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Ask HN: Weird DuckDuckGo Behaviour with Firefox

2 points by discordance ↗ HN
When you use DuckDuckGo with the built in search in Firefox I noticed it adds this query parameter "t=ffab", which changes the returned search results. Anyone know what's with this?

Example:

https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=imdb+game+of+thrones&ia=web

The example searches for "IMDB Game of Thrones" with the added "t=ffab" query parameter. This does not return IMDB in the search results.

If you remove "t=ffab" from the query parameters, IMDB appears at the top of the search results.

6 comments

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vonadz
https://askubuntu.com/questions/994803/meaning-of-t-canonica...

Answer there quotes a source that is deleted: "The t=mageia is intentionally added in the search configuration, as Mageia gets a tiny amount of money donated to it from duckduckgo for making it the default search engine in most of the browsers."

grlass
The source also notes that:

> In debian 9, I get 't=ffab' in the search url instead.

Running on debian, I also see this, though I haven't tested on another distro. Is this the OP's distro too?

nanis
Something else might be going on as I got the same results with or without `t=ffab`.

`ffab` sounds like "Firefox A/B", but that is pure speculation.

If you would like to remove that behavior, here is a suggestion: https://old.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/cfo0xt/how_i_can_r...

discordance
I read that too and it's an odd fix. I guess my question is more that, if it's not a bug... why would DDG do this?

Not listing an IMDB result (or whatever) when included in the search parameter does not do them any benefit.

tsjq
I tried it now. the first result is same on both. but the rest of the results are quite different between the two.