Comment by seanw444
4 years ago
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 that I was still giving a company all of my search queries, and companies are eventually too greedy to trust. It's only a matter of time before DDG becomes the next Google, after hype for Google dies, and everyone knows DDG as that upcoming cool kid.
Now, I just spend $6/month on a DigitalOcean droplet and run a SearxNG instance on it. Until I can get it moved over to my physical server at home, that's a much better option for my privacy and freedom of access to information. Who needs Google, or Bing, or DDG, or Yahoo, etc.; when you can have all of them in a single search?
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 better for privacy, but worse for security and customizability.
(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-help-pages/results/ne...
[1] "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." https://twitter.com/yegg/status/1515637392190935041
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
What you have basically done here is say "we only downrank spam" (this is fine), and then said "state-sponsored news is inherently spam" (this is not).
You are using a definition of "spam" that is not commonly held or understood by those who would be your users. Whether or not this is for a noble reason, this renders it a dark pattern. This is not only a violation of the principle of least astonishment, your explanation comes off as deceptive. You are making a value judgment on truth and working that into the product while claiming you are not making a value judgment.
Relevance and truth are two different things. It is not your job to be making calls on the second one, and I find your willful conflation of these concepts, and attempts to deflect from the fact that you have done so to be a bit gross.
> we rely on multiple non-governmental and non-political organizations that specialize in objectively assessing journalistic standards.
This is a vaguely worded workaround for applying censorship, especially without giving a specific list of organizations that they consult. The use of the term "objective" is very sneaky here, even manipulative. I didn't realize DuckDuckGo did this - how disappointing.
Time to start trying other search engines, perhaps a proxied or self-hosted one like SearXNG as GP suggested.
https://docs.searxng.org/
> then said "state-sponsored news is inherently spam
So BBC is spam according to them?
> 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 reporter listed her news agency as "Amazon" on a sign in sheet to interview Assange?
Do you consider RT (a huge Russian news network) misleading about who "owns, funds, and authors its stories"?
I'm sorry, but I don't think you "accidentally made a bad tweet" -- you tried to publicly jump on the Ukraine bandwagon for cheap political points, it backfired, and you've been backpedaling ever since.
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 removed. Unless legally prohibited, you should find all media outlets in our results, and they should generally show on top if you search for them by name or domain name. If you see otherwise, please let us know and we will investigate."
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> Search ranking and censorship are entirely different things
They are not, actually. Especially when you already have made your plans public previously based on your reaction to a political situation.
Hi, didn't expect to see you here.
I have a question I always wanted to ask. Why should people trust your privacy centric services when you are famous for your previous project which was essentially a pyramid scheme for harvesting user data, which you then sold along with the data? Any rational person would expect DDG to also be a user data harvesting scheme.
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) to highlight quality information for rapidly unfolding topics"
Your post here and your tweets tell completely contradictory stories, which only harms your credibility more.
A search engine does have to make a judgement call on what results to rank over other results. However, making that call based on anything but relevancy to the user's query means I'm not going to take your search engine seriously. If anyone but the user is deciding what "russian disinformation" is, you've already lost the game.
Personally, that's fine for me: I don't have to take my search engine seriously to use it, and I dont turn to search engines for my news anymore. In fact, I think the only things I use engines for these days are a replacement for the StackOverflow search bar...
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 captured MSM (arguably primarily by big pharma), by politicians (captured heavily by big pharma, enough to be toeing their line); and where Pfizer's CEO at last minute cancelled his in-person testimonial to EU parliament inquiry - arguably because they know they've been caught and will be held accountable by those who aren't toeing their line/profiting from it.
This is the "new" war using "soft" power, a war against all of society that arguably billions of people are now awake to; which speaking of it gets you flagged and lazily downvoted as "conspiracy theorist" to suppress a seemingly endless and growing amount of concrete proof points to support the hypothesis of what's actually going on.
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There was an update clarifying that tweet.
https://twitter.com/yegg/status/1515637392190935041
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Thank you for this clarification!
He "clarified" by twisting and lying about the situation. Simply said - down-ranking is censorship, whether you agree with it or not. Pushing a result to page 3 or 4 in a search engine means that 99.99% of people won't see it, effectively hiding (ie. censoring) it from public view.
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 better for privacy, but worse for security and customizability.
Is there no way to clear all state after each query, or every 24 hours, etc? I'd wonder if sharing with family just means you'd build a closer data association with them. Or, what kind of things do you find important to customise (and why?) that aren't configured by public SearxNG instances?
* https://docs.searxng.org
** https://searx.space/
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.