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DDG: We are not “purging” any media outlets from results
- usrn 4y agoThat they said they will manipulate the results was enough for me to start using Yandex.
- m-p-3 4y agoIt's a tight-rope for any search engine. Either you rank/filter nothing and everything showing up at the top is stuff abusing SEO and spam, or you try to get rid of the junk and ultimately piss someone who values it.
- trdtaylor1 4y agoAgreed; but certainly the red line is sites which some people believe are scum and others believe are holy (thepiratebay, fox news, RT, DDGs direct competitors). If anything this story/non-story has taught us is, there still exists potential cursed product changes which can sink large internet phenomena, like Digg was sunk.
- V__ 4y agoBut you will always find people who believe one or the other and who would consider it a red line? In my opinion that's an impossible task to solve. The only solution would be for everyone to preset what kind of information bubble they want to be a part of... which would result in a myriad of other problems.
- jakelazaroff 4y agoHow would it be possible for them to not manipulate results? The very definition of a search engine is ranking and filtering sites based on a query.
- yucky 4y agoManipulation in this context means modifying the results after the search algorithm ranks the relevant results for the query. A good recent example of this on Google was all during March Madness, any searches for "NCAA tournament schedule, "March Madness schedule" etc. would deliver the women's basketball tournament schedule (and results) above the men's, despite all of the interest being around the men's games. Google would say this was a noble thing, hoping to remind people that women's basketball exists, knowing how many queries were pouring in non-stop to find out what time a specific men's game was on. That is manipulation. You see the same "noble lies" surrounding political, news, & covid related searches as well.
- sidibe 4y agoLol Yandex is about to be the Russian Baidu if it hasn't started already. Dodging a little censorship to dive headfirst into a government controlled search engine.
- Trouble_007 4y agoGabriel Weinberg, @yegg CEO & Founder @DuckDuckGo - Nitter : https://nitter.net/yegg/ https://nitter.net/yegg/
- Trouble_007 4y ago>Gabriel Weinberg @yegg Apr 17, 2022 · 10:18 AM UTC Hoping to clear up some misconceptions about our private search engine. First, there is a completely made up headline going around this weekend. We are not "purging" any media outlets from results. Anyone can verify this by searching for an outlet and see it come up in results. Similarly, we are not "purging" YouTube-dl or The Pirate Bay and they both have actually been continuously available in our results if you search for them by name (which most people do). Our site: operator (which hardly anyone uses) is having issues which we are looking into. We are not and have never been owned by Google, and we also don't rely on Google's results for any of our search results. We have been an independent company since our founding in 2008. We don't track our users so don't have any search histories and therefore cannot alter results based on search history. This is different from "unfiltered" because every search engine's job is to filter millions of possible results down to a ranked order of just a handful. Search ranking and censorship are entirely different things. We make our results useful by ranking spam lower. We are not ranking based on any political agenda or my (or anyone else's) personal political opinions. We are also not assessing any individual news stories. Unlike independent media, Russian state-sponsored media is highly censored and violations are punishable by jail time or worse. This makes it inherently more spammy relative to independent media. The same is true for all censored media. Our product vision is much more than private search: it's the "easy button" for privacy in one app. Today it's an everyday browsing app with built-in private search, tracker blocking, HTTPS upgrading, button, email protection, and (for Android) app tracking protection.<
- privacyking 4y agoSounds bullshit. Coincidentally I've noticed them shadow banning my searches from a VPN with fake error messages. Go figure.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- patrick451 4y agoTelling us that the headline going around is "completely made up" and that DDG is "not ranking based on any political agenda or my (or anyone else's) personal political opinions" is woefully disingenuous. On March 10, he himself tweeted > Like so many others I am sickened by Russia's invasion of Ukraine and the gigantic humanitarian crisis it continues to create. #StandWithUkraine > At DuckDuckGo, we've been rolling out search updates that down-rank sites associated with Russian disinformation. This just more gaslighting by the censors of the internet.
- 58028641 4y agoWhy should DuckDuckGo help spread Russia’s lies?
- patrick451 4y agoIt's propaganda and lies all the way down. If DuckDuckGo doesn't want to help spread lies, they should just close up shop. But instead of being honest that they have picked one set of lies over the other, they are instead themselves lying about that decision.
- djanogo 4y ago"Unlike independent media, Russian state-sponsored media is highly censored and violations are punishable by jail time or worse. This makes it inherently more spammy relative to independent media. The same is true for all censored media." US media is also heavily state biased, even worse, pharmaceutical companies sponsor media. Government controlled media is not "inherently spammy", sure it's very biased, but it's disingenuous to censor them under spam guise. The media that he believes in, and controls who needs to be censored is "unbiased".
- 58028641 4y agoThe US has a 1st amendment that protects the press. Russian state media must publish blatantly false propaganda. This does not mean that all US news is accurate, but Russia state media is legally required to be inaccurate. I think this is sufficient reason for censorship.
- badkmw 4y agoWhy are you only quoting the US constitution without also quoting the Russian constitution?
- guilhas 4y agoThe US gov banned RT. So I guess it just protects some press Also YouTube channels, Facebook pages... All banned... At some point even the 'rt.com' was unaccessible Even worse, CNN is still allowed is to transmit in Russia Same applies to EU, UK, BBC...
- BirAdam 4y agoI don’t buy his line. As others have mentioned, picking one country’s state media or corporate media over another’s is bias, no matter the rationalization. I would stop using DDG, but I am not yet aware of anything better…
- 58028641 4y agoThe point of search of search engines is to have bias. Without bias how could they possibly separate spam from legitimate websites?
- cato_the_elder 4y agoNo, the point of a search engine is not to have bias. The point is to provide the user with the results they are looking for. Calling things people want to censor "spam" is just the trendy talking point of the day.
- 58028641 4y agoWhat users are looking for Russia propaganda?
- cato_the_elder 4y agoI don't know, perhaps people who follow the news (which is mostly propaganda anyway), and like to see some alternative propaganda. On the other hand, if no one is looking for it, why would DuckDuckGo need to do something special about it? Sticking to the telos would suffice.
- cato_the_elder 4y agoSure Jan, you are NOT purging media outlets, but merely "down-ranking" "spam". Also, you didn't purge Youtube-dl from the results, you merely gave them porn-like status: you have to explicitly search for it by name.