One thing I found is how bad ddg is at removing conspiracy theories and other misinformation. Google is, for better or for worse, much more managed. For instance, search "are vaccines dangerous", google replies with .org and .gov sites, while ddg promotes dangersofvaccines.com. Even if you search "dangers of vaccines" in google, it still never produces that site.
What tests have you done to confirm that you're actually any good at this?
Or is the idea that you'd actively prefer to have your life ruined by misinformation than admit you might not have the best ability to distinguish - like the way some people would prefer to be crippled or maimed than accept safety protection on dangerous machinery because they find it emasculating?
That's where the "decide on my own" part comes from. I don't need to pass your tests or arbitrary criteria.
The most important point in having a democracy and citizens worthy of the name, is that you don't delegate this sorting out the wheat from the chaff to some third party that "knows better".
I can figure it out. I don't need to get information filtered by people who think they know what is best for everyone (else). This is what China does.
[0] https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/1682-google-hit-hider-by-d...
If I search "we never landed on the moon" I want to see results about those theories, not see them censored because the search engine "knows better".
No thanks, I'd rather think for myself.
I wonder what portion of the internet you have to scrape to be able to have good results for 90% of queries. An enormous number of my queries end up on Wikipedia somewhere, for example. A lot end up on Stack Overflow. The two of those probably constitute the majority of my searches, and almost certainly a majority of the searches where I really care about the answer (and I'm not just googling whether pirates and ninjas were contemporaries of each other, because why not).
If Google's results are really slipping that much, you can make up for the lack of data by providing better results on the data you do have.
I am curious why something like that hasn't gotten more popular. A search engine that only indexes highly reputable and public sources would be interesting. Wikipedia, dictionaries from somewhere, reputable newspapers globally, etc. Is it just too big of a target for abuse to be viable?
> I wonder what portion of the internet you have to scrape to be able to have good results for 90% of queries.
But this is it. I don't think it'd be too hard to get 90% of queries right. It's the 10% that are the challenge.
"Page rank" / "link juice" (amount/strength of incoming links) is still a main ingredient in Google's recipe, so they are actually able to determine, without manual intervention (more or less), which sites are "reputable", while your suggestion would require someone to curate the assortments of "reputable" sites.
How would you discover niche blogs? Or even more high profile ones, just not known to the major public?
That said, as you say, you could probably do with something like this for most of your day-to-day searches, and then just !g or whatever for the rest.
In all kinds of regimes, from dictatorships to western democracies, all kinds of valid (and sometimes proven in court, or historically, later) stories have been officially called "conspiracy theories" and/or misinformation.
And inversely, in all kinds of regimes, from dictatorships to western democracies, all kinds of bogus state propaganda has been officially called "the truth".
I'd rather not have a search engine decide for me...
If you repeat your idea often and loud enough, you can make a large number of people believe anything.
Internet curated by algorithms is a perfect tool for spreading misinformation:
- You need not to carry the weight of any of the legal structures or responsibilities of a journalist.
- You can produce misinformation faster than the news cycle is able to react, meaning your misinformation will be able to poison the well before any conversation is able to take place.
- You can segment your audience so that dissenting opinion is nowhere to be seen.
- By the time any debunking by actual journalists can be done, your target audience is already exposed to the next cycle and can barely remember anything about the previous one.
This is extremely dangerous.
I am sure that the people who came up with automobiles weren't trying to create a vehicle of death, but there needs to be some kind of safety check akin to seat belts for the information propagation that takes place online. I am not sure what the answer is, but acknowledging the problem and trying to do something shouldn't be dismissed with a mere cry of "censorship" when information can and is being weaponized in a way and at a scale that has been impossible so far.
It was not long ago that trans and gay people were censored "for the common good".
Let's not repeat those unfortunate lessons.
The Nazi party got into power in Germany democratically. They used the privileges given to them to take those privileges from others. Give people the freedom to elect their representatives with no checks and balances, and the results can be ugly.
