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DuckDuckGo “down-rank sites associated with Russian disinformation”

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Re: DuckDuckGo “down-rank sites associated with Russian disinformation”

#91

Post by uejfiweun »

chriscjcj wrote: post #56
uejfiweun wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Weird. Maybe I got unlucky with some experiment rollout. My top links are Drudge Retort (some stupid parody), the link to the Drudge app on iPhone, and the dictionary definition for "drudge". Nowhere on the page is there an actual link to the site for me.

For the last couple years, I think the Drudge Report itself has actually been a parody of the Drudge Report.

I like Drudge as an aggregator, it's a great way to see a "full picture" of what is going on in the world. But I do have some major gripes, the main one being that he routinely links to dog shit sources like DailyMail, The Sun, etc. That crap isn't news and I wish I could just remove all links to it from Drudge and Google results forever.

Re: DuckDuckGo “down-rank sites associated with Russian disinformation”

#93

Post by mattwilsonn888 »

Spivak wrote: post #42
mrjangles wrote: post #20

Seriously what the f*ck makes Gabriel Weinberg think that myself, or anyone else, gives a damn about his personal opinion on what I should and should not be reading. The arrogance of these people is astounding. Also, absolutely zero of the standard base of Duck Duck Go users are the kind of people who don't understand what a Russian state controlled news site is, and why one would have to be careful reading it. Those…

This is a weird stance to take about a search engine which is "tell me what to read as a service." Like you're literally using them to surface the wheat from the chaff. The algorithm that ranks results is already biased as hell and sometimes it's going to get it wrong. Google surfacing lots of stackoverflow spam sites isn't "unbiased" it's junk and manual correction is totally fine.

This word keeps coming in this comments section: "spam." Spam was never mentioned in the Tweet, the source of this discussion. In fact no one in the comments section is talking about spam either, unless its a pathetic debunking attempt. They are talking about genuine results being down-ranked based on their ideological, even morally unscrupulous content, and why that is harmful to intelligent people who don't need their information retrieval service helping them form thoughts.

Re: DuckDuckGo “down-rank sites associated with Russian disinformation”

#94

Post by hammock »

There's really nowhere reliable on the web you can get non-Western sanctioned news about the Russia-Ukraine conflict. If you are interested in alternative viewpoints, don't bother with any of the search engines. All the sources I've seen are on, e.g. Telegram.

Re: DuckDuckGo “down-rank sites associated with Russian disinformation”

#95

Post by hajile »

eli wrote: post #57
TehShrike wrote: post #40

I want to use a search engine that puts all its effort into down-ranking sites that I'm not searching for

Doesn't seem incompatible. I assume most people searching for general news about Ukraine are not seeking for Russian state media's take on it.

I've watched US propaganda from WW2, Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, etc. I don't trust the US government or their news agencies anymore than any other propaganda. They'll pick the facts that support their side and mix in lies without a second thought.

There are three truths in war: My side, their side, and the truth.

If they feel compelled to do something, poison the well by marking sites as suspected Russian propaganda. Otherwise, let me read what I want and make up my own mind.

If I wanted my search engine to play politics, I'd just use Google.

Re: DuckDuckGo “down-rank sites associated with Russian disinformation”

#96

Post by cato_the_elder »

eli wrote: post #57
TehShrike wrote: post #40

I want to use a search engine that puts all its effort into down-ranking sites that I'm not searching for

Doesn't seem incompatible. I assume most people searching for general news about Ukraine are not seeking for Russian state media's take on it.

> Doesn't seem incompatible.

Of course they are incompatible to some extent. Otherwise, explicit downranking of Russian sources would be pointless.

Re: DuckDuckGo “down-rank sites associated with Russian disinformation”

#97

Post by orhmeh09 »

ajsnigrutin wrote: post #73
uejfiweun wrote: post #3

I like DDG, but honestly, this is a really bad move. It is already harder for me to find certain sites in the rankings. I mean look at this, even searching for "drudge" doesn't even bring up a link to Drudge Report: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=drudge&t=h_&ia=web I liked DDG because it respected the user. Limiting what I can see in order to make sure I don't see "Russian disinformation" seems to me like the exact opposi…

Yep, search is getting more and more broken... I remember all the "trump vs reporters" etc. compilations, that were funny... now searching for any of those terms (basically anything at all involving trump, or now russia) ignores almost everything in the searchbox, ignores all the small creators, just picks out the one keyword (trump/russia/putin/...), and show the CNN/MSNBC/... news related to that one term, and unre…

It also tends to prioritize recency a lot. Good luck searching for something with terms that have been in the news lately.

