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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”

#351

Post by thepasswordis »

awb wrote: post #331
AmVess wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They just murdered any goodwill they had built up. I just switched to Yandex (Russian search). At least Yandex doesn't pretend to be something that it isn't.

What? Do you do this in other elements of your life? “I’m not going to drink this veggie smoothie because they started adding honey and I don’t think sugar is healthy. I’m going to drink soda where at least they don’t try to hide that you’re drinking sugar.”

Yes, I do this with other parts of my life. One of the most frustrating experiences I ever had grocery shopping was when I tried to buy "fancy" mayonnaise at whole foods. I was trying to cook something "nice" and wanted to get the good stuff, so that's where I went.

The package said in bold letters, "Mayonnaise!" or some such, and what I didn't realize until I got home was that it wasn't actually mayonnaise, but some sort of vegan/literally not mayonnaise alternative.

I wanted mayonnaise, I asked for mayonnaise, and I got something whole foods thought was healthier.

Now when I'm shopping at WF (rarely), I am extra vigilant about making sure that what I am seeing on the label is actually what I am getting in the container. In fact, I try to avoid "fancy" alternatives to normal foods, because I find that they often replace normal ingredients with things they think are better for me.

But I don't want that! I just want mayo, just give me mayo!

I've also had this where I buy sour cream, or cottage cheese, and get home to find out that it has, in tiny letters, "reduced fat sour cream!" - NO! I want the fat in that sour cream or cottage cheese, that's literally why I'm buying it!

edit: interestingly the mayo was actually called "just mayo", but that's newspeak. It literally is not mayo at all, it is a substitute for mayo that they think tastes similar. So "JUST MAYO" actually contains nothing that is mayo.

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

#353

Post by giaour »

pessimizer wrote: post #207
giaour wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did DDG say they're upranking "good" propaganda and downranking "bad" propaganda? What I understood from the tweets is that DDG is downranking propaganda. Russia happens to produce a lot of it, so they'd be more impacted.

No, what they said is that they're downranking "sites associated with Russian disinformation", not "propaganda." If what you understood is different than that, it's different that what the tweet directly says.

Source reputation is an important heuristic for determining whether a given piece is content is likely to be spam. If a web property is demonstrated to be routinely publishing falsehoods to sway public opinion, you don't think that should factor into a site's reputation score?

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

#354

Post by awb »

hidden-spyder wrote: post #343

Why not provide a toggle that allows unfiltered results for those who want that? This way, they can both filter out propaganda away from those who might be vulnerable and still let those who want it have it.

Maybe call it “controversial” similar to Reddit.

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

#355

Post by helen___keller »

spoils19 wrote: post #321
helen___keller wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. I’m confident this is factually incorrect for a very very large subset of searches. Probably a majority.

Could you source what you're basing your facts on? I know many people like myself are just looking to expand on the text we're searching for, and letting the free market decide what's a good search result.

The best supporting data is the rise in no-click searches. See https://sparktoro.com/blog/in-2020-two-thirds-of-google-sear...

No-click searches continue to grow in share while google continues to adopt design that presents information outside a traditional link, like a weather widget or the fact you were looking for presented at the top in large text outside the scope of a link.

This suggests a growing share of searches weren’t looking for links in the first place, they were looking for information and when the search engine provided that information, the user left without clicking a link

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

#356

Post by colinmhayes »

spoils19 wrote: post #344
colinmhayes wrote: post #327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is people choosing which search engine they use based off the results it returns not the free market in action?

It is not transparent what kind of curations take place to return the results. You cannot have a free market without transparency, and while DDG are announcing this now, they have no obligation to in the future. Previously the status quo was "we don't curate", now it's "we curate but announce it". What's the chance that they will no longer announce it in the future?

> It is not transparent what kind of curations take place to return the results.

This is true for all search engines because it's literally impossible to return even half decent results if everyone knows your algorithm. It'll just be pages and pages of SEO nonsense. If you believed for even a second that search engines can exist without curating you haven't been thinking very hard. Not curating would only ensure that you see nothing but propaganda.

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

#357

Post by shadowgovt »

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.

That comment shouldn't have aged well one nanosecond after it was posted.

Search results are bias. The entire idea of a "search engine" is to bias the set of all possible data in the crawled universe to select for the information you're searching for, then sort that information by "likeliest to be what you wanted" because the interface can't just cram all the results straight into your brain.

... and the company writing the search engine is always the final arbiter of what that means in implementation.

In this specific case, DDG is announcing they are aware of some sites where the information is likely to be untrue and they're downranking it on account of it being a datasource unlikely to deliver what the user wants. That's their job, in exactly the same sense that it's their job to figure out that when I search for "hacker news" I mean this site and not the r/hackernews Reddit mirror.

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

#358

Post by foxfluff »

michaelmrose wrote: post #159
OtomotO wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Disinformation doesn't just try to present an alternative view, it also tries to drown out other viewpoints." So, basically what is done now by downranking "disinformation", right?

If I want to know if a Foobar Baz Sedan is a good car then legit reviews and spam generated by paid shills aren't equally useful and since there is a finite time available to produce quality content having 1000x more spam will make it absolutely impossible for the real information to be obtained by anyone. Searching google for war in ukraine returns over 2 billion results. It is impossible not to privilege some infor…

> Searching google for war in ukraine returns over 2 billion results.

Google always lies about the number of results. You'll see the real number once you dig in. First screenshot shows what you get by default, second shows what you get after you enable "omitted results."

https://imgur.com/a/pgiTYuV

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

#359

Post by Imnimo »

ricardo81 wrote: post #340
Imnimo wrote: post #323

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So if I could only detect this one prank site, but did not have a way to detect and downrank all prank sites at once, you would say it's invalid for me to just take action against the one I know about, since that's not a universal solution?

define prank. dictionary definition (according to Google) >a practical joke or mischievous act. Maybe if that's the definition then all Twitter parody accounts need to be removed. Would you agree?

Well that depends. If my position were that you have to act via "web-wide decisions" and "universal solutions", then I might conclude that my only options were to leave up all prank sites, including those damaging the usefulness of my search results, or remove everything including harmless parody accounts.

On the other hand, if I were to accept that it's valid to target individual sites or subsets of sites only as they become a problem, then I might conclude that removing this one troublesome prank site that is pointing my users to bad information does not require me to take action against random twitter parody accounts.

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

#360

Post by latexr »

decadancer wrote: post #294
kats wrote: post #168

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…

How exactly is it bing? Refaced and operated by microsoft? Refaced and scrapped results from bing? Any more info on this?

> Any more info on this?

https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/so...

> We also of course have more traditional links in the search results, which we also source from multiple partners, though most commonly from Bing (and none from Google).

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