The polarization and brainwashing happening through social media today makes me think it is completely feasible, if not inevitable, that a group will form that will enact actual censorship to the internet.
They didn't censor the other site completely. If I search with site:dangersofvaccines.com I get results from it. I can't get results from it any other way though, including searching text that only appears on that site - they'd rather tell me there are no results - so I agree that's an unpleasant level of censorship/nannying.
It's not censorship against stupidity. It's censorship against bullshitters who spread medical misinformation that may put people in danger; factually untenable opinions, expressed in an assertive manner, in a context which seems authoritative to the layperson.
Nobody says the majority is stupid, nor it is relevant. Protecting a minority is as good an excuse as it is protecting the majority, don't you think?
The quality of US public schools can vary immensely, especially for students in poor areas where the community can't put up much money and education budgets are the first thing to be slashed.
Additionally, many states allow outright lies such as creationism or abstinence-only sex ed to be taught - both of this is further evidence that it cannot be assumed automatically that a person educated in the US is well educated.
To make it worse, antivaxxers explicitly mistrust science and only trust the blogs and "mama groups" and other crap. How is anything the government, scientists, the media, anyone supposed to overcome that mistrust?
Please keep in mind that qanon, antivaxx etc. are active hostile infowars campaigns. It is a duty of a society to protect its citizens against such efforts.
Among the many aspects of your faith that I disagree with, one of the most utilised by its followers is its enthusiastic advocacy of false accusations against heretics in the pursuit of attacking them. And so while I don't know anything about qanon or infowars, your bad mouthing them is only lending them credibility; it is also shores up my belief that whatever your implicit definition of "duty of a society to protect its citizens against such efforts" is, I can assure you, we neither need nor want it.
I'm not just an antifascist, I'm German. My ancestors proved for the rest of the world where a worldview based on lies and hate (and qanon is nothing more than that) will lead. Their history is proof that a society must defend itself or it will collapse.
Your ancestors and plenty of other examples throughout history are proof where censorship and book burning lead. The principle of sunlight is the best disinfectant has proven time and again to be true and the only people who argue against it are those being shown to be wrong under the light. Yes it permits the odd crazies to exist on the fringe, that's fine; flat earthers anti-vaxers and the rest were pointed at and laughed at long before the recent desperate grab for censorship by authoritarians was made.
Open access to information is only a problem in the eyes of those who want to misslead.
I am a strong advocate for free speech, but I really think it is naive to believe that truth will always win no matter what. History is full of examples where propaganda and lies wins. I am not arguing for censorship, but I am arguing that we need to confront lies and propaganda with more than just platitudes about the truth winning out in the end.
The truth needs advocates.
I'd say a couple of things.
In a situation where we do have free speech I believe the truth does overall win out in the end; very often it takes a frustratingly long time and often comes too late to repair the damages caused by the lie but I believe that that overall, if you'll excuse the horrendous remark, "the truth does find a way".
I also know that the current lies and propaganda we so often see are an absolute stain on these past decades and I'm also in agreement that something needs to be done. Whatever it is however I'd like to see it built on the free speech principle rather than against it, even if the principal isn't without its flaws.
For example, take fascist propaganda... the lies are effective, and if left unchecked, can convince people to support fascist leaders, who will then block free speech, preventing the truth from winning out.
This is a form of the paradox of tolerance..
Half the US has voted for someone explicitly denying science, half the UK has voted for Brexit, in some areas of Germany 25% vote for people just a few beards short of Nazis, Bolsonaro is still in office. The "average citizen" can not be trusted to vote in their own interest or in the interest of the future generations.
Maybe not, but in a democratic system the right to choose trumps any ideas about what you or some elitist group thinks is best for future generations.
Are you advocating for undemocratic system?
> your faith believes false accusations against perceived heretics are acceptable tactics; your word against them is less than empty.
