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Comment by valvar | Hacker News Reader

I switched to Kagi[0] when DDG announced their implementation of selective censorship[1]. The results are much better, and I use the !g bang way less often (for DDG I was basically always using it, making the bangs the only actually useful feature of DDG for me).

[0] https://kagi.com/

[1] https://twitter.com/yegg/status/1501716484761997318 — I think it's sad that I have to clarify that I am personally also sickened by Russia's invasion of Ukraine, but that I don't want DDG to be an arbiter of truth despite that

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Calling what DDG did "selective censorship" is a very unfair description. Essentially a search engine is about sorting search results and any search engine must do that based on some idea about what information is good and what is bad. DDG has been doing that since day one. In fact, the primary reason DDG was created was because its creator thought they could improve search results by getting rid of things that showed up in Google that they thought where bad (the privacy selling point came later)[1]. You may disagree with some of these choices (which is fair) but calling them "censorship" is just using bad sounding words that don't really apply.

1: Source, Gabriel Weinberg's book Traction.

Folks throw that word around so much that it's become neutral.

The people that use DDG overwhelmingly are not using it as a search engine to find Russian disinformation. This is literally a case of a business announcing that it's working to do its stated business activity, which is to provide relevant search results.

What he actually said: "At DuckDuckGo, we've been rolling out search updates that down-rank sites associated with Russian disinformation."

You may note what Microsoft had stated earlier [0] "We are removing RT news apps from our Windows app store and further de-ranking these sites’ search results on Bing so that it will only return RT and Sputnik links when a user clearly intends to navigate to those pages."

[0] https://blogs.microsoft.com/on-the-issues/2022/02/28/ukraine...

I'm just waiting for the day my flashlight starts deciding what to shine a light on based on my perceived intentions

I guess that will be the day that you buy a flashlight intended to rank and only light up the top 10 / 20 most relevant things?

It's like complaining about water making you wet.

Relevant to the flashlight you mean?

down ranking is basically throwing the results down the later pages which is the same as removing results, just doing it in a sneaky way.

and rating stuff as disinformation is censorship. i want my search engine to be like the internet, i.e. a conduit for bits, not a self righteous mind that controls what goes thru.

But then you open yourself up entirely to being manipulated by the website owners. The Russian government has enough resources to artificially push their SEO way higher than it should be, and it's objectively lower quality information.

There isn't really a neutral option (no "conduit for bits") – you either let low quality, high resource sites flood your search results, or you try to filter for quality. Here, that choice is also aligned with a political choice.

> The Russian government has enough resources to artificially push their SEO way higher than it should be,

country with low tier GDP has supposedly more resources to move SEO than the first or second tech powerhouse in the world? Hum. I smell bullshit here.

If I take your argument as valid I should worry about Spain next.

I fail to see how this could be called anything else without resorting to newspeak. It's politically motivated downranking of sources that the operators of DDG are in ideological disagreement with. It's a way of exerting narrative control over public perceptions.

Downranking sites that disrespect user privacy using trackers and similar is different, because it is not ideologically motivated. I guess you could call it censorship, but no-one except the site owners are going to take issue with it.

A simple way to tell if something is political censorship is to ask: who will take issue with the absence of this piece of information that is being removed or hidden? If the answer contains groups of people that aren't just corporations, I think it's pretty clear what is going on.

And I guess I have to repeat myself here: no, I don't personally belong to such a group in this context. I just happen to not want anyone telling me what I'm supposed to believe, even if I'm "on their side".

As they said, you still have to sort top to bottom the results consistently. SEO "hacking" is a big problem, allowing sites to put themselves at the top even though they're not relevant to the search or are not the most common source of information that real users click on. You have to take action against those abuses by downranking. It just so happens that a big government, Russia, was caught doing this.

Just because it may be "political" doesn't give it special protection.

The core feature of their product is "we will discard all the data on the internet except 10 links". They already "censor" nearly everything.

It is completely reasonable to question their algorithms and processes. I don't see why Russian disinformation needs to be singled out given what is allowed in the corporate press every time the US starts a fight somewhere (can they please downrank all sociopath war mongers?). But while it may be political activism it isn't censorship. If you use DDG you ask for them to make judgement calls.

Hi, CEO & Founder of DuckDuckGo here. I see a lot of confusion here too, we are not ranking based on my politics (or anyone's politics for that matter).

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 let 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.

Seriously, try kagi. Its better.

Are you suggesting to the CEO and founder of DDG to try Kagi?

I love what you're been fighting for and it's great that you're on here. I'd even accept you accepting MS tracking cookies if you're transparent about it - you have to make money and I'd rather you stay in business. But I can't see anything from this post or the answers you gave to the metro specifically refuting this [1]: "The new @DuckDuckGo browsers for iOS/Android don't block Microsoft data flows, for LinkedIn or Bing"

  [1]: https://twitter.com/thezedwards/status/1528808759027331072

I actually left a top-level comment on this post that responds to the article in depth here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31557587. To be clear, though, we do block Microsoft 3rd-party cookies and their scripts are also further restricted in our browsers with additional web protections, e.g., fingerprinting protection, Global Privacy Control, referrer header trimming, etc.

What this article is talking about specifically is one web protection that the major browsers don't even attempt to do — stopping third-party tracking scripts from even loading on third-party websites. You can see that for yourself at the bottom 'tracker content blocking' section of this audit site: https://privacytests.org/ios.html

> 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.

Do you publish these scorecards publicly?

