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I guess this did not age well: “[W]hen you search, you expect unbiased results, but that’s not what you get on Google,” @matthewde_silva quotes @yegg https:/

I guess this did not age well: “[W]hen you search, you expect unbiased results, but that’s not what you get on Google,” @matthewde_silva quotes @yegg https://twitter.com/DuckDuckGo/status/1114524914227253249 https://twitter.com/DuckDuckGo/status/1114524914227253249 Also, they probably do not realize that they will have to start with Twitter if to be consistent.

peakaboo 5y ago
Im still against censorship but covid showed me that there are people who believe anything. :/ You can change entire elections this way, by controlling what propaganda is ok and what isn't. But make no mistake, its actually all propaganda.
meerita 5y ago
Exactly. This people never realize this: 1. Who will decide what is truth or not. 2. Who will be arbiter With this decision, they join the club with Google and the rest.
eli 5y ago
What does down-ranking disinformation sites globally have to do with complaining about Google customizing results based on its profile of you? EDIT: The rest of the quote is “On Google, you get results tailored to what they think you’re likely to click on, based on the data profile they’ve built on you over time.”
- coffeefirst 5y ago
  And in this specific case, it feels more like quality control of state-sponsored spam. You can still find these sites—they come up first if you look for them directly, they're just treated as the low quality information than they are.
  - mattwilsonn888 5y ago
    And why should anyone believe that State sponsored spam doesn't come from all angles? If I'm going to receive propaganda, I at least would like consistent sampling of it. And who cares about any of that - you have admonished an information search provider to determine what information it serves you based on subjective, undisclosed criteria of which there is good reason to believe is ideologically motivated.
  - avgcorrection 5y ago
    Some people consume information from outlets like Al Jazeera because they would like something which might be a little more distanced from the West than things like Anglo outlets.
    - coffeefirst 5y ago
      Right, but Al Jazeera is more like the BBC than it is like RT. I don't see anyone making a quality-based argument to downrank it, and I would disagree with them if they did.
      - mardifoufs 5y ago
        Aljazeera is literally the Qatari state media. That means they are the media outlet of a slave state controlled by an absolute monarchy . Tell anyone in the Arabic world that aljazeera is neutral or BBC like and you will get laughed at. Even RT is probably not on as short of an editorial leash than al jazeera. Your comment is actually an amazing example of why we should absolutely avoid media censorship (like the EU is doing right now); it seems like the people who are usually the most vocally pushing for it are also, not coincidentally, those who are also the most likely to be completely oblivious to propaganda even when it's right in front of them. Yet also think that they are impervious to it.
        soundnote 5y ago
        Also worth noting that Al Jazeera's coverage in English and Arabic are obviously different.
        empthought 5y ago
        The BBC is literally the UK state media.
        mardifoufs 5y ago
        You ignored the "slave state with an absolute monarchy" part I think. Not like they are even comparable, unless you are saying the BBC journalists could justifiably be fearing for their lives if they criticize the UK government? All state media aren't created equal, and aren't equally independant. Otherwise the BBC, aljazeera and RT would be all equal since they are all state media after all.
  - Mountain_Skies 5y ago
    Cool, you can have a checkbox for 'Protect me from being stupid' and click it on each of your searches. This allows you to be protected from "state-sponsored spam" without imposing your intellectual shortcomings on everyone else.
- hombre_fatal 5y ago
  Downranking "disinformation" could be seen as creating the sort of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filter_bubble https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filter_bubble that Weinberg often denigrates. > As a result, users become separated from information that disagrees with their viewpoints, effectively isolating them in their own cultural or ideological bubbles. The choices made by these algorithms are not transparent. I don't think it's unfounded criticism. One problem is how arbitrary the categorization of "disinformation" can be. Once you go down the path, it can also create a scenario where you tacitly approve the things you don't decide to censor/downrank. While I can argue both sides, it simply doesn't come without trade-offs.
