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DuckDuckGo for Mac beta now open to the public

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Re: DuckDuckGo for Mac beta now open to the public

#21

Post by loceng »

TobyTheDog123 wrote: post #19
loceng wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you know if DDG also did the same - or perhaps their rankings were already captured by the likes of Reuters et al ("fact checkers") - for the COVID pandemic narrative? It's quite apparent their desired narrative is falling apart now, where a Pfizer executive publicly admitted they didn't even test for transmissabiity - meanwhile that was arguably the primary promotion point for the mRNA shots propagated by the cap…

I'm not very inclined to discuss mRNA on a tech forum, but "fact-checkers" do also fall under this kind of umbrella, yeah. Any large organization presenting what they claim to be the truth is subject to all sorts of unscientific biases, which is why it's so important that people aren't shouted down, that sites aren't de-ranked. If you let anyone but individual people decide their conclusions, it's a nice, paved, flow…

"P.S. For those who believe that putting "fact-checkers" in quotes is denying truth, promoting misinformation, etc, etc -- I put it in quotes because even giving them that title gives them more power than they should have."

It's part of the same problem of media et al referencing "experts" or "the science" - where the majority of society seems to blindly trust those words or concepts, trusting that the utterers of it are equally trustworthy.

Re: DuckDuckGo for Mac beta now open to the public

#22

Post by TobyTheDog123 »

jasonlotito wrote: post #18
TobyTheDog123 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know how you claim that you have not made yourselves the arbiters of truth after posting tweets like https://twitter.com/yegg/status/1501716484761997318 "At DuckDuckGo, we've been rolling out search updates that down-rank sites associated with Russian disinformation" and "we also often place news modules and information boxes at the top of DuckDuckGo search results (where they are seen and clicked the most) t…

There was an update clarifying that tweet. https://twitter.com/yegg/status/1515637392190935041

I saw it - it didn't help their case much:

>Search ranking and censorship are entirely different things. We make our results useful by ranking spam lower.

They're only different things if the ranking decision is based on relevance. If you de-rank something based on political agenda, that's censorship. But hey, it looks like they talk about that:

>We are not ranking based on any political agenda or my (or anyone else's) personal political opinions. We are also not assessing any individual news stories.

Why did the initial tweets say the opposite? Are they conflating "russian disinformation" with spam?

Frankly it reads like the PR hit was larger than they expected.

Re: DuckDuckGo for Mac beta now open to the public

#24

Post by loceng »

jasonlotito wrote: post #18
TobyTheDog123 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know how you claim that you have not made yourselves the arbiters of truth after posting tweets like https://twitter.com/yegg/status/1501716484761997318 "At DuckDuckGo, we've been rolling out search updates that down-rank sites associated with Russian disinformation" and "we also often place news modules and information boxes at the top of DuckDuckGo search results (where they are seen and clicked the most) t…

There was an update clarifying that tweet. https://twitter.com/yegg/status/1515637392190935041

The tweet:

"Search ranking and censorship are entirely different things. We make our results useful by ranking spam lower.

We are not ranking based on any political agenda or my (or anyone else's) personal political opinions. We are also not assessing any individual news stories."

Entirely different things? Are we supposed to just swallow that statement and pretend one doesn't cause suppression - even if it isn't 100% suppression like outright censorship is?

And, if it's not political, then why did the down-ranking occur after political incident.. and the rest of the tweet is trying to minimize.

Re: DuckDuckGo for Mac beta now open to the public

#25

Post by seanw444 »

yegg wrote: post #17
user3939382 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> censoring stories due to operating with very limited press freedom, and misleading readers about who owns, funds, and authors stories for the site So does this mean you're going to deprioritize The Hill for firing Katie Halper because she wanted to do a story calling the Israel/Palestine regime apartheid? Or the Washington Post owned by Bezos who is paid untold fortunes by the US intelligence apparatus, and whose r…

No, as it says on that referenced help page: "Many sites may occasionally do one or more of these things, but we take action very rarely, only in the most extreme cases...We trust that users can find the right information for themselves, so even in these rare cases we do not remove these sites from our search results page. Additionally, impacted sites are not moved so far down in the results that they are effectively…

Like the sibling comment says, that's not much better. To the majority of people who don't go that far down the list, and would have otherwise seen it if it weren't moved down the list, that information has been effectively hidden.

If you intend to make certain links harder to find, you have the same intentions as straight-up erasing them. It's those intentions I cannot get behind, because I don't trust a company's arbitrary morality to make those decisions, when you literally just get search results essentially verbatim from another search engine.

Re: DuckDuckGo for Mac beta now open to the public

#26

Post by chrisjc »

stuff4ben wrote: post #23

Other comments seem to say it's based on Webkit, but why not something like Mozilla Firefox? I stay as far away as I can from Chrome and Google, but Webkit doesn't seem like the answer. That being said, I may still try it.

The "The Browser" episode from the Acquired podcast might shed some light on the reasons why. If one of the key figures in the development of Mozilla and JavaScript didn't choose it for his own new browser, why would anyone else? :(

The Browser (with Brendan Eich, Chief Architect of Netscape + Mozilla and CEO of Brave) https://www.acquired.fm/episodes/the-browser-with-brendan-ei...

