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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 parti

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.
    - danShumway 5y ago
      > 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 They don't have that capability. DuckDuckGo also doesn't have the capability to surface only correct JS code when I search for a programming concept. There isn't a binary here, all manual upranking and downranking of any content is always playing whack-a-mole, none of it is systemic or equally applied -- that's why it's manual and not automatic. DuckDuckGo tries to strike a balance between manually downranking misinformation that is obviously wrong, while being careful about downranking in less clear-cut situations. It is justifiable to critique them in whether or not they've done a good job of that, and it is definitely justifiable to ask about why they don't apply the same standards to certain other propaganda sources. But that's not how I originally read your comment: "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." There's a big difference between saying that a specific search engine isn't doing a good job of stamping out all misinformation, or that it's being very selective about which misinformation it cares about, and saying that political content should be immune from ranking systems. ---- > 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. You know that most search engines downrank non-English-language sources for you if you're located in America, right? They try to return results in languages that you're likely to be able to read. And search engines don't base rankings off of tlds because that would be trivial for adversaries to take advantage of by switching to upranked tlds. It's not at all comparable to deciding to downrank a news source.
- cutemonster 5y ago
  It's called psychological warfare, what Putin is doing. And you're asking for an enemy state to be allowed to do that warfare, against Ukraine, Europe, the US, unhindered. This is not comparable to a company tricking people in buying more of their pointless stuff. > but of political bias nature No, what you're saying, would help a dictator that attacks another country.
  - JakeAl 5y ago
    The same could be said of the US, especially since the NDAA made it legal for the government to use propaganda on the domestic population.
    - cutemonster 5y ago
      The US is not currently invading Canada and bombing Toronto.
kradeelav 5y ago
State-sponsored American propaganda during the War on Terror is pretty routinely denounced now as incorrect to what was going on, but during the active days would have been ranked higher in results in search engines, had this kind of thing been more popular then. (I say that as a former neocon too.)

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.
  - danShumway 5y ago
    > 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 They don't have that capability. DuckDuckGo also doesn't have the capability to surface only correct JS code when I search for a programming concept. There isn't a binary here, all manual upranking and downranking of any content is always playing whack-a-mole, none of it is systemic or equally applied -- that's why it's manual and not automatic. DuckDuckGo tries to strike a balance between manually downranking misinformation that is obviously wrong, while being careful about downranking in less clear-cut situations. It is justifiable to critique them in whether or not they've done a good job of that, and it is definitely justifiable to ask about why they don't apply the same standards to certain other propaganda sources. But that's not how I originally read your comment: "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." There's a big difference between saying that a specific search engine isn't doing a good job of stamping out all misinformation, or that it's being very selective about which misinformation it cares about, and saying that political content should be immune from ranking systems. ---- > 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. You know that most search engines downrank non-English-language sources for you if you're located in America, right? They try to return results in languages that you're likely to be able to read. And search engines don't base rankings off of tlds because that would be trivial for adversaries to take advantage of by switching to upranked tlds. It's not at all comparable to deciding to downrank a news source.
cutemonster 5y ago
It's called psychological warfare, what Putin is doing. And you're asking for an enemy state to be allowed to do that warfare, against Ukraine, Europe, the US, unhindered. This is not comparable to a company tricking people in buying more of their pointless stuff. > but of political bias nature No, what you're saying, would help a dictator that attacks another country.
- JakeAl 5y ago
  The same could be said of the US, especially since the NDAA made it legal for the government to use propaganda on the domestic population.
  - cutemonster 5y ago
    The US is not currently invading Canada and bombing Toronto.

kradeelav 5y ago

State-sponsored American propaganda during the War on Terror is pretty routinely denounced now as incorrect to what was going on, but during the active days would have been ranked higher in results in search engines, had this kind of thing been more popular then. (I say that as a former neocon too.)