  - eli 5y ago
    No, it can't. A filter bubble is specifically defined as users getting personalized results for the same query based on what an algorithm knows about them. It's right there in the first paragraph on wikipedia. A hyper-partisan search engine that only showed results that favor one viewpoint would be bad, but it wouldn't be a filter bubble.
    - hombre_fatal 5y ago
      When I read the wiki page, I don't personally think much swivels on whether a human or algorithm creates the filter since the reason it's an issue is the end result. Or rather, "it's okay since it's not an algorithm doing it" doesn't wave away the concerns very effectively.
      - chaosite 5y ago
        The argument you're responding to wasn't "it's okay since it's not an algorithm doing it". It was "it's not a filter bubble since it's not personalized".
    - pvaldes 5y ago
      This is not an us or them case, is a true or false case. And false and true don't share a value of 50/50%. Unless we want to use a browser as moron-classifier, false results had a value of 0 in a search. False facts are valuable in a search only as if tagged as debunked as false in the same page.
enragedcacti 5y ago
I really don't understand this view point. Isn't a search engine's entire job to effectively 'censor' the parts of the internet that aren't relevant or helpful to your search query? Is it censorship for them to downrank flat-earth content when you are trying to learn about how to chart a flight? Flat-earthers certainly have a lot of ideas about how charting a course on a flat earth works but that doesn't mean it's helpful to a reasonable person. At least in their case they truly believe it, with disinformation the entire goal is to exploit DDGs users to pretty much everyone's detriment. Of course if I search for "RT ukrainian conflict" RT should show up, but do you really want your search engine to default to providing results from someone with a very clear agenda and a history of abusing their influence to carry out that agenda? Of course its possible that the net is too wide, but I find it weird that there is a slippery slope censorship argument going on when search engines have been trying to serve authentic results and beat out inauthentic ones for 20+ years.
- CWuestefeld 5y ago
  The announcement makes me suspect that it's down-ranking results not for what they are, but who it's from. That is, penalizing results based on their being from a disfavored source.
  - shadowgovt 5y ago
    That's been a valid approach ever since expertsexchange.com dropped off the radar. It's one of the many tools in the toolbox for dealing with SEO games.
- avgcorrection 5y ago
  If I am interested in Flat Earth Theory and search for that then I expect to get results that Flat Earth believers are interested in. It’s that simple.
  - astine 5y ago
    If you're actually interested in flat earth theory you'll search for "Flat Earth." If you search for "Charting a Flight", You're probably not looking for flat earth content.
kube-system 5y ago
"unbiased" doesn't mean "unfiltered". For example, I don't want spam or malware in my search results. Search results should return good information that is relevant to your query, and filter out anything that is not that.
- kyle_martin1 5y ago
- dylan604 5y ago
  What if I'm doing research on the specific types of misinformation? I don't want results of sites telling me the misinformation is going on, but I want the actual bits of misinformation for proper attribution. There's always edge cases
  - kube-system 5y ago
    You'll have the same challenges as the people who are researching spam or malware. I could see a use-case for a niche product that specifically doesn't filter bad results, but I'm pretty sure DDG wants to be a general-purpose search engine first.
  - spywaregorilla 5y ago
    If it's not appearing in the searches then it's not "going on". If you're looking for what specific sites are saying, you can still do that.
  - eli 5y ago
    If you search "Ukraine news RT" on DDG you get Ukraine news from RT. It's still there if you look for it. It just isn't near the top of a "Ukraine news" query (I assume you'd find it there eventually if you scroll enough)
    - willcipriano 5y ago
      All you have to do is scroll past the US misinformation, on past EU misinformation and you'll find it right there. Easy.
ColinHayhurst 5y ago
To what extent does their agreement with Microsoft allow them to change rankings? Will Ecosia, Qwant, Yahoo! and so on be doing, or have to do, the same?
- mrweasel 5y ago