It’s interesting to me that despite the widespread complaint about the bad quality of DDG (which I, excepting long-tail results, disagree with), at least for my quick checks of "ddg" and "css center text" from your suggestions, I prefer the DDG results in both cases (especially for the css search).
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=are+vaccines+dangerous&t=fpas&ia=w...
The first page of the US search results: vaccines.gov, chop.edu, cdc.gov, livescience.com, scientificamerican.com, nytimes.com, newsweek.com, healthline.com, who.int, mayoclinic.org. That's a good mix of the official outlets and some popular explanations. Results change of you specify a different region or no region at all. For reference, these are results in Italian, many of them are rebuttals of a minister claiming that vaccines are useless and dangerous: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=vaccini+pericolosi&t=fpas&ia=web
But if you try to search English terms in a non-English region, expect ask kind of SEO garbage.
You should probably blame Microsoft for that. I mean DDG is just a Bing API wrapper.
Anyways, DDG does mainly use Bing, but they also do their own modifications to the rankings, which is sometimes for better and sometimes for worse.
Could you maybe share a reference for this?
Not sure if your site is taking the location into account, but when I do the "are vaccines dangerous" search on the search-compare website, I get .gov and .edu domains as the top 5 hits or so.
Yeah, you're right about search results. I'm seeing more normal sites now as well. The results are not deterministic. I'm not sure whats causing it, but I saw different results for the vaccines query earlier. "Flat earth" still gives me a fair amount of flat earth content.
From the FAQ:
> For Duck Duck Go, search-compare searches the html version (e.g. duckduckgo.com/html/?q=search). The results are different than the canonical duckduckgo search, but its easier to scrape. For Google, search-compare uses the main google site (e.g. google.com/search?hl=en&q=search), but it doesn't pass any personally identifiable information
Can't be any worse than google since they give preferential treatment to conspiracy theorists like CNN, MBNBC, Foxnews, etc.
> For instance, search "are vaccines dangerous", google replies with .org and .gov sites
So google should just push government and special interest groups funded by the wealthy?
> Even if you search "dangers of vaccines" in google, it still never produces that site.
You make it sound like that's a good thing...
Holy christ man. You are right, let google just show government sites. Big Brother knows best.
???
>let google just show government sites. Big Brother knows best.
.org is not a government domain. even so, maybe if they and other tech companies had done this earlier we wouldn't have gotten into this trump + coronavirus mess
Exactly. This is the problem with the country. Half the crazies believe one set of conspiracies is the truth and the other half believe in another set of conspiracies.
> .org is not a government domain.
Right, I said they were special interests funded by the wealthy.
> maybe if they and other tech companies had done this earlier we wouldn't have gotten into this trump + coronavirus mess
Right... And in a few years, the other half of the crazies will be talking about the biden mess.
Half the morons the last 4 years, Trump stole the election. Half the morons now, Biden stole the election. Figure it out.
That anyone would defend any mainstream media after the last 4 years is being intentionally blind. Right or left.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1976_swine_flu_outbreak
> Three more cases of Guillain-Barré were reported in early December, and the investigation into cases of it spread to eleven states. On December 16, a one-month suspension of the vaccination program was announced by Sencer. William Foege of the CDC estimated that the incidence of Guillain-Barré was four times higher in vaccinated people than in those not receiving the swine flu vaccine.
" LONDON (AP) — The World Health Organization says a new polio outbreak in Sudan is linked to an ongoing vaccine-sparked epidemic in Chad — a week after the U.N. health agency declared the African continent free of the wild polio virus. "
"a week after the U.N. health agency declared the African continent free of the wild polio virus."
Why do you think the U.N. was able to declare the continent polio free in the first place? Because of strong wishful thinking? Or because of vaccines?
See, that's the thing that enrages me. Here we have an "epidemic" (it's not) that was caused 11 cases of polio - after the virus was eradicated on the continent with the help of the vaccine. An outbreak that wouldn't even be a blip on radar if not for vaccines.
For heaven's sake.