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Comment by yegg | Hacker News Reader

(Hi, I'm the CEO & Founder of DuckDuckGo.)

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."

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That page states: "To identify these rare, extreme cases, we rely on multiple non-governmental and non-political organizations that specialize in objectively assessing journalistic standards."

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?

I abandoned DuckDuckGo during the Tank Man fiasco, but recently started giving it a chance every now and then. The fact that some page loads figuratively take a literal god damn eternity in Firefox on Android (I'm talking double-digit seconds) put the kibosh on that, Google is still instantaneous.

First off, we do not remove any results ourselves for political purposes and in fact we have been banned in China for many years for that very reason. What you're referring to was a temporary bug in our image search results from Bing that they promptly fixed. If they hadn't fixed it promptly then we would have taken further action. That seems hardly cause to abandon us.

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.

I do use Dark Reader. That's a hell of a bug. I'll assume it was that until proven otherwise.

Yes, it was.

If Bing censors the results, DDG is automatically going to do it too. I don't think yall have your own web results. You buy it from Microsoft if I'm not wrong. If bing serves ddg censored results how would ddg try to "in-censor" the results??? is it even possible?

We actually always had a bunch of our own stuff, and still do, as well as work with other partners. For example, the number one module on mobile is local, and we don't get any local stuff from Bing at all. Similarly, the number one module desktop is knowledge graph, and we don't get that from Bing at all either. And yes, you can re-insert results if they are indeed censored, but Bing doesn't really intentionally censor anything either as far as we can tell or we'd here a lot more about it. Occasionally something drops out of the index for some kind of bug reason that gets fixed.

Lately the main thing that's been greatly hurting DDG's usability for me is the search results being influenced by geolocation. It's quite frustrating to see completely unrelated search results that just so happen to have my city's name in their title (especially when I searched in a completely different language). Plus I frequently use proxies which makes the entire scheme meaningless either way. At least a way to switch to non-localized results would be nice to have.

(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.)

On this last point, a search engine has to provide local results to be useful, e.g., local weather, restaurants, etc. We do that always in anonymous fashion, as explained here: https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/privacy/an...

Could you make it opt-in? I suppose some people want to go to DDG to find the weather, but I never would. If I want a local business, I open Maps and search. I would never want any location data to influence any of my searches.

as companies go mainstream every company adopts the same methods. As time passes by ddg is starting to feel more like the YBG (Yandex Bing Google) search engines and less like a privacy friendly search engine.

That doesn't seem fair at all. Our privacy protections have only gotten stronger as we've protected you more and more beyond search.

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