rt.com does not show up in your search results when searching for either "rt" or "russia today".
If you are in the EU, though, the EU legally prohibited search engines from linking to RT & Sputnik.
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...
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.
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.