Re: DuckDuckGo “down-rank sites associated with Russian disinformation”

#98

Post by freediver »

enragedcacti wrote: post #51
freediver wrote: post #22

I guess this did not age well: “[W]hen you search, you expect unbiased results, but that’s not what you get on Google,” @matthewde_silva quotes @yegg https://twitter.com/DuckDuckGo/status/1114524914227253249 Also, they probably do not realize that they will have to start with Twitter if to be consistent.

I really don't understand this view point. Isn't a search engine's entire job to effectively 'censor' the parts of the internet that aren't relevant or helpful to your search query? Is it censorship for them to downrank flat-earth content when you are trying to learn about how to chart a flight? Flat-earthers certainly have a lot of ideas about how charting a course on a flat earth works but that doesn't mean it's he…

There are many problematic aspects of DDG's decision, but here are just a couple of angles.

Both sides in the conflict spread disinformation. DDG desides to downrank only results related to disinformation from one side. This makes it a decision based on a political bias and not search quality bias (which would cause all disinformation to be downranked - which is OK and actually a desireable thing in a search engine). By not downranking disinformation from the other side, which is equally bad content, this steps out of the scope of what a search engine should be interested in doing.

Secondly, how in the world would DDG have the resources or capabilities to determine what is disinformation in the first place? Much larger companies like Facebook failed at this. It is generally considered that the 'fog of war' is a real thing and there is no single source of news on this planet that did not spread some disinformation at some point. DDG would probably have to downrank half of the sites in its results, and probably every site that ever published any information about this conflict, if they were to be consistent. Something like this is basically unenforcable from an engineering/algorithmic standpoint.

So basically from a business perspective, this has to be a bet that the publicity from this act would net them more users than they started with in the markets they care about.

Re: DuckDuckGo “down-rank sites associated with Russian disinformation”

#99

Post by wara23arish »

mrjangles wrote: post #20

Seriously what the f*ck makes Gabriel Weinberg think that myself, or anyone else, gives a damn about his personal opinion on what I should and should not be reading. The arrogance of these people is astounding. Also, absolutely zero of the standard base of Duck Duck Go users are the kind of people who don't understand what a Russian state controlled news site is, and why one would have to be careful reading it. Those…

You echoed my thoughts and thanks for the alternative. Ive been a user of DDG for years and have recommended it to people constantly.

Unfortunately since DDG caved today, they’ll certainly cave in the future. Its just a matter of time.

Re: DuckDuckGo “down-rank sites associated with Russian disinformation”

#100

Post by tenebrisalietum »

uejfiweun wrote: post #26
diego_moita wrote: post #11

Good! One more reason for me to remain a DDG user. This is the behaviour of responsible and accountable adults. "Censoring" is a word very badly understood and prone to manipulation. There are a lot of circumstances where suppression of information/opinion is justified: protecting intellectual property and copyrights, blocking doxing, prevent haters from doing harm against others, protection of military secrets or pe…

You're not wrong that they absolutely have the right to choose what results to display. Just like Twitter has the right to choose what content appears on their platform, and same with YouTube, etc. But my opposition is not from a legal standpoint, it is from a moral standpoint. I just think censorship and cancellation is wrong and immoral, even if it is legally allowed. I think it is immoral for some business executi…

> I think it is immoral for some business executive to make sweeping decisions about what the commoners are / aren't allowed to see

I used to have this point of view, but it's clear lately that certain types of information do not result in good outcomes if processed by the uneducated.

The U.S. is already going in the direction of a dystopia if you haven't noticed. More free speech isn't going to help gas, housing, or educational prices, but it does enable various actors at little to no cost to themselves to freely shit out emotional, illogical, and invective dreck on various platforms and prevent honest analysis and discussion from happening on numerous issues. If all of this is a guaranteed benefit to society it's getting harder and harder to see to lately.

I think the young people growing up today, who cannot afford a place to live, who have to go into years of debt just to get started, who are being looked down by previous generations for not starting a family when they literally don't have the resources to do it, are going to look at things vastly differently and really care less about this sort of thing from a hard absolute perspective.

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