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Comment by marcoseliziario | Hacker News Reader

DDG is more neutral in political themes. You usually see some results that you wouldn't see on the first page on google. Google still has a slight advantage when searching for technical info, but most of times DDG is good enough for them too.

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Obviously lacks the privacy aspect, but I've noticed Bing is also politically neutral.

This seems to be a Google-specific problem.

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Example that I just double-checked: (I don't claim any political views here; JUST an example)

Reddit's largest subreddit for a political candidate is r/The_Donald. Objectively, a rather popular site.

Google (with or without SafeSearch) returns zero results for "Reddit The_Donald" linking to the subreddit. [1] It's only results are indirect discussions about the subreddit.

Whereas DuckDuckGo, Bing, and Yahoo show the subreddit itself as the very first result. [2] [3] [4] (https://np.reddit.com/r/The_Donald/ which is Reddit's public non-logged in site.)

So Google won't display a high-traffic site. I can only assume they find the content objectionable and so will not link directly to it. I understand how some may want that, but that's not a simply not a service I want my search engine to perform, especially when SafeSearch is disabled.

[1] https://www.google.com/search?q=Reddit+The_Donald

[2] https://duckduckgo.com/?q=Reddit+The_Donald

[3] https://www.bing.com/search?q=Reddit+The_Donald

[4] https://search.yahoo.com/search?p=Reddit+The_Donald

Google doesn't look like it indexs any subreddits under the np.reddit.com subdomain.

That's a red herring. All subreddit content is available under both www.reddit.com and np.reddit.com. (I'm not 100% sure why Reddit has both.)

Example:

r/ChapoTrapHouse is a left-leaning political subreddit (and in the interest of true apples-to-apples comparison, also has a content warning by Reddit like the earlier example).

"Reddit ChapoTrapHouse" has top results for www. or np. from all search engines.

* Google: https://www.reddit.com/r/ChapoTrapHouse/ [1]

* DuckDuckGo: https://np.reddit.com/r/ChapoTrapHouse/ [2]

* Bing: https://np.reddit.com/r/ChapoTrapHouse/ [3]

* Yahoo: https://np.reddit.com/r/ChapoTrapHouse/ [4]

[1] https://www.google.com/search?q=Reddit+ChapoTrapHouse

[2] https://duckduckgo.com/?q=Reddit+ChapoTrapHouse

[3] https://www.bing.com/search?q=Reddit+ChapoTrapHouse

[4] https://search.yahoo.com/search?p=Reddit+ChapoTrapHouse

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I'd love a simpler explanation than "Google being politically biased Big Brother", but I can't see one.

> All subreddit content is available under both www.reddit.com and np.reddit.com. (I'm not 100% sure why Reddit has both.)

np.reddit.com stands for "no participation". np.reddit.com disables comment and voting. It's intended so that links to niche subreddits from popular subreddits like /r/BestOf don't result in a flood of outsider activity that disrupts the niche subreddit.

"np" is being treated as a country code, like every other two letter string. xy.reddit.com also works. Country codes were meant for localization.

Somehow moderators decided to start using it for "no participation", and many subreddits use custom CSS to disable commenting and voting on np.reddit.com/r/whatever. But np.reddit.com with custom styles off works just like normal reddit.

I'm sure Nepal is very offended.

The parent poster was inputting the search term "Reddit The_Donald"

(https://www.google.com/search?q=Reddit+The_Donald)

Whether or not you are logged into Reddit, the first page of Google results (and I suspect the rest of them) don't display the actual link to the /r/The_Donald subreddit. It _does_ link to a bunch of articles about how the sub was quarantined, and the first result (for me) is a wikipedia page.

The singular form of "data" isn't "anecdote".

If you search "news" on Google, the 2nd result is Fox News[1] (first being Google News). Half the suggested articles by Google on my phone are from Fox News, even though I've never clicked on any article from there. I do not use that to conclude that Google is politically biased.

1. https://www.google.com/search?q=news

It's generally poor form to direct link a Google search as a reference as you can never be sure if the results will be the same tomorrow or if the person clicking it will get personalized results that differ from those you get.

I agree with that too. That's how GP was providing "evidence" for their claims, however, so it seemed a fitting way to respond.

I thought that DDG is effectively a (privacy-preserving) front-end on Bing, so it makes sense that Bing would give the same or similar results. (Maybe they're doing some of their own indexing these days? I haven't been paying close attention.)

That would make sense why I've noticed the same sorts of results.

r/The_Donald is "quarantined" by Reddit, which means you get a gateway page if you visit for the first time, asking if you really want to visit it (try an incognito window). In the HTML, you'll see that there's a "noindex" metatag that Reddit is instructing Google not to index it.

Also, np.reddit.com seems to be excluded from all search engines: https://np.reddit.com/robots.txt.

I'm not sure why Bing is ignoring both the robots.txt and the "noindex" metatag.

