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Comment by Barrin92 | Hacker News Reader

> but it's interesting to see that many things are not censored away in comparison to Bing and Google (political correctness, copyright, nsfw etc. etc.).

I am not aware that there is a censorship of things that are deemed 'politically incorrect' by either bing or google, and Yandex does comply with European copyright law and other EU legislation like the right-to-be-forgotten.

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As an illusory example only, and definitely not as an endorsement, and chosen only because it is the extremes of acceptable speach that are most likely to be censured; consider these search results for "Daily Stormer"

https://www.google.com/search?q=daily+stormer&oq=daily+storm...

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=daily+stormer

DDG provides the link to the site as their first result; Google provides links to information about the site.

Again, I am not endorsing the site; it is simply an obvious example of search result differentiation between DDG and Google.

A stark difference. Is Google on the record about what their view is on this sort of thing?

I suppose the two scenarios that leap to mind are (1) Google is social engineering or (2) they have good reason to believe that nobody searching for the Daily Stormer actually wants to see the website. It'd be interesting to know if there is a 3rd.

I wonder if the rank is based on which options are clicked the most... I wouldn't put it past google to keep track of which link is clicked the most for each search and use that to 'improve the links'

It could be a massive conspiracy to keep people from seeing some third rate website.

You notice that the results aren't direct links, but redirects through Google first? That seems to support your first alternative.

They don't need to reroute through a url to do tracking, they could do that in JS. The rerouting probably is used for tracking but it also serves the purpose of flushing your search terms out of the referer header.

Maybe they have an AI that ingests thinkpieces and twitter feeds lambasting them for insufficient censorship, and based on the strength of sentiment and number of retweets apply additional censorship to the specific examples listed, with the cost function being something like f(likelihood_of_negative_public_opinion) + g(impact_on_search_quality).

If I were to do this I'd allow penalized results to resurface from time to time, and leave it up if nobody tweets too hard.

Google knows that when I type 'rails' into their search box I mean Ruby on Rails and gives me relevant results, instead of railroad tracks or hand rails.

It's not a big leap to think they'd do that globally for extreme results like DS where most people want to know about them and not actually visit the site.

It's a website. Shouldn't your first stop be visiting the site itself to form your own opinion?

Yes but in many countries this can get you into legal trouble.

You still can, obviously.

It's simply more probable that I would prefer a site that contains expert analysis of a topic/subject first.

So at what point will Google look at your search history and decide that you are looking for racism when you search for a racist term?

I don’t think anyone on here will admit if it’s happening to them, but if the answer is never then that means Google is suppressing the “best” search results due to political reasons.

For a less charged example, Google won’t show pornography as the first result for a fetish term, ever. It will always show a clean page with Wikipedia as the first result regardless of safe search.

How do you even get it to show non safe for work results?

> decide that you are looking for racism

Given that there are definitely people that I have personally met that keep complaining "they keep getting racist results" in Google and Youtube, I'm guessing we are already there. As for how they build up this profile, I'm sure the people that actually know aren't allowed to tell us.

I know that website has been heavily censored, so it's possible there is fool play here, but it's also possible that it's simply different algorithms.

If Google weighs links to a certain page, it's not a stretch to imagine that fewer websites would directly link to that particular website, and refer to its name instead. But maybe Bing has some rule that gives priority to the domain name.

this is why https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2017/08/1...

The first thing I see on DDG is the Wikipedia page describing their site. They must be reading this.

Well there's a few things in here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_by_Google

Am a staunch gun-control type, but there certainly has been evidence of google censoring political causes they disagree with. This is not the way forward. It's incredibly hard to have a discussion with someone who clearly has a point about the masses being dictated what they see/think by a Google search. These sort of things do not advance civil discourse and only serve to inflame it in an "us against them" mentality.

It became increasingly hard to find EPUBs with DDG or Google.

Is it really? Looking for Calibre libraries is basically considered meme-level effort in places like /r/opendirectories ...

Just because it's in /r/opendirectories doesn't mean it's in google or on the first pages.

What I meant is, the sub is full of cut-and-paste suggestions on how to make google searches for that sort of thing, because it really is trivial. This stuff is in google. Maybe it's de-emphasized by algos, but it's definitely there.

I can recommend to just use a NZB search engine for it (during Black Friday deals you can get a for life account for 10-30 EUR). Combined with a Usenet block server (also available cheap during sales), this should not cost you much data or money. And you can use it for Sonarr/Radarr as well, if you want to burn some more data.

Speaking of searching, does Qwant support dorks (no pun intended)?

There are differences in search results for sure. Political correctness is also a very broad field. Depending on topic it is sometimes biased and even filtered (e.g. nsfw content) by Google/Bing or search results in Google are too much SEO hacked in comparison to Yandex on first pages. I've never analysed in deep and don't have numbers but for some searches it is worth to check also Yandex.

But to be fair Google is often better... it depends on the topic you search for.

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