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Comment by thankful69 | Hacker News Reader

Are the search results being "curated" by its political nature or affiliation?

They actually never were. We also recently put out a help page explaining how our news rankings work: https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/ne.... From that page: "when we apply our own ranking signals we do so in a strictly non-political manner, meaning we don’t evaluate or otherwise take into account any potential political bias or leanings of websites in our search result rankings."

Cool, thanks for the clarification.

That entire page suggests extremely opaque behavior for a post about increasing transparency. Where can I find a list of which sites have been manually "downranked" and by how much? What are the "non-governmental" and "non-political" agencies declaring said sites to be whatever you're declaring them to be? Where are the links to the reports that informed your decisions?

This is a new help page, and so it is just a first step in more transparency on this issue. That said, what you're referencing in the page applies extremely rarely, currently to less than 0.1% of news websites, and it is expected to stay that way. So, you are unlikely to regularly encounter this ranking signal. And even then it's impact is relatively small, only a few slots on average -- from the page, "impacted sites are not moved so far down in the results that they are effectively removed."

So are you implying that you do have plans on revealing plans on revealing which sites you're "downranking"? And ideally precisely how they fit your criteria?

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.

Yes, we are constantly working towards more transparency in everything we do. More generally, from the new help page, "A search engine’s primary job is to rank results. In other words, search engines try to put results that most quickly and accurately answer the query on top." and "when we apply our own ranking signals we do so in a strictly non-political manner, meaning we don’t evaluate or otherwise take into account any potential political bias or leanings of websites in our search result rankings."

Could you extrapolate on what you mean by "games"? I don't believe search engine bias is something that is an issue for Google or DDG. There is a lot of misinformation, it shouldn't be ranked near factual information, because humans are still bad at determining what is good information. Medical advice is a good example; this is a hyperbole, but if someone was choking and you needed to know the Heimlich, you probably don't want a result at the top for essential oils.

Politically speaking, lots of people switched to DDG not for privacy, but because it never down ranked politically biased news like Google. I don't believe DDG's mission statement is to be the bastion of misinformation.

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