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> 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

> 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.

freediver 5y ago
> It is justifiable to critique them in whether or not they've done a good job of that, If the announcement said "all disinformation about Russian-Ukraine conflict" it would grant benefit of a doubt about their execution as you point out. But it says "Russian disinformation" thus they are making it about politics (something a search engine should not be doing), not fighting disinformation (something a search engine should be doing), so we are justified to critique them on that basis. > 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. Correct. Because they can rightfully infer that the user is searching in english and likely wants results in english. However in this case, they are inferring a certain political view of the conflict, regardless of what your intent is (what if you are a Russian or Chinese DDG user, or simply someone who is agnostic and wants to read what all sides have to say to form a world view?). No basis for inference can be established here. The only way this could work is by having a switch in the interface to turn such results off, so the user can opt in into it if they prefer to.
- danShumway 5y ago
  > But it says "Russian disinformation" thus they are making it about politics I don't follow. What specifically do you mean when you say the word "politics"? Do you mean that targeting a specific source of misinformation is political? That's literally all manual interventions, all of them target specific sources. > However in this case, they are inferring a certain political view of the conflict, regardless of what your intent is Well, or they're inferring that the information is factually wrong. Again, just very confused at what you mean by political here. When DuckDuckGo uses the word misinformation, what it means by that word is that DuckDuckGo thinks the information is factually incorrect, regardless of whether you are Russian or Chinese or American. If the DOJ comes out against encryption and says that it has a special chip that's safe enough for everyone, and then a researcher says, "no, I have broken the chip" -- is that a political disagreement? If I block the DOJ source am I making a political statement, or am I saying that the DOJ's assertion in this case is factually wrong? Of course, sorting facts often has political implications, and it is fair to ask about what the political implications and viewpoints are that DuckDuckGo has, and whether it has biases that prevent it from reacting as strongly to, just as an example, US propaganda about refugees or armed conflicts that it has initiated. However, once again, asking critical questions about bias is not the same thing as saying that there is a nebulous category called "politics" where a private company who's job it is to sort information should never sort information. > No basis for inference can be established here. The only way this could work is by having a switch in the interface to turn such results off, so the user can opt in into it if they prefer to. It's hard to argue about this because on one hand, having more user controls around search would genuinely be good. However, this is not really how search works right now outside of rare situations like safe-search and location, and to argue that DuckDuckGo shouldn't be making any editorial decisions about political topics until full user-transparent customization of search algorithms exist -- it's effectively the same thing as arguing that no editorial decisions should be made right now. To me, this just kind of circles back around to what I was originally saying. Are you upset about a result-sorting business doing its job and sorting results, or are you upset with this very specific decision, or... is it possible you're just upset that we don't have a more competitive market for search engines?
  - 5y ago
ipaddr 5y ago
"search engines don't base rankings off of tlds" Of course they do. By country: so .ca will rank better in Canada$and .in India by domain rank .com ranks higher than .biz
- danShumway 5y ago
  Yep, fair point, you're probably right about that. I was thinking more TLDs like .net vs .com and forgot about the regional side of things, even though I had just mentioned it for ranking based on language. I guess on that note, I also vaguely remember that .com/.net differentiation was something that people tried in various contexts (not sure if searching was one of them) before we all figured out, "wait, this doesn't mean anything about quality other than which one you chose to buy."

freediver 5y ago

> It is justifiable to critique them in whether or not they've done a good job of that, If the announcement said "all disinformation about Russian-Ukraine conflict" it would grant benefit of a doubt about their execution as you point out. But it says "Russian disinformation" thus they are making it about politics (something a search engine should not be doing), not fighting disinformation (something a search engine should be doing), so we are justified to critique them on that basis. > 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. Correct. Because they can rightfully infer that the user is searching in english and likely wants results in english. However in this case, they are inferring a certain political view of the conflict, regardless of what your intent is (what if you are a Russian or Chinese DDG user, or simply someone who is agnostic and wants to read what all sides have to say to form a world view?). No basis for inference can be established here. The only way this could work is by having a switch in the interface to turn such results off, so the user can opt in into it if they prefer to.

danShumway 5y ago
> But it says "Russian disinformation" thus they are making it about politics I don't follow. What specifically do you mean when you say the word "politics"? Do you mean that targeting a specific source of misinformation is political? That's literally all manual interventions, all of them target specific sources. > However in this case, they are inferring a certain political view of the conflict, regardless of what your intent is Well, or they're inferring that the information is factually wrong. Again, just very confused at what you mean by political here. When DuckDuckGo uses the word misinformation, what it means by that word is that DuckDuckGo thinks the information is factually incorrect, regardless of whether you are Russian or Chinese or American. If the DOJ comes out against encryption and says that it has a special chip that's safe enough for everyone, and then a researcher says, "no, I have broken the chip" -- is that a political disagreement? If I block the DOJ source am I making a political statement, or am I saying that the DOJ's assertion in this case is factually wrong? Of course, sorting facts often has political implications, and it is fair to ask about what the political implications and viewpoints are that DuckDuckGo has, and whether it has biases that prevent it from reacting as strongly to, just as an example, US propaganda about refugees or armed conflicts that it has initiated. However, once again, asking critical questions about bias is not the same thing as saying that there is a nebulous category called "politics" where a private company who's job it is to sort information should never sort information. > No basis for inference can be established here. The only way this could work is by having a switch in the interface to turn such results off, so the user can opt in into it if they prefer to. It's hard to argue about this because on one hand, having more user controls around search would genuinely be good. However, this is not really how search works right now outside of rare situations like safe-search and location, and to argue that DuckDuckGo shouldn't be making any editorial decisions about political topics until full user-transparent customization of search algorithms exist -- it's effectively the same thing as arguing that no editorial decisions should be made right now. To me, this just kind of circles back around to what I was originally saying. Are you upset about a result-sorting business doing its job and sorting results, or are you upset with this very specific decision, or... is it possible you're just upset that we don't have a more competitive market for search engines?
- 5y ago

ipaddr 5y ago

"search engines don't base rankings off of tlds" Of course they do. By country: so .ca will rank better in Canada$and .in India by domain rank .com ranks higher than .biz

danShumway 5y ago
Yep, fair point, you're probably right about that. I was thinking more TLDs like .net vs .com and forgot about the regional side of things, even though I had just mentioned it for ranking based on language. I guess on that note, I also vaguely remember that .com/.net differentiation was something that people tried in various contexts (not sure if searching was one of them) before we all figured out, "wait, this doesn't mean anything about quality other than which one you chose to buy."