Re: DuckDuckGo for Mac beta now open to the public

#27

Post by hairofadog »

yegg wrote: post #6
seanw444 wrote: post #3

I used to be a fan of DuckDuckGo. I mained it as my search engine for a long while because it was better for privacy, and it gave me my choice. Then, they decided that they were the arbiters of truth, and they'd start censoring "Russian disinformation campaigns." Because apparently that's important to them. The fact that they also get most of their results from Bing also subtracts points. I also eventually realized t…

(I'm the CEO & Founder of DuckDuckGo.) It is simply not true that we have censored anything or made ourselves "the arbiters of truth." I realized I previously explained how our news rankings work very poorly on Twitter but I subsequently put out a clarification tweet[1] and then we made this help page with a much clearer (and detailed) explanation of how our news rankings work: https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-…

It must be so satisfying to wake up on the morning of a product announcement after a long development cycle, pour a nice hot cup of coffee, and then type `news.ycombinator.com` into the browser's address bar

Re: DuckDuckGo for Mac beta now open to the public

#28

Post by seanw444 »

vintagedave wrote: post #9
seanw444 wrote: post #3

I used to be a fan of DuckDuckGo. I mained it as my search engine for a long while because it was better for privacy, and it gave me my choice. Then, they decided that they were the arbiters of truth, and they'd start censoring "Russian disinformation campaigns." Because apparently that's important to them. The fact that they also get most of their results from Bing also subtracts points. I also eventually realized t…

Could you share more about this please? Some quick reading of SearxNG's docs* and testing out an instance** shows some very good search results. > If you run your own instance, it's better to share that instance with friends or family so they can dilute your search queries with theirs, and it makes it much harder for your instance to be tracked the same as they'd track you. Or, you can use a public instance which is…

Well all Searx does is act as a single-request-in, multiple-requests-out proxy. Whatever you search on it, you search on those same sites, just from the IP address of the Searx instance. They will assume your Searx instance is a person, and build a profile of its searches. Eventually, if you're the only one using it, and someone is able to link your search history on your Searx instance to your history on that same engine from before you used Searx, they have an uninterrupted search history / profile built on you.

Building a profile of one person using queries from multiple people is difficult, and it gives you plausible deniability if it's ever brought against you in some accusation.

So I guess I'm not entirely sure what you mean by clear state. If you mean clear state on the instance side of things, the point is that it doesn't really keep any state unless you want it to. The problem is the state that is stored on the search engine side of things.

The more people in your instance of choice, the more anonymous you become. But since you're not the one running the public instances, you don't have the power to tweak all the settings you may want to. There are plenty of public instances that have great defaults though, but you're ultimately trusting that instance owner to not log your queries as well. So make sure it's a trustworthy-enough instance. Or use multiple instances, as a counter to that.

Ultimately, even the worst-configured public Searx instance I've used in the past, was much better than using any mainstream search engine directly. The most important settings are which engines you want to pull results from. Most public instances don't let you set all of those, if I remember correctly. So being able to choose those may or may not be important to you. Again, some public instances have pretty good search engine settings.

Re: DuckDuckGo for Mac beta now open to the public

#29

Post by HelloMcFly »

loceng wrote: post #16
TobyTheDog123 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know how you claim that you have not made yourselves the arbiters of truth after posting tweets like https://twitter.com/yegg/status/1501716484761997318 "At DuckDuckGo, we've been rolling out search updates that down-rank sites associated with Russian disinformation" and "we also often place news modules and information boxes at the top of DuckDuckGo search results (where they are seen and clicked the most) t…

Do you know if DDG also did the same - or perhaps their rankings were already captured by the likes of Reuters et al ("fact checkers") - for the COVID pandemic narrative? It's quite apparent their desired narrative is falling apart now, where a Pfizer executive publicly admitted they didn't even test for transmissabiity - meanwhile that was arguably the primary promotion point for the mRNA shots propagated by the cap…

It almost beggars belief to have to say that of course the vaccine testing is on efficacy of infection prevention, not transmissibility. But wouldn't you know it? The less likely you are to get infected and the faster your body clears the virus, the less the virus is or can be transmitted. Yes, peak viral load for infections that do "breakthrough" may be the same as unvaccinated. That's not a smoking gun.

There is a lot of sinister stuff happening in our world, a lot of coordinated efforts against labor and the working class. Tying that narrative to a conspiracies about COVID vaccines rightly nudges you into conspiracy theorist territory.

And that is the last comment I will ever make about vaccines on this site.

Re: DuckDuckGo for Mac beta now open to the public

#30

Post by jorams »

sholladay wrote: post #14
elashri wrote: post #2

> All the app code – tab and bookmark management, our new tab page, our password manager, etc. – is written by our own engineers. For rendering, it uses a public macOS API, making it super compatible with Mac devices. Is this a new way of saying that they use Webkit?

For all practical purposes, yes. Technically, the article links to the WKWebView class. So it sounds like they aren’t directly using WebKit, but rather WebView, a cross-platform API that delegates rendering to the OS preferred rendering engine, which on Apple devices happens to be WebKit.

> they aren’t directly using WebKit, but rather WebView, a cross-platform API that delegates rendering to the OS preferred rendering engine, which on Apple devices happens to be WebKit.

WKWebView is a part of the WebKit API, so it always uses WebKit. As far as I know it's also a Cocoa API, so it's only cross-platform in the sense that it's available on both iOS and macOS.

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