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Comment by ta8645 | Hacker News Reader

Switched to Brave when DDG revealed its focus on politics. It has been a very pleasant transition, and I haven't missed the !g bang as much as anticipated. Turns out falling back to Google isn't needed nearly as often with Brave as it was with DDG.

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How did DDG reveal its focus on politics? Are you referring to them dropping Yandex? Unfortunately there’s no good options in that situation because however good Yandex is, it basically gives the Russian government free reign to inject propaganda into search results, which is basically the opposite of being apolitical.

For me, it was the founder announcing that they were going to de-rank "sites associated with russian disinformation".

https://twitter.com/yegg/status/1501716484761997318

https://www.pcmag.com/news/duckduckgo-to-down-rank-sites-ass...

The weird situation they got themselves into with Tank Man was revealing.

https://amp.theguardian.com/technology/2021/jun/04/microsoft...

AMP link.....

Non Amp link-https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/jun/04/microsoft...

Argh. Thank you.

Is there more to this story than in the article?

Because I don't see anything "revealing" about that situation, other than that DDG suffered from Bings error, as they use Bing's results. What did this incident reveal specifically about DDG?

I'd say it's revealing how closely they are tied to the censorship that Microsoft employs.

Might have been obvious to those who knew where they got their index from, but it was certainly highlighted by that event.

It probably refers to DDG down-ranking so-called Russian disinformation.

Which sounds like a brilliant idea until one remembers the clusterfuck of censoring pandemic-related disinformation which transformed into a witch hunt of everything which didn’t match the mainstream political opinion.

FYI !bangs work in Brave Search: https://search.brave.com/bangs

That was my number 1 concern about switching away from DDG. I put one into Brave for the hell of it, and was surprised that it worked. (!mdn, probably) That sold me on Brave.

Didn't know about political bias of DDG results. Could You point out some reliable sources?

They're upset because the Russian government got caught publishing disinformation in the US, and DDG announced they were going to downrank puppet sites.

Presumably, they're also upset that search engines downrank penis enlargement ads, and machine generated stack overflow copy pastes.

What does politics mean to you? Isn’t every entity covertly or overtly political? What is it about keeping those politics secret that you like so much? Or is it that you don’t like their politics?

Not everything is political, let alone heavily. I could be forging hammers, and in some sense it's a political choice to not sign Erika or L'Internationale at the top of my lungs, but that sort of definition of politics means everything, and is thus meaningless.

One reason I like Brave (and Vivaldi for that matter) is that their team understand that their job is to build a tool - a good browser. The team members themselves have political stances that they don't leave a secret, but insofar as the organizations have politics, those are politics related to making a browser, politics of privacy and of more user control.

They have different philosophies on how to do that, but both companies understand their job is to make hammers for people to hit nails with. Other things they as individuals believe are not very related to their jobs as hammersmiths, so they leave it out. This is increasingly rare nowadays, and very much worth supporting, IMO.

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