291–300 of 865 posts
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All you have to do is scroll past the US misinformation, on past EU misinformation and you'll find it right there. Easy.
Sorry but it just isn't the same. Russia made it illegal -- punishable by 15 years in prison -- to accurately describe their invasion of Ukraine.
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What does down-ranking disinformation sites globally have to do with complaining about Google customizing results based on its profile of you? EDIT: The rest of the quote is “On Google, you get results tailored to what they think you’re likely to click on, based on the data profile they’ve built on you over time.”
And in this specific case, it feels more like quality control of state-sponsored spam. You can still find these sites—they come up first if you look for them directly, they're just treated as the low quality information than they are.
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analysts and historians saying "it's complicated"
But its not complicated at all. Ukraine is every year more prosperous and more connected to the west and Russia is weakening kleptocracy led by a disconnected, malicious, evil dictator that fears that if it doesn't seize the opportunity to return to its vision of a greater Russia that has a seat at the table in the grand scheme of things that it will ultimately be subsumed by either the west or by its own people who…
DuckDuckGo is Bing, we know this because when Bing accidentally censored all image searches for "tank man", all image results disappeared from DuckDuckGo as well. Bing already announced that they were doing this, so maybe DuckDuckGo doesn't have any choice about it. https://www.reuters.com/business/media-telecom/microsoft-rem... > The company said it would not display any state-sponsored RT and Sputnik content, de-ra…
Judging by the replies to this thread, I don't think anyone here knows what an algorithm is. How do you think any search engine on the planet "objectively" decides how to show you the top 10 results for a search term out of billions of possibilities? There are a thousand knobs constantly being turned behind the scenes depending on the preferences of the operator. "Non-biased search results" are impossible by definiti…
And making some stance about what results you should see based on a war that is going on is wrong. If someone searches for a keyword they should get back results that are relevant to the keyword. They should not have results filtered on this impression that those results come from paticular sources that are deemed by DDG as russian propaganda. Search engines are not supposed to filter out propaganda. That propaganda…
If RT / Sputnik use SEO to target the keyword “Ukraine conflict”, it creates a worse experience for users. Right now RT is not on the top page for that search term. I’m guessing that’s what they’re targeting.
If you search “rt Ukraine conflict”, the #1 result is RT. You can still easily find content you’re looking for.
It just won’t be part of those wide net searches I’m guessing.
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.
For me, this move by DDG will have the opposite effect of what is intended. I will now trust my own media and sources even less, if they rely on silencing the competition and insist on controlling what I access "for my own good". Such dirty tactics are insulting, even more so when delivered under a sneering benevolent guise. As if they have perfect knowledge of my motives and wishes. What if I'm genuinely curious as…
Suppose I go off and make a search engine, with my own algorithm for ranking search results. At first it works great. And then five years later, I find that, by a quirk in my algorithm, I find that a new site has risen to the top of all my results. This new site was created as a prank, and it contains authoritative-sounding but incorrect answers to common questions. The results returned are still relevant to my users…
IMO the difference is between web-wide decisions vs something else. DDG have stated they're specifically targetting something beyond web pages.
If DDG has some way of measuring "misinformation" then fair play, we can assume it isn't specific to Russia because it'd be a universal solution.
Some sort of decree from the CEO about what is true and what is not just sounds dangerous. We might not fully understand automation, as in all search engines, but it's a safe wager that he doesn't understand it any better otherwise he would've coded it in already and it'd be a non-story for the searchers of the world.
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I can't agree more. As a child I was brainwashed by US propaganda living on the western side of the Iron Curtain. The 'home of the brave and land of the free'. How lo g it took me to remove this naive Hollywood image of our friend the US from my mind. It took many long evenings of talking to actual people from the US while in university to learn more about the individual truths and lives instead of my rose tinted ima…
> Russian propaganda is more or less banned from German viewers (with RT and others being banned). is rt.com also banned?
DuckDuckGo is Bing, we know this because when Bing accidentally censored all image searches for "tank man", all image results disappeared from DuckDuckGo as well. Bing already announced that they were doing this, so maybe DuckDuckGo doesn't have any choice about it. https://www.reuters.com/business/media-telecom/microsoft-rem... > The company said it would not display any state-sponsored RT and Sputnik content, de-ra…
> maybe DuckDuckGo doesn't have any choice about it. Did you read the linked tweet? "At DuckDuckGo, we've been rolling out search updates that down-rank sites associated with Russian disinformation." Sounds like they very much had a choice, and chose censorship. If they didn't and are actually just subject to Bing's whims, then they're lying. Neither of those are good.
Suppose I go off and make a search engine, with my own algorithm for ranking search results. At first it works great. And then five years later, I find that, by a quirk in my algorithm, I find that a new site has risen to the top of all my results. This new site was created as a prank, and it contains authoritative-sounding but incorrect answers to common questions. The results returned are still relevant to my users…
Yes, your users aren't using your search engine as an oracle for the truth, they're using it to find pages with similar text. It's their job (and specifically not yours) to determine how well the text they find corresponds with reality. Perhaps they're even aware the site is factually incorrect and enjoy reading it for the novelty, perhaps they want to cite it to warn others that sometimes things online are wrong. You have no idea what the people are doing with the information.
Google has started censoring their results because they decided people should use their search engine as a truth oracle (with the results you would expect, lets not forget the "when did George Washington go to the moon" thing from a year or so ago.) I think that's a mistake and is a large part of the reason I use DuckDuckGo.
You may have caught this one instance but there are likely an unlimited number of others. You're not going to catch everything and you make your search engine worse with every exception you make to the algorithm.