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Comment by remus | Hacker News Reader

I find these responses fascinating as the "clearly slanted" results tend to change direction depending on the political affiliation of the person making the claim! Having said that, I'd love to be proved wrong if you have any evidence to show a particular bias one way or the other?

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Search "mass formation psychosis" on Google and DuckDuckGo. This is a trending phrase popularized by a doctor that has been canceled and banned from the mainstream due to his criticism of the world's COVID response.

DDG shows the author's substack as #1 result and is neutral otherwise. The other doesn't even have it on the first SERP, and is overwhelmingly critical.

If you argue that covid response is not politics, I will disagrer strongly.

Search politically controversial topics incognito with a VPN on using google vs yandex vs duckduckgo? Ivermectin, January 6th arrests, BLM protest deaths, VAED, mRNA studies before 2020, Robert Malone, Geert Vanden Bossche. I mean there's an endless list of things you can experiment with.

My experience is that it's slanted whichever side of the easel you're one. The evidence is really clear when you measure results between various search providers, and especially when searching up contentious or controversial topics. So it doesn't really change direction so much as it confirms one particular set of beliefs depending on which search engine you're on. I think this is clearly in Google's disfavour, because people have started to notice and they're actively searching for alternatives to Google in order to avoid it.

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