More Privacy and Transparency for DuckDuckGo Web Tracking Protections

C'mon, you're being intellectually dishonest here. uBlock Origin and AdGuard has all these things to check on. Even the obscure stuff, like FLEDGE ( https://adguard.com/en/blog/adguard-privacy-sandbox-topics-b...).

At the end of the day, at your company and at AdGuard's, it is only really one person's full time job to find this stuff. And your guy and AdGuard's guy are both reading the same garbage Twitter posts all day from the guy who's actually sourcing issues. Which he does for free because his particular malfunction is being really passionate about hating Google. And that's why we hear about FLEDGE.

This is tough. I think people want you to succeed. But I suspect the reason you didn't answer my question - why do you think you guys got raked over the coals for the Microsoft thing? - is, from your point of view, you probably think it's a smear campaign from Google, and your people have cautioned you that it sounds really conspiratorial and salty. Maybe it's true!

I can't imagine you're going to say "because Startpage is better" or "because the issues people complained about were substantive" (they weren't). And indeed, Google complains to the press about how you guys are like a mere fraction of their size, "down the street," and receiving so much intellectual attention and funding from the digerati despite having, essentially, a meaningless impact on anyone's use of the web. No offense. Like I said people want you to succeed.

But you have to do so without the sales pitch. Because it makes it sound like you'll do anything to survive, which may be good in the long term but is probably the real reason the Microsoft thing looks bad: It smelled desperate and unbecoming of someone entrusted to provide a privacy focused service.

And maybe you're going to do a full Justin Roiland and accuse everyone on the anonymous Internet forum of being totally lazy compared to you. You can be one of those "ra ra Elon Musk" people. Listen, you have no idea who writes these anonymous posts.

That said, I think the people who are talking about the censorship thing are morons and I wish you'd just focus on what I'm talking about here.

One of those websites reported having problems for a month or so, then having it sorted out all by itself. The author's article on that:

https://www.jessesquires.com/blog/2022/07/25/my-website-disa...

My sites are technically present, but shown only when I search for the exact domain (bikegremlin.com) or the site name (BikeGremlin).

But none of my articles are shown in SERP when I search queries that otherwise get my articles to top-3 on Google.

I've tried submitting URLs for indexing, to see if that will help, now that at least some problems seem to have been fixed. We'll know in a few days... weeks... months if that's helped. :)

So far, articles in my native are back, at least to a degree. But none of my articles in English, even those that used to rank highly (both on Google and Bing/DuckDuckGo etc).

I've used this situation to check which search engines rely on Bing for their results (primitive, unscientific method, but I think it's accurate): https://io.bikegremlin.com/28530/microsoft-bing-serp-gone-ov...

Where can cases like this be reported to DuckDuckGo?

I feel quite strongly about this because I, like I suspect many who use DDG, swapped over largely because I didn't really like the games Google was playing with search. As DDG goes down the same path I've moved on once again, but have been left with quite a sour taste in my mouth. I evangelized for your site for years, including on this site/account. Changes like this are the antithesis of everything that drew many people to DDG to begin with.

I hear you when you say you don't remove content, but do you, or to what extent do you throttle/downrank websites?