  As I understand it, based on previous comments on HN they can change ranking and inject results from their crawler into the search. The assumption that it’s just Bing comes which a bunch of asteriskes.
HeckFeck 5y ago
For me, this move by DDG will have the opposite effect of what is intended. I will now trust my own media and sources even less, if they rely on silencing the competition and insist on controlling what I access "for my own good". Such dirty tactics are insulting, even more so when delivered under a sneering benevolent guise. As if they have perfect knowledge of my motives and wishes. What if I'm genuinely curious as to how the Russian media is presenting this war? They must have access to this perfect knowledge if they are fit to decide which news sources are "correct"!
- ScarletEmerald 5y ago
  Would you trust a source of medical information less if it declined to present or link to information that breathing CO is healthy, drinking mineral spirits is fine, and handling mercury with bare skin is safe and fun?
  - skinnymuch 5y ago
    I don’t know. Since this sort of thing isn’t happening and the general atmosphere of everything is unlike your hypothetical. I’m not sure it much matters.
    - hobs 5y ago
      The united states has several states passing laws so doctors can proscribe ivermectin for covid, we genuinely live in a world where homeopathy is a the option Steve Jobs took instead of cancer therapy. I have no understanding of why you would say this is not happening when product brands like GOOP make tons of money from outright hocus pocus health bs.
      - skinnymuch 5y ago
        I think Ivermectin was part of the CDC’s COVID prevention or when you have light levels of Covid lists back in 2020 and early 2021. I remember seeing it from progressive people sharing stuff before it became the term and meme it became today. That makes it a really interesting point too, but it makes all sides look bad. OTOH, you’re right Steve Jobs and what he did...yikes. That sort of thinking is harmful for society. Yes GOOP is disgusting. So disgusting. I thi
WheatM 5y ago
moralestapia 5y ago
p1necone 5y ago
Search results have to be "biased" towards being related to your query to be useful, I would argue that state sponsored Russian propaganda is probably not particularly related to most queries.
- freediver 5y ago
  How about state sponsored Chinese propaganda? Or how about state sponsored New Zealand propaganda? Or state sponsored German propaganda? How about a corporation XYZ sponsored propaganda? What if you are Russian, Chinese, Kiwi, German or XYZ employee in these situations - or simply want to have equal access to information so you can make up your own world view? If you choose to go down this path - what propaganda is OK to be relevant to most queries and who is supposed to be the judge of that? The problem discussed here is not of search quality bias nature, but of political bias nature which should not have a place in a general web search engine.
  - danShumway 5y ago
    Hrm. I always wonder in these situations, what about the slippery slope in the opposite direction? "Political bias" is not a well-defined term; different people have different opinions about what topics are political and about what counts as bias. So let's say that DuckDuckGo commits to not doing any filtering or sorting based on a nebulous term like "politics". If you choose to go down that path - what concepts are political and who is supposed to be the judge of that? It seems to me that in order to have any web search engine of any real use, we necessarily have to accept that we are on some level ranking facts based on how relevant they are to queries, and we have to accept that we're going to try and strike a balance between neutrality and usefulness, and that different people/engines will have different ideas about what that balance is. Of course it would be better if consumers had more choices about different search engines to use in situations where they feel the rankings are bad, but... is it necessarily DuckDuckGo's fault that there aren't more search engines?
    - freediver 5y ago
      A search engine should have ranking factors that tie to the end goal of providing the most relevant results to their users. However this decision is about unilaterally down-ranking a subset of results because of the political view expressed on them (if it was about misinformation than surely they would want to down-rank all misinformation equally - if they had capability to do so in the first place). This is at the same level of absurdity from a search engine user perspective as would downranking sites because their tld is .net or because they are in italian language.
squiggy22 5y ago
