I thought it was maybe due to the suffix being problematic, but “torpedo” shows up without issue. Tried with safe search on/moderate and off.
I thought it was maybe due to the suffix being problematic, but “torpedo” shows up without issue. Tried with safe search on/moderate and off.
My guess is that it’s an offshoot of the Scunthorpe Problem. My theory (without hard evidence) is that Bing/DDG have a blacklist of terms to completely filter out from results, but a whitelist of words that contain those terms which are exceptions to the filter. This would explain why “torpedo” is ok but less common terms like “Sharpedo” wouldn’t be individually flagged as ok. You’d have to find other examples with other blocked words to test this idea.
This crossed my mind too, but I wanted to verify. I’m not sure what other words would be good testers, but if you happen to find some, I’d love to know!
Just type some gibberish but with pedo in it. It should still return something if it’s not actually blacklisted since most searches use some form of word distance algorithm.