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Comment by ValveFan6969 | Hacker News Reader

I found it interesting that they have an article saying "we don't censor search results".

Who is "we"? Don't they get their results from Bing?

We = DuckDuckGo. As the article notes, we are increasingly relying on our own search technology. For example, our Search Assist (our version of AI overviews), local results (maps, business listings, etc.), knowledge graph stuff (wikipedia, answers, etc.) don't come from Bing. That said, if Bing happens to removes something, we can add it back, which we do. We do not censor anything ouselves.

But DuckDuckGo does censor search results, if DMCA takedown requests are countered as censorship (which they should be because the system is abused).

Eg, DDG always fail the "watch (specific movie or tv show) online" search query test. Many other search engines like Bing and Google also fail. It's a quick censorship influence test as DMCA takedown requests have a clear track-record of being abused.

One search engine that succeeds is Russia's Yandex. I'm sure they censor plenty of things (eg, material sensitive to Russia), but that censorship set may not intersect with the Google, Bing and DDG sets.

> Eg, DDG always fail the "watch (specific movie or tv show) online" search query test. Many other search engines like Bing and Google also fail.

DDG results are mostly Bing results, so if a page doesn't show up on Bing, it probably won't on DDG either. That doesn't mean DDG themselves censored the results.

As a user that distinction is meaningless. I don't care what they use as a backend, and I shouldn't have to. If their source provider censors search results it means their own search results are censored too.

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