If people started using the word 'false' instead of disinformation I think the distinction would be clearer. We aren't talking about good results versus bad results here surely? When did bias come into it? Merely falsehoods versus truths? Or have we got to the point where no one actually believes in such anymore and it depends on your political opinion on whether something is true or false? Fact or fiction. Let your political direction decide. Surely removing fictious results should be a bonus for everyone? I give up. World has gone pure stone mad.
luciusdomitius 5y ago
Even before that it was just a bing.com fronted. Now it is a censored bing.com frontend lol.
shadowgovt 5y ago
That comment shouldn't have aged well one nanosecond after it was posted. Search results are bias. The entire idea of a "search engine" is to bias the set of all possible data in the crawled universe to select for the information you're searching for, then sort that information by "likeliest to be what you wanted" because the interface can't just cram all the results straight into your brain. ... and the company writing the search engine is always the final arbiter of what that means in implementation. In this specific case, DDG is announcing they are aware of some sites where the information is likely to be untrue and they're downranking it on account of it being a datasource unlikely to deliver what the user wants. That's their job, in exactly the same sense that it's their job to figure out that when I search for "hacker news" I mean this site and not the r/hackernews Reddit mirror.
danShumway 5y ago
The entire quote in context: > “[W]hen you search, you expect unbiased results, but that’s not what you get on Google,” Gabriel Weinberg, founder of DuckDuckGo, a privacy-focused search engine, writes on Quora. “On Google, you get results tailored to what they think you’re likely to click on, based on the data profile they’ve built on you over time.” "Unbiased" is a bad word to use, but what they were getting at is that Google tailors search results per-person based on a data profile. I don't see how anyone even at the time thought that this meant that DuckDuckGo was not ranking sites, that's what a search engine does. I genuinely don't understand the controversy at all about this. "Who determines what is misinformation" is an argument for search engine diversity, not for destroying the entire concept of a search engine. Of course DuckDuckGo downranks and upranks sites. The real controversy here is why after all of these years they still haven't gotten around to downranking W3Schools.
- shadowgovt 5y ago
  I assume it's the "law of conservation of expertsexchange." They don't downrank w3schools because something will just replace it. ;)
  - giantrobot 5y ago
    I still can't read that site name as anything but "expert sex change".
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
hedora 5y ago
Funny how most of the comments here are complaining about how this proves there is western media bias. One of the main goals of the current Russian propaganda push in the US is to get people to lose confidence in reliable news outlets. They want us to believe that our best news outlets are equivalent to their basement troll farms that just fabricate stories day in and out. The two are not the same. Giving equal per story weight to misinformation spammers is equivalent to letting those spammers censor the rest of the media. Is that really what you want duck duck go and other western sites to do?
- pydry 5y ago
  >One of the main goals of the current Russian propaganda push in the US is to get people to lose confidence in reliable news outlets. If western news outlets focused a little more on actually being reliable and objective maybe people wouldnt lose confidence. I hardly think Russian propaganda is required for people to do this.
  - hedora 5y ago
    True, but "not great" is different than "maliciously bad".
    - pydry 5y ago
      Western news is a lot worse than "not great".
- freediver 5y ago
  Out of curiosity, what are the reliable news outlets that you subscribe to?
  - hedora 5y ago
    Good question. I tend to read primary sources when possible. Propublica isn't bad. Outlets that syndicate them are often good. Also, organizations that still have journalists on staff, and win awards such as the Pulitzer Prize are a good bet. Edit: https://www.pulitzer.org/prize-winners-by-year/2021 https://www.pulitzer.org/prize-winners-by-year/2021
TameAntelope 5y ago
DDG's ranking algorithm is under attack, and they're acting in defense of it. Nothing more, nothing less. To think there's some objective "unbiased" search result is naive.
eyelidlessness 5y ago
Seems consistent to me.
lliamander 5y ago
As the Substack folks said: we do not have a misinformation problem, we have a trust problem.

