231–240 of 252 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you are not a Bing frontend, do you think it would be please possible to unblock our Fortran webpage at fortran-lang.org? See here for details: https://fortran-lang.discourse.group/t/fortran-lang-no-longe... Bing decided to remove it for some reason and DDG now also removes it from search results, presumably because it uses Bing underneath. For Google it's #1 page when you search "fortran".
Yes, I'll look into it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
DDG may not be the best if you want to avoid political meddling. I switched to Brave after https://web.archive.org/web/20220831110219/https://twitter.c...
I get so tired of seeing yegg raked over the coals for this one. A search engine by definition takes an editorial stance on things. They take in all of the internet and decide what to present to users. For a search engine to take no editorial position is to yield the floor to whoever can best game the system, and a propaganda machine like Russia's is absolutely capable of exploiting a search engine that doesn't proac…
That editorial stance should be "show the user what they are looking for and want to see". The customer is always right, otherwise the real customer is someone else.
> For a search engine to take no editorial position is to yield the floor to whoever can best game the system
I am not against search engines having heuristics against state-sponsored propaganda, but there is no need for those heuristics to single out a particular state. Russian state-sponsored content shouldn't be treated differently than American, Chinese, Ukrainian, or any other state's propaganda.
The sole benefit of DDG is their claim that they don't track. One problem with this narrow focus is that many people mistakenly carry this statement over to an assumption that DDG doesn't censor their search results. I suspect that DDG both knows and counts on this as an aspect of an undeserved reputation. DDG's search results aren't acceptable for anything even mildly controversial. I'll use them for image searches,…
(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 in this help page with a much clearer (and detailed) explanation of how our news rankings actually work: https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/res…
> When we apply our own ranking signals we do so in a strictly non-political manner, meaning we don’t evaluate or otherwise take into account any potential political bias or leanings of websites in our search result rankings.
Yeah? What about that?
https://www.reddit.com/r/PrivacyGuides/comments/tb6cj8/duckd...
I mean, I get it, it's a public-facing service, some guard-rails should be present. But political censorship on a search-engine that poses itself as a "good guy" privacy focused search engine? On a search engine that is used by default in a Tor browser? That is just an unacceptable abuse and misrepresentation.
And judging by their press releases, DDG seems to be quite proud of themselves fighting "misinformation". I mean, even if it came from the good intentions, it had essentially broken the core search functionality to the point it where works far worse than google or any other search engine. And if that's the case, what is even the point?
If you are researching some political topic, don't ever use DDG, they will 1984 your search results and act like they did good. It's like their target userbase aren't even educated engineers, but silly gullible grans who need curated experience.
P.S. If you search "duckduckgo censorship" in different search engines, DDG's first result labels anyone complaining as "far right", ironic. Seems like every other search engine is "far right" these days, judging by sheer brokennes of DDG compared to others.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Politics is about how you think things should be run. Science is about what we have evidence for. They are not the same thing.
Science is about coming up with a hypnosis or theory and testing it. The evidence comes at the end not before the theory
I was able to convince my wife to switch for anything remotely "controversial", when, during the pandemic, we caught the relatively "real time" disappearance of several "against the grain" articles about covid [1]. By disappeared, I mean top results for the rough concept one day to not being able to find it, even with the exact title and text, the next. I want a search engine, more than a curated guide. [1] https://w…
x-posting from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35980374 (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 in this help page with a much clearer (and detailed) explanation of how our news rankings actuall…
This is far too vague. Last year Bazbaz told Recode that sites like RT and Sputnik were "extreme" cases (https://www.vox.com/recode/22981115/duckduckgo-free-speech-p...). While I tend to agree, which other sites are extreme cases? This isn't published. Despite the claim that none of this is done for political reasons, I find it hard to trust that these "non-governmental and non-political organizations" act and are chosen without any bias. Your method isn't published or explained. I really think these organisations should, at minimum, be listed. So too should all the sites DDG considers to be "extreme" cases. Then we could decide if we think DDG is being politically neutral.
My confidence in DDG is shaken, and I don't think I'm alone. We live in a world where so many major software brands we love have made overt moves towards censorship on political grounds. If DDG could prove they reject this authoritarianism I think it would serve as a major USP.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The main thing I still use Google for is when I want to look up offline stuff near me. DDG uses a rough location, but even if I zoom in on their maps near me it's missing a whole lot of local stores etc. For other searches I usually try DDG first and only fall back on !g when the results are bad, and often the Google results are also bad in those cases.
We have precise user location that is still anonymous to us (by sending a nearish location based on the browser location). Have you tried turning that on? More info at https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/privacy/an...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The main thing I still use Google for is when I want to look up offline stuff near me. DDG uses a rough location, but even if I zoom in on their maps near me it's missing a whole lot of local stores etc. For other searches I usually try DDG first and only fall back on !g when the results are bad, and often the Google results are also bad in those cases.
I was just using Google maps yesterday to find a restaurant I knew was there. But it wasn't showing up on the map. Then I noticed it was omitting about half the restaurants in the area. The place I was looking for finally showed up when I zoomed almost all the way into it, and then clicked "search this area." I don't know why they are leaving out so many search results on maps these days. Just a few weeks ago, I was…
Remember Goto [1]? The search engine that at the time was much maligned for letting people ... buy sponsored results and arguing it made their results better...
Goto became Overture...
Overture was bought by Yahoo.
But where Yahoo faded away, Google has largely become Goto 2.0.
There are narrow niches where that model works for users. When you're specifically searching for a shop for example, it's often ok.
But for everything else it's absolutely awful.
[1] https://thehistoryoftheweb.com/goto-forgotten-search-engine/
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Nobody knew if covid was airborne at the time, so the most correct answer was nobody knows. Some people got lucky by making things up on the spot and guessed it was airborne. At a certain point their confirmation bias and distrust of media broke their perception of the world and they became antivax etc, still no critical thinking taking place.
Many did not know and took extra steps like wearing a mask. What the experts did was say anyone wearing masks is racist against asian people. Their was no vaccine at this point so no one against it yet. The critical thinking can be found in the independent minds of those who made the choice to wear a mask. Listening to an expert didn't play out well.
To make it short (my humble conclusion): Google is using too much UI space to fill with ads and too many websites hacked the SEO algorithm, creating bad quality information pages getting in the top results.