Comment by yegg
4 years ago
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."
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.
But how isn't this disingenuous? The reason you'd de-rank is because less users then get exposed to whatever narratives/information you want hidden, the reason why you de-rank.
Users use a search engine for passive exposure to a mix of information for them to then scan, ideally reviewing multiple sources thoroughly, for them then to make a determination/conclusion.
And certainly DDG would have actual statistics on the direct impact the down-ranking had/has, but not the statistics on the externalized impact of how that cascades - e.g. you're biasing their knowledge towards whatever has become the dominant/"acceptable" narrative and reducing the likelihood (greatly) by who sees competing narratives.
In general with searches, what % of clicks occur within say the first 2-3 pages, and were the Russian sites de-ranked to after those 2-3 pages?
Where do 80% of the clicks go for most search - within how many pages of results? Were the sites de-ranked passed that point?