In another comment [1] I compare this with a pro-Marxist subreddit which is similarly "quarantined" and has noindex.

Google indexes it perfectly. [2]

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21316065

[2] https://www.google.com/search?q=Reddit+ChapoTrapHouse

I understand why one might expect r/The_Donald and r/ChapoTrapHouse to have similar results, since they're both politically extreme subreddits. But after having worked in SEO for a pretty long time, I can't conclude that Googlebot is evaluating political affiliation with n=2 examples on n=1 sites. Instead, incoming links quality/quantity, popularity, competition, newsworthiness, age, and dozens of other ordinary differences between these pages and queries are usually the reason. Even the underscore in The_Donald likely matters.

It can get pretty frustrating to rank #1 or #2 for a query, and not rank at all for a slightly different, higher-traffic query, like using the plural, a hyphen, different capitalization, or an article.

It could be that Bings index is outdated.

I'll second this - Google is starting to hide things that it deems objectionable and I've found myself using DDG now and then for controversial topics.

Sometimes I find myself searching for something I specifically remember in the past, but I can only find one side of the story. Then I remember, "oh yeah, I have to use duckduckgo for political subjects."

Google's bias has gotten especially noticeable this past year.

I'm glad that we are at a point where we can point out obvious political bias by Google without being trashed as nutjob conspiracy theorists.

But now they have all the Fox News crackpot stories featured in the news feed. What bias?

You do know that DDG just serves Bing organic results, right ?

People keep saying this, but from what I could find on DDG's website, Bing is just one of several sources they use, one of which is their own crawler.

No need to take my word for it, just search on both and look at the 10 blue links.

Makes you think why they present Google as compromising your privacy, but they're dead-silent when it comes to Microsoft. Or Yandex, their other search partner.

I just tried this and the first 2 results matched up, but the rest were different. And not just ordering (on the first page at least) — DuckDuckGo had some Bing didn't, and vice versa.

What was your query ?

If all DuckDuckGo did was proxy my search request through to Bing while stripping away all identifying information, while not storing any identifying information themselves, they would still achieve the goal of securing my privacy.

It's not about search engines seeing search requests, it's about tying them to particular people.

Privacy is a big deal, but even when privacy is guaranteed it's still a problem that the public's ability to find information on the Internet is effectively controlled by two large tech companies, Google and Microsoft. I hope that eventually we have a lot more competing search engines.

Whatever makes you happy as a user. If they make you think your privacy is respected, all the more power to you.

It really boils down to this: Can you trust a small company that chooses to grow via smearing campaigns, provides sub-par results, and _claims_ that it protects your data while sometimes feeding your queries off-shore, or the tech leader that tells you exactly what it knows about you, allows you to search privately and is widely believed to be the best search offering ?

Is that a serious question? I trust DDG infinitely more than I trust google, because google openly admits they are abusing me where as DDG states in clear writing that they are not. I mean it is possible that DDG is lying, but what could they do that is _worse_ than google?

You have misinterpreted my post. It is an "if-then" statement, not a claim about whatever DDG may currently do.

However, I will say that I don't see a hell of a lot of point in playing more-contrarian-than-thou on this topic. If DDG put its entire staff onto full time evil, they still could not, in my personal opinion, match Google. Contrarianess may feel good and be fun in internet posts, but it's no way to actually make decisions.

Just tried with diffeomorphism. The first two links to wikipedia and mathworld are the same (also the first links on google). Everything else is different.

But don't let facts get in the way of your "makes you think" theories.

8 out of 10 results are identical. ddg returns a Japanese result on the first page for some reason.

10 first links from Bing:

1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffeomorphism

2 mathworld.wolfram.com/Diffeomorphism.html

3 https://encyclopedia2.thefreedictionary.com/diffeomorphism

4 https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/301364/what-is-a-di...

5 https://www.encyclopediaofmath.org/index.php/Diffeomorphism

6 https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/diffeomo...

7 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffeomorphism_invariance

(8) dictionary.sensagent.com/Diffeomorphism/en-en

9 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Local_diffeomorphism

(10) https://ipfs.io/.../wiki/Diffeomorphism.html

10 first links from ddg:

1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffeomorphism

2 mathworld.wolfram.com/Diffeomorphism.html

3 https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/301364/what-is-a-di...

4 https://www.encyclopediaofmath.org/index.php/Diffeomorphism

5 https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/diffeomo...

6 https://encyclopedia2.thefreedictionary.com/diffeomorphism

7 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Local_diffeomorphism

8 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffeomorphism_invariance

(9) https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/760433/prove-that-f...

(10) https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/微分同相写像

It's more complicated than that. Bing sells results and charges a lot, Yahoo BOSS used to sell 2 different levels of results, one older (and cheaper) than the normal Bing feed and one much older (and even cheaper.)

So if it's a query with a lot of temporal churn in the results, it's easy to be confused.

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