by Fred Theilig – @fmtheilig
One of my passions is old movies. Mostly Hollywood golden era, but all kinds. I post a short blog entry for the pre-1980 films I watch. For the curious, it can be found here.
Recently I watched the quasi-Christmas film Penny Serenade from 1941. A woman (Irene Dunne) reminisces about her life with her husband (Cary Grant) after deciding to leave him. I didn’t care for it. Anyhow, I use a poster of the film for the top of my post, so I paste the film title into DuckDuckGo then click on Images. I do this every time, for every film, but this time I was met with a surprise.
For those not in the know, DuckDuckGo.com is a privacy focused search engine with an excellent reputation. Google.com may provide better results, but at a cost of your privacy. Google tracks your search behavior and that insight is shared across the entire Google ecosystem. If you choose to use DuckDuckGo, I recommend installing the DuckDuckGo Privacy Essentials extension, as well as Privacy Badger.
The exact steps are to navigate to duckduckgo.com, search for the exact text “Penny Serenade (1941)” (without the quotes), click on Images, then turn Safe search off. DDG returns many images of people and characters named Penny, in various states of undress performing various services for which they deserve to be handsomely paid. On the first page I find exactly one image that comes from the movie.
I’ve been blogging movies for almost sixteen years, totaling 784 films to this point, and I’ve used this method since the beginning. I don’t remember when I transitioned away from Google, but I am sure it was a few years and maybe a couple hundred films ago. Of course I had to investigate.
“Penny Serenade (1942)” returns images from the 1941 film. So does (1943) through (1970) with the exception of (1949). (1940) returns NSFW content, but each year back to (1929) returns the expected results. That’s as far as I checked. Removing the parens stops the behavior.
You will not see this result if you change the spelling or capitalization of Serenade in any way. The same for changing Penny to another name, but you can change the first letter to read Jenny or even Lenny it continues to return images of wayward Pennys. In fact, substituting any letter or number, and even some symbols for the “P” will continue to do this. Here are some theories.
Cookies or Cache issue – Nope. Tried multiple computers on multiple browsers. Same behavior. One note, this does not happen on my Android phone, using the DuckDuckGo browser, on 4G. It does when connected to wifi.
DNS – It’s always DNS. I use Pi-Hole unbound, so this was plausible but didn’t make sense. I am resolving to DuckDuckGo, it’s the results that are wonky. Anyhow, I had a couple people try from their house and they got the same results, so we must rule out Pi-Hole. Different operating systems, different ISPs, different routers.
Perhaps “Penny Serenade” is slang – If so, someone should tell the Urban Dictionary. Besides, capitalization wouldn’t matter in this case. And we get regular, non-NSFW results on the All, Videos, News, Maps, and Shopping tabs. I say nope.
“(1941)” is some kind of image search engine directive – Maybe, but how? Again, this only works under the described conditions. None of this makes sense.
It doesn’t appear there is much further I can go with this. I’m left to assume that something deep inside the DuckDuckGo secret algorithm is misfiring. Also, I tried replacing Serenade with other innocuous words. Most behaved as expected, except Penny Lemonade. I’m flabbergasted.