Does DDG pad its search results with fake hits when they can’t find responsive answers? I searched for a question about fake currency and got the homepage of PCworld as a search result, and I cannot for the life of me understand why. 

I was curious whether the government offers a program reimbursing people if they turn in a fake bills. Like, if you get a fake $20 as change from a store, can you turn in (to remove it from circulation) and get a new $20? Or are you just out the $20 if you turn it in? I doubted that any government exchange program exists, but figured I’d search to confirm. 

I searched “does the government offer an exchange for forged money to remove it from circulation.”

None of the search results answered the question. Disappointing. And worse, one of the top search results is just “www.pcworld.com”. That’s it, just PCworld’s homepage. Screenshot attached. How that relates to currency exchanges for forged bills, I have no idea. 

Critically, when I clicked the PCworld result, it had \*\*none of the search terms\*\* — I did individual ctrl-f searches for “government”, “exchange”, “forged”, “money”, “remove”, and “circulation” and literally not one of those terms was on the PCworld page served up by DDG. So how did PCworld’s home page get into the results? 

I understand that DDG’s search engine repackages the web index from Microsoft’s Bing, rather than relying on a search index created by DDG. See here: https://duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/sources. But I thought DDG claimed to have improved Bing’s results by (1) supplementing it with their own crawler, DuckDuckBot, and (2) by refining the ranking of results from Bing to be more accurately ranked. (Same source). 

Is there any reasonable explanation for including PCworld as a responsive hit here? Or is it just included to pad search results? 

Relatedly, did DDG add PCworld as a hit? Or did PCworld come from Bing, and DDG’s “re-ranking” algorithm kept it because it thought PCworld was actually a responsive result? 

I’m genuinely curious if there’s any explanation (other than fraudulently padding search results) for why DDG returned PCworld’s homepage as a result for a search about fraudulent currency exchanges. I can’t think of one. 

DuckDuckGo’s Search Engine Adding Fake Results to Pad