Search engines shouldn't be in the business of picking what content I see based on the owners of the search engines politics.
Most other search engines are just reverse proxies for Google or Bing, so they inherit those biases.
We actually do not intentionally censor any news results, meaning media outlets are not being removed or their stories displayed so far down in the results they are effectively removed. That is, unless legally prohibited, you should find all media outlets in our results, and they should generally show on top if you search for them by name or domain name. If you are seeing otherwise, please me know and we will investigate.
A search engine's primary job is to rank results, trying to put results that most quickly and accurately answer the query on top. We do this ranking in a strictly non-partisan manner. Ranking for news-related searches is particularly difficult because for most news stories there are often hundreds of media outlets covering the same story, many with similar relevancy in terms of keyword matching and popularity. As such, we look to another ranking factor to ensure just the top of the results aren't taken by obviously very low-quality news results so that users have more sources of relevant, high-quality news results to compare and choose between.
The non-partisan factor we've found to help accomplish this is a rare, but well-documented history of a site's complete lack of news reporting standards, such as routinely using spam or clickbait to artificially inflate traffic, consistently publishing stories without citing sources, censoring stories due to operating with very limited press freedom, or misleading readers about who owns, funds, and authors stories for the site. And since we do not censor sites, even state-sponsored media in countries with very limited press freedom, these sites will still show up in results, and even on top like when you search for them directly.
I'm curious of the implementation. Are these sites in a list and that alters their ranking in the results? Or some other approach?
Would also be very curious to hear an answer to this. Its been long rumored that Google has weights or boost/throttle values that are manually assigned to websites by humans which impact ranking. Would be great to understand if DDG is following in Google's footsteps.
If you are in the EU, though, the EU legally prohibited search engines from linking to RT & Sputnik.
That must be it then, I wasn't aware. Thanks for correcting me.
You weren't wrong. Try to get RT to show up without specifying "RT"/"Russia today"/etc. I can search RT article titles with quotes but the original RT link will be on the second page if at all.
Now repeat this experiment with the NYTimes and compare the outcome.
DDG may not delist RT but you would not be a fool to suspect DDG throttles the visibility.
They prohibited broadcasters [0]. The legality of extension to search is disputed [1]. The EU sent a request to Google [2]. Microsoft announced changes including "further de-ranking these sites’ search results on Bing" ahead of the EU sanctions and PR [3].
[0] https://www.consilium.europa.eu/en/press/press-releases/2022...
[1] https://twitter.com/tjmcintyre/status/1501596542624485382
[2] https://www.lumendatabase.org/blog_entries/notice-in-lumen-r...
[3] https://blogs.microsoft.com/on-the-issues/2022/02/28/ukraine...
You get lots of spammy stuff (top link is a site offering to sell a translation of RT), site-ranking sites (that rank RT), some rando lady quoting RT's meta description on Twitter (!!!), and even RT's pages on Twitter, Linkedin. And then it's finally there, just before getting into really high quality results like a page on rotten tomatoes ranking the 200 Best LGBTQ+ Movies of All Time.
"Curating" results is a great way to completely break your own search engine.
If I was designing a search engine, I wouldn't use keywords in meta tags for ranking. It's too vulnerable to keyword stuffing attacks.
Aren't all search engines in the business of picking what content you can see based on the politics of the owner?
There is obviously a massive problem with modern disinformation tactics, to the point that if you deny it, I presume you have an agenda to sell. There are most definitely terrible things that should not be legal to knowingly include in search results, ever (yes, actually, do think about the children, etc). So all reasonable people already accept that some things should be censored, as a moral and legal obligation. The correct solution is not as simple as unfettered libertarianism would have you believe.
Thus, agree or disagree with that action, I cannot reach the conclusion that they have somehow broken an inviolable code, especially since all algorithms include publishing choices anyways.