191–200 of 865 posts
I used DDG in the past, because they did not tamper with the search results. Privacy is secondary to me. Now I switch to another search engine.
DDG has always been bold about downranking and deleting spam.
Based on this, if you have a distaste for censorship, you probably should use Brave Search instead of DuckDuckGo. [1] Also, if you are using DuckDuckGo to avoid gargantuan corporations, you should know that they are essentially Bing with some extra perks. Brave Search has its own index, it only falls back to Bing when it doesn't have enough results (which they claim happens only for a minority of queries). [1]: https…
Falls back to Google actually and semi-independent as explained here: https://seirdy.one/2021/03/10/search-engines-with-own-indexe...
> For <10% of queries where we don't have good results, we rely on Bing presently, so that fallback could be censored.
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.
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I want one which doesn't decide this for me, no-matter how "good for me" it may be, and relies exclusively on my search query to decide what is most relevant. If you really want to flag disinformation, I'd be fine with some sort percentage reliability value or something along those lines, right next to the result. Preferably something that I can also order results by. Totally happy with a 'caveat emptor' clause regar…
> Besides, what's so bad about access to "disinformation"? Disinformation doesn't just try to present an alternative view, it also tries to drown out other viewpoints. I don't think it's possible to accurately and neutrally present search results when bad actors try to subvert rankings. I think propaganda can be interesting, I don't think it should be banned. But penalizing it seems fair to me. I don't want other sea…
Yegg followed up with an argument about relevancy of results: "Search engines by definition try to put more relevant content higher and less relevant content lower -- that's not censorship, it's search ranking relevancy." – https://twitter.com/yegg/status/1501734648417865731 The other premise is that Russian disinformation is irrelevant by virtue of being disinformation – that a user of DDG wouldn't want to be manipu…
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>but do you really want your search engine to default to providing results from someone with a very clear agenda and a history of abusing their influence to carry out that agenda Have you met the US media? If you don't look at this massive coordinated effort and smell something fishy, I just don't know what to say.
So like, what, everyones keeping this big secret and its just schlubs like you and me kept in the dark?
Unfortunately, the alternatives to mainstream media (Q-idiots, Zero Hedge, Info Wars, random dude with an opinionated blog, some pot comedian's podcast, viral memes on facebook, etc), tend to be even worse. And for every time they may occasionally be right about something, there's another dozen times when they are laughably, pants-on-head wrong.
There's no easy solution to being informed... That you can just passively consume on your smartphone.
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…
> In case someone hasn't noticed, there is a war going on in Europe. That is a circumstance where some of these cases apply. Indeed, there's a war going on and there's a tremendous amount of propaganda being circulated from both sides. The question is, why is DDG okay with amplifying Ukranian/NATO propaganda and not Russian propaganda? Is it because NATO is the "good" guy and Russia is the "bad" guy? When the US inva…
One difference, though, is that GWB never put anyone in prison for talking about the Iraq "war" or about how much the US government lied about WMD.
> Is it because NATO is the "good" guy and Russia is the "bad" guy?
I don't know that NATO is the "good" guy, but Ukraine is in this story (and they're not part of NATO). I'm saddened that it took about 2 days of everybody being in shock about the war until all the Russia apologists started re-emerging. One nation is brutally attacking another sovereign nation in complete violation of all international law and at the same time threatening the world with nuclear war. To me it's clear who the "bad" guy is.
So, how does this make any sense for ddg? I don't get it, I really don't Why would they self sabotage like this? Ever?
Sometimes you can get as rich purposefully trashing a product as you can taking it to a moderate success. Look at Firefox.
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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 th…
Pretending that both sides are equal is not always helpful. Bad actors do exist, and pretending that everything is equally indeterminate is a fatally nihilistic and dangerous view. Sometimes we actually can tell when something is a lie, and we should treat it appropriately. For a tool that retrieves genuine results matching a query, that means down-ranking them.
For the purposes of current event queries, disinformation is certainly spam. The purpose of spam is to fool you into doing something you probably wouldn't otherwise do, usually based on false pretenses. Disinformation is the same. The action it promotes is more indirect - it seeks to influence beliefs, and therefore voting patterns and soft power - but it is still spread with a purpose that is disingenuous. It disguises it's true intent and is dangerous to the user. It is effectively spam applied to the domain of politics and current events, and should be treated as spam is. It should not be a valid result in an information retrieval service.
I agree that this ranking could be the start of a slippery slope. But DDG is being transparent, and you can still get to RT if you disagree. This is a good measure for people unfamiliar with Russia news sources and propaganda networks, who are the people most likely to be susceptible to Russian propaganda.