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DuckDuckGo Web search engine sometimes does not show Wikipedia article (testing?)
Closed, InvalidPublicBUG REPORT

Assigned To
None
Authored By
Prototyperspective
Feb 27 2026, 12:07 AM
Referenced Files
F72446383: Screenshot_20260227_175526.png
Feb 27 2026, 12:59 PM
F72441125: dataact1.jpg
Feb 27 2026, 12:07 AM

Description

Steps to replicate the issue (include links if applicable):

  • Search "data act" in DuckDuckGo on mobile
  • Search "data act" in DuckDuckGo on desktop

What happens?:

  • It does not show the correct article near the top but a false one (some 2014 policy) on mobile while it does show the infobox with the correct article on desktop (where it shows the wrong one only in the SearchAssist at the bottom of the page). I noticed this in September (screenshot is from back then). The results have changed by now so that now when searching this English phrase it shows me search results of another language than English (no article exists about this in that language and it does not even show the wrong 2014 policy there) and if I do switch DuckDuckGo to English in its settings which is usually not necessary when searching in English or at all, it does show me this article.

dataact1.jpg (1×804 px, 191 KB)

What should have happened instead?:
It should show the correct article also on mobile.

This is not much of a bug but I thought it would be better suited for this issue than feature request.

What is suggested here is some investigation such as systematic testing using smartphones or smartphone emulators on a sufficiently-sized article set. Maybe the communities know of more cases and one could try testing articles with some similarities (eg about policies or where there is an article that's named similarly etc). So for example one could compile a list of search terms mapped to the article that should be shown in the first 10 search results on mobile; the test would then run through and list all articles where the given article is not there.

Software version (on Special:Version page; skip for WMF-hosted wikis like Wikipedia):

Other information (browser name/version, screenshots, etc.):
Android

Event Timeline

Aklapper closed this task as Invalid.EditedFeb 27 2026, 12:59 PM

If DuckDuckGo decided to rank pages differently for you on mobile versus desktop, then please feel free to contact DuckDuckGo about that.
We do not maintain DuckDuckGo's algorithms to rank pages, thus closing.

Screenshot_20260227_175526.png (3×1 px, 378 KB)

(Screenshot from one of my mobile phones)

This is an issue like T400022: 2025 Commons SEO review T54647: MediaWiki images and image pages are not being indexed properly by external search engines etc. It needs some investigation to see if other pages are affected too and if so how big of an issue it is. Should be part of eg '2026 Wikimedia SEO review' or sth like it.

T400022 was generally about whether data is indexed. The screenshot above shows that your example article does get indexed.