peakaboo 5y ago

Im still against censorship but covid showed me that there are people who believe anything. :/ You can change entire elections this way, by controlling what propaganda is ok and what isn't. But make no mistake, its actually all propaganda.

meerita 5y ago

Exactly. This people never realize this: 1. Who will decide what is truth or not. 2. Who will be arbiter With this decision, they join the club with Google and the rest.

eli 5y ago

What does down-ranking disinformation sites globally have to do with complaining about Google customizing results based on its profile of you? EDIT: The rest of the quote is “On Google, you get results tailored to what they think you’re likely to click on, based on the data profile they’ve built on you over time.”

coffeefirst 5y ago
And in this specific case, it feels more like quality control of state-sponsored spam. You can still find these sites—they come up first if you look for them directly, they're just treated as the low quality information than they are.
- mattwilsonn888 5y ago
  And why should anyone believe that State sponsored spam doesn't come from all angles? If I'm going to receive propaganda, I at least would like consistent sampling of it. And who cares about any of that - you have admonished an information search provider to determine what information it serves you based on subjective, undisclosed criteria of which there is good reason to believe is ideologically motivated.
- avgcorrection 5y ago
  Some people consume information from outlets like Al Jazeera because they would like something which might be a little more distanced from the West than things like Anglo outlets.
  - coffeefirst 5y ago
    Right, but Al Jazeera is more like the BBC than it is like RT. I don't see anyone making a quality-based argument to downrank it, and I would disagree with them if they did.
    - mardifoufs 5y ago
      Aljazeera is literally the Qatari state media. That means they are the media outlet of a slave state controlled by an absolute monarchy . Tell anyone in the Arabic world that aljazeera is neutral or BBC like and you will get laughed at. Even RT is probably not on as short of an editorial leash than al jazeera. Your comment is actually an amazing example of why we should absolutely avoid media censorship (like the EU is doing right now); it seems like the people who are usually the most vocally pushing for it are also, not coincidentally, those who are also the most likely to be completely oblivious to propaganda even when it's right in front of them. Yet also think that they are impervious to it.
      - soundnote 5y ago
        Also worth noting that Al Jazeera's coverage in English and Arabic are obviously different.
      - empthought 5y ago
        The BBC is literally the UK state media.
        mardifoufs 5y ago
        You ignored the "slave state with an absolute monarchy" part I think. Not like they are even comparable, unless you are saying the BBC journalists could justifiably be fearing for their lives if they criticize the UK government? All state media aren't created equal, and aren't equally independant. Otherwise the BBC, aljazeera and RT would be all equal since they are all state media after all.
- Mountain_Skies 5y ago
  Cool, you can have a checkbox for 'Protect me from being stupid' and click it on each of your searches. This allows you to be protected from "state-sponsored spam" without imposing your intellectual shortcomings on everyone else.
hombre_fatal 5y ago
Downranking "disinformation" could be seen as creating the sort of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filter_bubble https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filter_bubble that Weinberg often denigrates. > As a result, users become separated from information that disagrees with their viewpoints, effectively isolating them in their own cultural or ideological bubbles. The choices made by these algorithms are not transparent. I don't think it's unfounded criticism. One problem is how arbitrary the categorization of "disinformation" can be. Once you go down the path, it can also create a scenario where you tacitly approve the things you don't decide to censor/downrank. While I can argue both sides, it simply doesn't come without trade-offs.
- eli 5y ago
  No, it can't. A filter bubble is specifically defined as users getting personalized results for the same query based on what an algorithm knows about them. It's right there in the first paragraph on wikipedia. A hyper-partisan search engine that only showed results that favor one viewpoint would be bad, but it wouldn't be a filter bubble.
  - hombre_fatal 5y ago
    When I read the wiki page, I don't personally think much swivels on whether a human or algorithm creates the filter since the reason it's an issue is the end result. Or rather, "it's okay since it's not an algorithm doing it" doesn't wave away the concerns very effectively.
    - chaosite 5y ago
      The argument you're responding to wasn't "it's okay since it's not an algorithm doing it". It was "it's not a filter bubble since it's not personalized".
  - pvaldes 5y ago
    This is not an us or them case, is a true or false case. And false and true don't share a value of 50/50%. Unless we want to use a browser as moron-classifier, false results had a value of 0 in a search. False facts are valuable in a search only as if tagged as debunked as false in the same page.

enragedcacti 5y ago

I really don't understand this view point. Isn't a search engine's entire job to effectively 'censor' the parts of the internet that aren't relevant or helpful to your search query? Is it censorship for them to downrank flat-earth content when you are trying to learn about how to chart a flight? Flat-earthers certainly have a lot of ideas about how charting a course on a flat earth works but that doesn't mean it's helpful to a reasonable person. At least in their case they truly believe it, with disinformation the entire goal is to exploit DDGs users to pretty much everyone's detriment. Of course if I search for "RT ukrainian conflict" RT should show up, but do you really want your search engine to default to providing results from someone with a very clear agenda and a history of abusing their influence to carry out that agenda? Of course its possible that the net is too wide, but I find it weird that there is a slippery slope censorship argument going on when search engines have been trying to serve authentic results and beat out inauthentic ones for 20+ years.

CWuestefeld 5y ago
The announcement makes me suspect that it's down-ranking results not for what they are, but who it's from. That is, penalizing results based on their being from a disfavored source.
- shadowgovt 5y ago
  That's been a valid approach ever since expertsexchange.com dropped off the radar. It's one of the many tools in the toolbox for dealing with SEO games.
avgcorrection 5y ago
If I am interested in Flat Earth Theory and search for that then I expect to get results that Flat Earth believers are interested in. It’s that simple.
- astine 5y ago
  If you're actually interested in flat earth theory you'll search for "Flat Earth." If you search for "Charting a Flight", You're probably not looking for flat earth content.

kube-system 5y ago

"unbiased" doesn't mean "unfiltered". For example, I don't want spam or malware in my search results. Search results should return good information that is relevant to your query, and filter out anything that is not that.

