Fed Up with Google, Conspiracy Theorists Turn to DuckDuckGo
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
TrUsTwOrThY > relevant
Right - the results themselves aren't manually edited. There's need to do so, and of course it wouldn't scale.
But if theirs is like any sufficiently featured search architecture we've ever seen -- the training data themselves have been almost certainly curated to favor certain baseline expected outcomes. It's quite likely a good portion of the metadata (read: allow/block lists, in GoogleSpeak) have been manually edited and ranked at some point in the process, as well.
I say that semi-jokingly. Getting less filtered results from DDG is very useful in many circumstances including legitimate ones.
And not that it matters, but I love vaccinations and encourage everyone to get them after speaking with their doctor.
- link to tests of 13 search engines I added for sample search that was mentioned in thread, https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/szgeba/fed_up_w...
5+ years ago, back when [0] people noticed that Nazi sites were the top Google results for "did the holocaust happen" — presumably because of the way Google prioritized literal text match in titles/headlines for esoteric queries — DDG had been providing bespoke responses via DuckDuckHack, its crowdsourced instant answer program [1]. Back then, and today, if you query a variation of "did the holocaust happen", the top result, in big large text, is "Yes"
DuckDuckHack was discontinued in 2017 because it didn't scale. The associated code repos are still available; for example, you can see how DDG's Instant Answer test suite specifically validated answers to questions about the Holocaust and the moon landing. [2]
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/dec/11/google...
[2] https://github.com/duckduckgo/zeroclickinfo-goodies/blob/mas...