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Comment by vikramkr | Hacker News Reader

Why would that query be censored?

Especially on DDG. I was under the impression that only Google was meddling with your search results.

The founder of DDG was also the founder of a privacy invading company. This has been scrubbed off most parts of the internet.

Edit: changed from spyware to privacy invading

What's the name of the spyware company he founded?

If you're referring to Names Database, how is that spyware?

When? Which company? Let's see some business registrations or other primary sources.

Is there any evidence that the query is actually censored, beyond conspiracy theories?

I attached the proof pic.

edit: To the comment below saying I'm lying.

Yes it does query. The first time I query, it doesnt give results. Then I query it again and it shows all results (same query, pressing the search icon again). This is stealthy censorship and an unsuspecting person wouldn't notice.

This doesn't happen for any other query. And it only happens with my work ip address, not a VPN.

Edit2: Still not working for me, I have to query it twice to get the results. Maybe this is happening for selected ip addresses. This doesn't happen when I use a VPN.

That's proof that Duckduckgo didn't find any results for the great reset at that particular time. It is not evidence for censorship, as you say "sometimes", meaning it could be a thousand other reasons why that is happening.

Works fine here, including the first time I tried.

Working flawlessly for me, no matter how many times I reload.

Ockham's razor encourages me to believe that this is just some minor technical issue on either side, rather than censorship.

> This doesn't happen when I use a VPN.

That points at your network (ISP, LAN) more than DDG. You might try other less popular search engines (maybe Bing) to see if this behavior happens there as well.

Of course, all the queries in the world will be anectotal compared to your experience, but still : from my phone, a couple second ago, ddg censors the query so much that typing "the great" auto completes to "reset". And follows to giving pretty expected results.

I suppose I could come up with a few dozens scenario that would explain no results in your case (as a software engineer, I have heard a rumor that sometimes those " server" thingys have what they call "glitches".)

But I of course completely understand that the hypothesis of DDG specifically censoring the query for you looks more plausible.

You're probably a very important person that needed to be hidden the fact that the WMF had a conference about restarting the economy after the covid - which obviously means that the prince Charles of UK is behind a global conspiracy to manufacture viruses from scratch in order to overthrow capitalism. (I'm just kidding, I know that's not what you believe.)

Sincerely, i hope you have the best possible holiday season, and take care of yourselves.

FYI, I'm also a software developer/engineer. I do understand when glitches happen, but this seems too off.

If it works on a VPN, or a proxy server but not your own ip address. Are you really sure it's just a "glitch"?

And there are good reasons to think that way. Partially because there have been conspiracy theories about the "great reset", so this might be a way to stop the viral spread or whatever. I mean it's not too long ago when it came out that google censored queries to websites unless you typed the name directly in google.

When trust is broken, it's wise to be skeptical.

And yes, I did read the comments and rule out other things.

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