kyle_martin1 5y ago
dylan604 5y ago
What if I'm doing research on the specific types of misinformation? I don't want results of sites telling me the misinformation is going on, but I want the actual bits of misinformation for proper attribution. There's always edge cases
- kube-system 5y ago
  You'll have the same challenges as the people who are researching spam or malware. I could see a use-case for a niche product that specifically doesn't filter bad results, but I'm pretty sure DDG wants to be a general-purpose search engine first.
- spywaregorilla 5y ago
  If it's not appearing in the searches then it's not "going on". If you're looking for what specific sites are saying, you can still do that.
- eli 5y ago
  If you search "Ukraine news RT" on DDG you get Ukraine news from RT. It's still there if you look for it. It just isn't near the top of a "Ukraine news" query (I assume you'd find it there eventually if you scroll enough)
  - willcipriano 5y ago
    All you have to do is scroll past the US misinformation, on past EU misinformation and you'll find it right there. Easy.

ColinHayhurst 5y ago

To what extent does their agreement with Microsoft allow them to change rankings? Will Ecosia, Qwant, Yahoo! and so on be doing, or have to do, the same?

mrweasel 5y ago
As I understand it, based on previous comments on HN they can change ranking and inject results from their crawler into the search. The assumption that it’s just Bing comes which a bunch of asteriskes.

HeckFeck 5y ago

For me, this move by DDG will have the opposite effect of what is intended. I will now trust my own media and sources even less, if they rely on silencing the competition and insist on controlling what I access "for my own good". Such dirty tactics are insulting, even more so when delivered under a sneering benevolent guise. As if they have perfect knowledge of my motives and wishes. What if I'm genuinely curious as to how the Russian media is presenting this war? They must have access to this perfect knowledge if they are fit to decide which news sources are "correct"!

ScarletEmerald 5y ago
Would you trust a source of medical information less if it declined to present or link to information that breathing CO is healthy, drinking mineral spirits is fine, and handling mercury with bare skin is safe and fun?
- skinnymuch 5y ago
  I don’t know. Since this sort of thing isn’t happening and the general atmosphere of everything is unlike your hypothetical. I’m not sure it much matters.
  - hobs 5y ago
    The united states has several states passing laws so doctors can proscribe ivermectin for covid, we genuinely live in a world where homeopathy is a the option Steve Jobs took instead of cancer therapy. I have no understanding of why you would say this is not happening when product brands like GOOP make tons of money from outright hocus pocus health bs.
    - skinnymuch 5y ago
      I think Ivermectin was part of the CDC’s COVID prevention or when you have light levels of Covid lists back in 2020 and early 2021. I remember seeing it from progressive people sharing stuff before it became the term and meme it became today. That makes it a really interesting point too, but it makes all sides look bad. OTOH, you’re right Steve Jobs and what he did...yikes. That sort of thinking is harmful for society. Yes GOOP is disgusting. So disgusting. I thi

WheatM 5y ago

moralestapia 5y ago

p1necone 5y ago

Search results have to be "biased" towards being related to your query to be useful, I would argue that state sponsored Russian propaganda is probably not particularly related to most queries.

freediver 5y ago
How about state sponsored Chinese propaganda? Or how about state sponsored New Zealand propaganda? Or state sponsored German propaganda? How about a corporation XYZ sponsored propaganda? What if you are Russian, Chinese, Kiwi, German or XYZ employee in these situations - or simply want to have equal access to information so you can make up your own world view? If you choose to go down this path - what propaganda is OK to be relevant to most queries and who is supposed to be the judge of that? The problem discussed here is not of search quality bias nature, but of political bias nature which should not have a place in a general web search engine.
- danShumway 5y ago
  Hrm. I always wonder in these situations, what about the slippery slope in the opposite direction? "Political bias" is not a well-defined term; different people have different opinions about what topics are political and about what counts as bias. So let's say that DuckDuckGo commits to not doing any filtering or sorting based on a nebulous term like "politics". If you choose to go down that path - what concepts are political and who is supposed to be the judge of that? It seems to me that in order to have any web search engine of any real use, we necessarily have to accept that we are on some level ranking facts based on how relevant they are to queries, and we have to accept that we're going to try and strike a balance between neutrality and usefulness, and that different people/engines will have different ideas about what that balance is. Of course it would be better if consumers had more choices about different search engines to use in situations where they feel the rankings are bad, but... is it necessarily DuckDuckGo's fault that there aren't more search engines?
  - freediver 5y ago
    A search engine should have ranking factors that tie to the end goal of providing the most relevant results to their users. However this decision is about unilaterally down-ranking a subset of results because of the political view expressed on them (if it was about misinformation than surely they would want to down-rank all misinformation equally - if they had capability to do so in the first place). This is at the same level of absurdity from a search engine user perspective as would downranking sites because their tld is .net or because they are in italian language.

