What the author really means is "they have disappeared from the only other English language index in the US." Yandex, an English language index hosted in Russia returns the wikivoyage queries as expected.
If I were to hazard a guess (and I am guessing here) the answer is here (also in the article): The first result links directly to Wikitravel. Wikitravel is the original project and a schism in the project resulted in the creation of Wikivoyage, ...
Based on this piece of information I would guess that Wikitravel sent Bing a DMCA take down notice telling them that Wikivoyage infringed on their copyrighted material. And as a result Wikivoyage was de-indexed from general results.
More importantly, Wikitravel is basically a dead man walking, and Wikivoyage is a living project.
I guess I’d ask what authority you’re speaking from, because a quick perusal of their terms of use directly contradicts your claim. When you post content you sign over all ownership to them, and they do not allow scraping it.
https://www.internetbrands.com/ibterms
> You automatically grant and assign to us, and you represent and warrant that you have the right to grant and assign to us, a perpetual, irrevocable, unlimited, fully paid, fully sub-licensable (through multiple tiers), worldwide license to copy, perform, display, distribute, prepare derivative works from (including, without limitation, incorporating into other works) and otherwise use any content that you post. You also expressly grant and assign to us all rights and causes of action to prohibit and enforce against any unauthorized copying, performance, display, distribution, use or exploitation of, or creation of derivative works from, any content that you post (including but not limited to any unauthorized downloading, extraction, harvesting, collection or aggregation of content that you post).
>Any copying, aggregation, display, distribution, performance or derivative use of our sites and services or any content posted on our sites and services whether done directly or through intermediaries (including but not limited to by means of spiders, robots, crawlers, scrapers, framing, iframes or RSS feeds) is prohibited.
However, when I look at actual edit history, wikivoyage seems indeed more active. So you got a point there.
I usually check both.
Valid complaint does not mean honest or accurate complaint. Only that all information legally required to file a complaint is supplied.
It's not hard to imagine the "duplicate score ranking" got one-upped to "spam domain ranking".
Here is my amended idea, Wikitravel added some sort of "gotcha" asset to their site, and Wikivoyage scraped their site and sucked it up, and when it appeared on Wikivoyage, Wikitravel sent the DMCA.
I could not find WikiVoyage's registered DMCA agent so it is entirely possible that Bing didn't know who to send notice of the takedown too.
Basically there seems to be a lot of bad blood between the two sites and as silly as it is, DMCA is an excellent "sniping" tool for taking cheap shots at someone you don't like.
I guess this is a very heavy market, and there are a lot of SEO optimized commercial pretty-looking "travel guide" sites (although WikiTravel apparently belongs to that category as well).
OR
Navigate to WikiVoyage Type Malta Click on Malta link
Seems like it's actually wasted navigation to visit the site first.
Or just type "Malta !wv" into a DDG search bar, which results in exactly the same, with fewer keystrokes.
I've been using !sp to get startpage results with wikivoyage queries.
I've linked TFA from this post.
DDG also monitor a subreddit:
https://old.reddit.com/r/duckduckgo/
A post has been submitted there:
https://old.reddit.com/r/duckduckgo/comments/qgkx46/wikivoya...
Here are a couple cases where I archived results pages from Bing, Google, and Yandex with the Wayback Machine and archive.is.
A particularly puzzling case as to why the result might be filtered: one particular Wikipedia page. Searching by its title, using the queries:
victorian erotica wikipedia
"victorian erotica" site:en.wikipedia.org
Another query, where the issue is likely that it borders on one of a diverse variety of sensitive and/or politically controversial topics where results sometimes seem deliberately tuned in one index or another (in my anecdata: mostly by Google), is the title of one of the hoax papers submitted in the grievance studies affair, which appears verbatim in many pages about it:
my struggle to dismantle my whiteness a critical race examination of whiteness from within whiteness
I've seen discussions about the decreasing relevancy of search results in general where some have suggested that some sort of central repository be started for archiving interesting search results. I wonder if there have been any efforts toward such a project?
Note: when archiving search pages, I stripped all unnecessary parameters from the URLs. For example,
https://web.archive.org/web/0/https://www.google.com/search?...
What you want is a "directory". Like Yahoo! of old. Search killed these during the window where search was useful.
Edit:
...and when they highlight the differences between search engines.
For example, Google's NLP allows it to just barely identify the video referenced by the query:
microsoft ceo repeating a word
split to left or rightIf you need to develop one to have the other....
Interesting, Google seems to have fixed my go-to example. The query "<college newspaper name> sexual assault false report <year>" (for my college and sophomore year) used to return the expected article on Bing but fail to return it entirely on Google, unless the exact headline was used. Somebody seems to have fixed this bug though - shows up as first for both today.
But I wonder how long Wikivoyage has been blocked from DDG and/or Bing...
For blocked search, I meant Startpage showed a page claiming unusual network activity, and presented a report form. There was no captcha, and there's no way to continue the search from there.
I wasn't using VPN when this happened, and I encountered this on my home WiFi, office WiFi, and mobile network, MacBook and Android.
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(Original comment)
I just tried it and it's the first result fwiw.
So whatever the issue is, it hasn't disappeared from DDG entirely, or has been fixed since the post went up.
Of course, I'd never heard of WikiVoyage before this, so nice publicity either way, I guess.
[1] https://i.imgur.com/5f4RHBh.jpg [2] https://search.brave.com/search?q=Wikivoyage+malta&source=we...
This is once again confirmed with the example in the article:
- DDG regular, no expected result: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=wikivoyage+malta
- DDG Lite, the expected result is returned: https://lite.duckduckgo.com/lite/?q=wikivoyage+malta
[1] https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/so...
my 2nd option would be yandex.ru
guess what, both these search engines return results for wikivoyage malta without any issues
