threads/rt-ac68u-in-media-bridge-mode-responding-to-dhcp-requests.48259/ ).
Google has snbforums at the top of the results.
DDG doesn't have snbforums on the first page.
I'm generally pleased with DDG results, this is the exception.

- I also use the search of the forum, but e.g. it doesn't like short keywords.
 
Try the same search on bing.com. DDG probably gets the results from Bing.
 
Indeed, bing.com and ddg behave similarly for those searches. Thank you Dave for the idea.

In my eyes, it means additional incentive for someone to look into this.

BTW, I don't care personally. I hardly ever search the forum that way.
 

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