squiggy22 5y ago

If people started using the word 'false' instead of disinformation I think the distinction would be clearer. We aren't talking about good results versus bad results here surely? When did bias come into it? Merely falsehoods versus truths? Or have we got to the point where no one actually believes in such anymore and it depends on your political opinion on whether something is true or false? Fact or fiction. Let your political direction decide. Surely removing fictious results should be a bonus for everyone? I give up. World has gone pure stone mad.

luciusdomitius 5y ago

Even before that it was just a bing.com fronted. Now it is a censored bing.com frontend lol.

shadowgovt 5y ago

That comment shouldn't have aged well one nanosecond after it was posted. Search results are bias. The entire idea of a "search engine" is to bias the set of all possible data in the crawled universe to select for the information you're searching for, then sort that information by "likeliest to be what you wanted" because the interface can't just cram all the results straight into your brain. ... and the company writing the search engine is always the final arbiter of what that means in implementation. In this specific case, DDG is announcing they are aware of some sites where the information is likely to be untrue and they're downranking it on account of it being a datasource unlikely to deliver what the user wants. That's their job, in exactly the same sense that it's their job to figure out that when I search for "hacker news" I mean this site and not the r/hackernews Reddit mirror.

danShumway 5y ago

The entire quote in context: > “[W]hen you search, you expect unbiased results, but that’s not what you get on Google,” Gabriel Weinberg, founder of DuckDuckGo, a privacy-focused search engine, writes on Quora. “On Google, you get results tailored to what they think you’re likely to click on, based on the data profile they’ve built on you over time.” "Unbiased" is a bad word to use, but what they were getting at is that Google tailors search results per-person based on a data profile. I don't see how anyone even at the time thought that this meant that DuckDuckGo was not ranking sites, that's what a search engine does. I genuinely don't understand the controversy at all about this. "Who determines what is misinformation" is an argument for search engine diversity, not for destroying the entire concept of a search engine. Of course DuckDuckGo downranks and upranks sites. The real controversy here is why after all of these years they still haven't gotten around to downranking W3Schools.

shadowgovt 5y ago
I assume it's the "law of conservation of expertsexchange." They don't downrank w3schools because something will just replace it. ;)
- giantrobot 5y ago
  I still can't read that site name as anything but "expert sex change".
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]

hedora 5y ago

Funny how most of the comments here are complaining about how this proves there is western media bias. One of the main goals of the current Russian propaganda push in the US is to get people to lose confidence in reliable news outlets. They want us to believe that our best news outlets are equivalent to their basement troll farms that just fabricate stories day in and out. The two are not the same. Giving equal per story weight to misinformation spammers is equivalent to letting those spammers censor the rest of the media. Is that really what you want duck duck go and other western sites to do?

pydry 5y ago
>One of the main goals of the current Russian propaganda push in the US is to get people to lose confidence in reliable news outlets. If western news outlets focused a little more on actually being reliable and objective maybe people wouldnt lose confidence. I hardly think Russian propaganda is required for people to do this.
- hedora 5y ago
  True, but "not great" is different than "maliciously bad".
  - pydry 5y ago
    Western news is a lot worse than "not great".
freediver 5y ago
Out of curiosity, what are the reliable news outlets that you subscribe to?
- hedora 5y ago
  Good question. I tend to read primary sources when possible. Propublica isn't bad. Outlets that syndicate them are often good. Also, organizations that still have journalists on staff, and win awards such as the Pulitzer Prize are a good bet. Edit: https://www.pulitzer.org/prize-winners-by-year/2021 https://www.pulitzer.org/prize-winners-by-year/2021

TameAntelope 5y ago

DDG's ranking algorithm is under attack, and they're acting in defense of it. Nothing more, nothing less. To think there's some objective "unbiased" search result is naive.

eyelidlessness 5y ago

Seems consistent to me.

lliamander 5y ago

As the Substack folks said: we do not have a misinformation problem, we have a trust problem.