The whole point of a search engine is curation, and excluding garbage or in the case of Russia/Ukraine, making willful misinformation less prominent is an act o

The whole point of a search engine is curation, and excluding garbage or in the case of Russia/Ukraine, making willful misinformation less prominent is an act of curation. A search engine is largely two things: (1) crawling and discovering all available resources (2) parsing a user’s request for a resource of some kind and providing the user with a means of accessing “best matches” This process is inherently, unequivocally and fundamentally biased. It HAS TO be. There is no abject, absolute, canonical result for a search engine query. Ddg/google “censor” () all kinds of results constantly. Malware sites, sites that just mirror content from stackoverflow, sites that may cause public harm, etc. That’s the whole point. Another note: they may be downranking those results because users are unsatisfied with their quality. DDGs job is to help the user find what they are looking for, and if the user finds a bunch of Russian propaganda that is blatantly not what they wanted when they search for something (perhaps because Russia is exploiting SEO or using other techniques to inflate their position), why wouldn’t they tweak their product?