If there is no transparency, we cannot assume your assessment is non-partisan.

This is doublespeak cover for censorship. The corporate media uses the same buzzwords about quality to obfuscate their serving of the Kabal’s agenda.

A wise man from Texas once said: Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice... can’t be fooled again.

Even though Kagi looks and sound nice, I can't cope with signed-in-required search.

I understand that their business model is "you pay, you are our user, we won't sell your data"[1] But there is a simple privacy-friendly business model to be made with free anonymous search engine as well, when you look for "horses" we show you ads of horses. This is what Duckduckgo Search and Google Search both do. (Well google then runs ads on many website which are then linked to your search query, that's the real issue)

Now with Kagi, I have a company which knows all my darkest secrets whether I use a different computer behind a VPN or not.

[1] https://kagi.com/faq#privacy

True, there should be an anony way to prove that you've paid. That would solve the issue.

Mullvad VPN does this when you pay with cash.

That's exactly the kind of "censorship" you want. I understand the sentiment, but you couldn't have chosen a worst example, I hope it's not this specific instance of censorship that really troubles you. Removing what is objectively, yes, spam is ok.

People complain about search engines being full of garbage and clearly false info, then complain that DDG took action against sources that publish false info. Can’t win.

What makes you trust Kagi more than DDG? Is their crawling/ranking algo open source?

No, I only have their word to go on, but at least they explicitly say that they are avoiding censorship[0], while DDG are quite open with it.

I also did some smell tests by searching controversial topics, and Kagi does seem to present a more mixed bag of sources than DDG and Google on the first page of results.

[0] https://kagi.com/faq#censoring

How is a mixed bag of sources a good thing? A collection of reputable sources would be better. There's no such thing as neutral however breitbart and fox news (both of whom I've seen come up in searching) actively spread disinformation however because they're news sites aligned with the american right downranking them is a political statement despite the list of lies they've spread.

Theres no winning as half the people want to be lied to and it has so obviously been weaponized.

> actively spread disinformation however because they're news sites aligned with the american right

If you think disinformation comes from one side you have been brainwashed good

If you think the distribution of disinformation is uniform across both sides, you've also been brainwashed good. There is plenty of peer-reviewed research on this, but here are two that I found after brief searching:

https://misinforeview.hks.harvard.edu/article/right-and-left...

https://cyber.harvard.edu/publications/2017/08/mediacloud

Love the strawman. I reply to your claim that its binary by saying its obviously not and you shift goalposts by talking distributions which was never the point.

kagi is just like duckduckgo

under the hood they track the shit out of you, even more than DDG with their machine learning tools for user based scoring system for links

remember everyone, duckduckgo refused every independent audits, proprietary stuff like kagi is no exception, history repeats itself

also i find it weird that product placement comments like this one are always ranked super high on this website

they are done with DDG, they shifted focus to kagi instead? suspicious, it's not even out yet, only work on macOS, and is a team of "benevolent living in San Fransisco", living on donations in the most expensive state of the US, sure :thinking_face:

yeah, I've kind of felt since DDG first showed up, it's weird that people just take it at face value. IMO, privacy first === open source, everything else is smoke and mirrors.

You got literally everything wrong about Kagi. Kagi founder here. Responding as I will not stay silent to public defamation. I'd politely ask you not to do what you did here (drop a ton of accusations without a shred of evidence) again.

> kagi is just like duckduckgo

There is almost nothing similar between Kagi and DuckDuckGo, starting with the fact that DuckDuckGo is a global brand that has ~100M users and sells ads to make money, where we have few thousand and are 100% user supported with a subscription business model.

> under the hood they track the shit out of you, even more than DDG with their machine learning tools for user based scoring system for links

We literally don't. Kagi is not only zero telemetry but we do not log or associate searches with an account. The reason is we both don't want and don't need to. Our business is selling subscriptions not user data.

> also i find it weird that product placement comments like this one are always ranked super high on this website

Perhaps people simply genuinly love the product?

> only work on macOS

I think you refer to our Orion browser, which does work on Apple devices only for now. One needs to start somewhere.

Kagi search works in any browser on any OS.

> and is a team of "benevolent living in San Fransisco", living on donations in the most expensive state of the US

I literally have no idea what you tried to imply here.

You can find my email in bio and reach out if you need any additional clarification, I am happy to provide it.

Another vote for Kagi here. What a breath of fresh air. I didn’t think they could pull it off but it seems they have.

Another vote for Kagi!

Every time I tried to switch to DDG I ended up reverting to using the !g bang on every other query. While Kagi supports the same functionality, I haven’t felt the need to use it once in the past two months that I’ve been trialing the private beta. It’s genuinely better than Google for me, which I never thought would happen.

it's not perse about truth but it is about facts, I personally don't have a problem with downgrading lies or denies of facts. In the end of the day a algo is ranking pages, algo's can be manipulated or gamed and they are not only by lot's of marketeers but also by government agents.

While I don't believe a company should decide if an opinion about gun controle should be rankt or not. but if someone is claiming that these are just crisis actors and nothing happend I don't see a problem to block it. After all we are used to blocking spam these things are spam. I don't see a reason to treat this as any different just because they are selling political lies instate of product lies (and a lot of times these people are selling products in the end)

these kind of lies are eroding democracy and should be treaded the same way as some one yelling fire in a cinema

I'm also very happy with Kagi, and i'm a french user. Very, very impressive.

Did you have to wait long for the invite?

Was around a week for me.

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