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> The solution is give those users options for unfiltered results Important to remember at this point in the conversation, DuckDuckGo didn't say that they were
by danShumway 5y ago
> The solution is give those users options for unfiltered results
Important to remember at this point in the conversation, DuckDuckGo didn't say that they were going to filter these results (although I also wouldn't really have a problem with that), they announced that they were going to downrank some of the sites.
Safe search toggles turn off actual content removal, which kind of makes sense -- there's a list of "mature" sites that are included in the list of possible search results or excluded. But ranking is different, turning off a site ranking doesn't make any sense in the context of a search engine. You want a toggle to make results no longer be a list?
Everything on DDG is ranked, everything is. There aren't separate categories of ranked and unranked content, there's no set of websites where DuckDuckGo isn't ranking them alongside other websites. It doesn't make any sense to say that DuckDuckGo shouldn't rank political content or news sites when returning them in searches, I don't know from a UI perspective what that would even look like.
I guess completely randomly sorting the search results for those queries? But... I mean, no one would want that feature, you would never be able to find relevant information for a political query.
Even before DuckDuckGo made this announcement and even before the war in Ukraine started, DuckDuckGo was always ranking these sites. There was never a period of time where these sites weren't being ranked higher or lower on search pages than other sites, and that ranking was always being determined in part by DuckDuckGo's internal bias about how rankings should work and what was and wasn't a "relevant" or accurate news source. From day one, from the start of the search engine, they were always ranking political content.