DuckDuckGo is broken with multiple site: operators
#1415
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I don't think Twitter is the way to go to report a bug to DuckDuckGo. I've reported the bug on DuckDuckGo's bug report page instead, and hopefully that will give us a better chance of them noticing the bug report. I also left my email for them to contact me, and I'll report back whenever I get anything back from them. |
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Hmm… That feedback form looks familiar. I remember also reporting the bug there myself. Did you get any confirmation email, @Hanicef? Honestly, I pinged DDG via every method I could find when I originally researched the bug a few weeks ago. Not one yielded any acknowledgement or reply. :/ |
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Well, I just sent it, so I haven't got anything yet. I think we have to wait a few hours before we can expect to get an answer. It's best to give it a few days tops, and if we haven't got an answer after that, then we can start assuming that they've either missed it or ignored it. |
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Just wondered if there was a confirmation I could look for in my own email to verify my memory of reporting it, haha. Guess there isn't one. |
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I think we're well into "start assuming that they've either missed it or ignored it" territory. The question is, where do we go from here? Besides the contextual warning I started working on, that is. |
The simple way to deal with sopel-irc#1415. A rewrite isn't in the cards this late in the release cycle for 6.6.0, so the next best option is to detect when a query is affected by the bug and advise the user to modify it.
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There's really nothing we can do about this, short of a rewrite to use an alternate method of accessing DuckDuckGo that isn't affected by the bug on their side. I'll leave this open for tracking, but without any milestone. The warning added in #1418 is Good Enough™. |
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Further testing during my work on #2247 indicates that this might not be a problem any more. Using multiple Will add to 7.1.8 milestone for tracking. The last thing to do before closing this is probably to add the same warning from #1418 to Bing as well, since there's still inconsistent behavior depending on which search engine is used and how the |
This affects both complex user-initiated queries and the
xkcdmodule (see #1410), at least.DuckDuckGo's plain HTML site, for some reason, no longer returns any results at all if the query includes more than one
site:operator. This isn't an issue in Sopel per se, but it does affect some operations. The plain HTML version of DuckDuckGo is how the.duckand.gcommands (search.py) get results, and also how thexkcdmodule searches by comic title.It seems DDG's Twitter ignored the bug report (sent two weeks ago) and other threads about this on their subreddit. While I'll continue trying to get their attention—and other users also contacting the service (via Twitter, Reddit) about the same issue will help—Sopel might need to change how it retrieves DuckDuckGo results, or start to warn users if they get no results from a query that looks like it would be affected by this issue.
Chances are the warning (along with switching the
xkcdmodule's means of retrieving comics by title) will be done in Sopel 6.6.0 if the bug is not fixed on DuckDuckGo's end. Any changes to howsearch.py'sduck_search()method works will come in Sopel 7, unless it breaks completely.The text was updated successfully, but these errors were encountered: