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Comment by smotched | Hacker News Reader

I've completely switched to brave search for browsing, I can never trust DDG again.

I’m the founder and CEO of DuckDuckGo. We are not (and never were) censoring results. I realize I caused the misunderstanding due to own my unfortunate phrasing in a tweet, and since then, how our news results rankings work has been highly misinterpreted.

We (DuckDuckGo) subsequently made a help page to explain it in detail: https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/ne... Tl;dr: we don’t censor, we don’t move things so far down that they are effectively censored, we don't evaluate individual stories or narratives for "truth", and we don’t rank based on any political agenda or opinions. This is just a summary though so would read the help page for details.

I also put out a clarification thread about misconceptions that included this topic amongst others (like the fact that no, we’re not owned by Google), but the help page referenced above is the best and most thorough explanation of our news rankings. https://twitter.com/yegg/status/1515635886855233537

Its not the results I'm worried about with DDG, after all you just use bing behind the scenes although I think there's some shenanigans there too.

It's your deep financial ties to Microsoft that's worrying. And it seems you're willing to turn your back on privacy/tracking for your friends when Microsoft asks.

https://twitter.com/shivan_kaul/status/1528879590772338689

The tweet you referenced is no longer the case. See https://spreadprivacy.com/more-privacy-and-transparency/. We’ve also since open sourced our web tracker block list (all our apps and extensions were already open sourced) and put out a help page detailing how all our web tracking protections work across platforms: https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/privacy/we...

As for our private search engine, it is in actually way more than Bing at this point. We have approximately a millions lines of search code at this point, many tens of millions of dollars invested in them and a staff of about 200.

Hello 'yegg'. What's your stake in all this? Who are you?

Who yegg is is well known on HN, but you yourself are anonymous so it's a bit weird to see this exchange. Maybe (1) click on the name of the person before asking them who they are and (2) flesh out your profile to return the favor?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DuckDuckGo

I am the founder and CEO of DuckDuckGo.

Hello “incitydreams”, you first.

Would be good to have context here... not that Brave hasn't had its own share of controversies.

Brave's controversies are mostly related to its monetisation, not censorship. They are not the same.

What happened?

They started censoring websites based on "political fake news" filter list supplied by MSM.

> based on "political fake news" filter list supplied by MSM

Can you provide a citation for this?

> Like so many others I am sickened by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the gigantic humanitarian crisis it continues to create. #StandWithUkraine

At DuckDuckGo, we've been rolling out search updates that down-rank sites associated with Russian disinformation.

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

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> In addition to down-ranking sites associated with disinformation, we also often place news modules and information boxes at the top of DuckDuckGo search results (where they are seen and clicked the most) to highlight quality information for rapidly unfolding topics.

https://twitter.com/yegg/status/1501717193855283201

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It should be obvious why this is problematic ...

FYI - I’m the founder and CEO of DuckDuckGo and responded to this in another comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32597340.

https://mashable.com/article/duckduckgo-search-engine-russia...

Or search google yourself to get a broader picture.

Search HN, it was a big buzz recently.

DuckDuckGo's search manipulation is just no different to Google's since essentially they are using Microsoft Bing's search results. [0] So the manipulation, down-ranking and censoring of search results was inevitable with tons of evidence of this: [1][2][3][4]

"At DuckDuckGo, we've been rolling out search updates that down-rank sites associated with Russian disinformation.": [1]

At this point, DDG is a front for Microsoft using 'privacy' buzzwords. Might as well use Brave Search then.

[0] https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/so...

[1] https://twitter.com/yegg/status/1501716484761997318

[2] https://www.vox.com/recode/22981115/duckduckgo-free-speech-p...

[3] https://www.reddit.com/r/duckduckgo/comments/hx5dn5/proof_du...

[4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27395635

Some people are upset about a company curating the database it uses to return results.

During the Russia / Ukraine conflict the Duck Duck Go founder decided to filter out any results which are deemed as Russian misinformation. Censorship of any kind, is always still in the end, censorship.

This is the gist of what everyone is upset about, of those who are upset. The entire point of DDG was that the search results were never to be tampered with for personalization reasons, censoring results due to political reasons seems to be a slippery slope.

Censorship is always censorship, yes, and naivite is always naivite. Meet the tolerance paradox!

Also, search engines have _as their sole purpose_ sorting their list of links by some measure of quality. Removing useless nonsense is what we go there for.

"The entire point of Company was ABC, doing 867 seems to be a slippery slope." Huh?

I don't see how capturing personal information from users for any reason has anything whatsoever to do with omitting perceived misinformation from all users across the board. One can agree or disagree with the decision, but they are two entirely different issues in entirely different areas, and one is in no way a "slippery slope" toward the other.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com