I'd use an engine that censors piracy sites over an engine that censors political views any day of the week.
It is simply not true that we have censored anything or made ourselves "the arbiters of truth." I realized I previously explained how our news rankings work very poorly on Twitter but I subsequently put out a clarification in this help page with a much clearer (and detailed) explanation of how our news rankings actually 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."
That said, super slow results I can understand :). But they are super fast according to all our metrics, so something else must be going on. There was a bug in DarkReader recently causing our page to be slow that was recently fixed -- not sure if that is related. In any case, if you want to email me (my email is my profile) then we can try to get to the bottom of it.
Is there any transparency (an up-to-date and publicly-accessible list, for example) regarding exactly how many of these "extreme cases" there are, and which specific web sites are involved?
Is there any transparency regarding who exactly these "multiple non-governmental and non-political organizations" are, too?
For each "extreme case", is there any transparency regarding the assessments that were considered?
(As for my more subjective opinion, a privacy-first search engine looking at your real-world location by default might be making the wrong compromise in the first place.)
I guess that reading between the lines, it could be inferred that some wrongthink is being censored, but I couldn't find any actual info
https://slate.com/technology/2022/03/duckduckgo-russian-disi...
> Last week, Gabriel Weinberg announced that his company would be combating Russian disinformation. “Like so many others I am sickened by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the gigantic humanitarian crisis it continues to create,” he wrote on Twitter. “At DuckDuckGo, we’ve been rolling out search updates that down-rank sites associated with Russian disinformation.” Although the move was more or less in line with how other major online platforms have been responding to the Russian invasion, pushback from DuckDuckGo’s user base has been pronounced. More than 30,000 users on Twitter have responded to Weinberg’s post with largely negative comments about the decision, accusing the company of engaging in censorship and injecting bias into search results. Breitbart ran a piece attacking DuckDuckGo as “Diet Google,” and high-profile libertarian YouTubers have also told their followers to stop using it.
I had poor word choice that got grossly misinterpreted, so I subsequently wrote the help article referenced above (https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/ne...) to give clarity: "we don’t evaluate or otherwise take into account any potential political bias or leanings of websites in our search result rankings."
In reality we never censored anything, nor do we have a disinformation/"truth" detector, nor did we go looking for any Russian narrative (or any other narrative for that matter). Instead, we just have essentially a spam detector that had detected some spam from Russian state sites. That's it.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33250463
Relevance and truth are two different things. It is not your job to be making calls on the second one, and I find your willful conflation of these concepts, and continuing attempts to deflect from the fact that you have done so to be a bit gross.
No, going by your own website, you outsource that judgment call to an unnamed and unaccountable list of third parties that apply unnamed and unauditable "objective" "journalistic standards" (which are not things that exist), which will then result in entire sites showing lower in the rankings an unspecified amount with no notification to the user that you have done this.
If this was actually about spam, there would be no need to bring "journalistic standards" into the equation. Spam is spam regardless of who it comes from. There would be no need to be so coy about all of this.
This is about news spam. The referenced organizations are evaluating a supposed news site's process on how they go about making news ("journalistic standards") and in particular what we care about is whether there really is any process/standard at all. That is, we're only looking for the very few sites that everyone agrees has no news process and is just a site purporting to be a news site but isn't in reality. From the page: "a well-documented history of a site’s extremely low journalistic standards, correlated with: 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, and misleading readers about who owns, funds, and authors stories for the site." Spamming search engines to game rankings is the primary criteria here.
However, we note that "Many sites may occasionally do one or more of these things, but we take action very rarely, only in the most extreme cases." We're talking tiny amounts of domains here because "we must see at least three of these organizations independently assess a site as having extremely low journalistic standards and also see that none of these organizations have assessed the same site as having even somewhat robust journalistic standards." That means if the site has any pulse of a real news site then it doesn't get counted as spam.
And it also says for these spam sites: "We trust that users can find the right information for themselves, so even in these rare cases we do not remove these sites from our search results page. Additionally, impacted sites are not moved so far down in the results that they are effectively removed."
- Why can you not publish who these organizations are and what the "objective" standards they all use are?
- Why can you not notify users when they have entered a query that has results subjected to this rank modification? (And/or give them the ability to reverse it?)
- Why can you not just publish the naughty list?
- Why can you not publish anything objectively verifiable about this entire process?
> In reality we never censored anything, nor do we have a disinformation/"truth" detector
Sorry, those are conflicting statements.
I cannot determine which of the two statements are true.
I assume filtering search spam is complicated. I can believe the narrative where Russian disinformation actually resulted in what you call more "news spam" (i.e. news sites that have recently gamed their own search rank).
But it genuinely felt like you wanted to affect the war, and your leverage was "suppress Russian lies", which incidentally suppresses everyone's perception of what's going on. Not even Switzerland was neutral in the invasion of Ukraine, so I understand the incentives.
But you can't both support politically motivated filtering and claim to be neutral.
Let's say the real purpose was always to reduce "news spam", and Russia increased their news spam when invading Ukraine. Let's say both DuckDuckGo's search quality and trustworthiness depends on being mostly neutral. Given your feedback in this thread, I'll continue to recommend DuckDuckGo to friends. And I'll continue to use Kagi myself for now. :-)
Yes, that is correct. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36145183
There is a difference between my personal political opinion and the fact that DuckDuckGo itself acts non-politically, which is what actually happened.
Are you suggesting that Google doesn't censor political views?
https://www.protocol.com/bulletins/duckduckgo-yandex-ukraine
To be clear, we do not censor. Per the help article referenced above (https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/ne...): "we don’t evaluate or otherwise take into account any potential political bias or leanings of websites in our search result rankings."