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DDG has been de-listing a ton of stuff recently. They recently de-listed rdrama, a reddit-trolling website that came up on HN last year. What, exactly, do they
by wyager 5y ago
DDG has been de-listing a ton of stuff recently. They recently de-listed rdrama, a reddit-trolling website that came up on HN last year. What, exactly, do they think people use them for? If I wanted "result curation" or whatever euphemism for censorship, I would just use Google.
- kevin_thibedeau 5y agoThey've removed Yandex and are now at the mercy of Bing's censorship.
- BurdensomeCount 5y agoAmazing that nowadays if you want the best "uncensored" results you have to go to the Russian Yandex (at least on all topics unrelated to Russia). How did our society get to such a point...
- markdown 5y agoIf that isn't a rhetorical question... capitalism.
- mpalczewski 5y ago> capitalism If capitalism caused censorship you would expect the least capitalist places to have the least censorship but the opposite is true.
- kenoph 5y agoIf capitalism causes censorship, that doesn't mean it's necessarily the worst at causing censorship. Additionally, we don't live in a stationary society, so, whatever capitalism did or did not cause in the past might not apply as-is today.
- kenoph 5y agoRelated: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
- stjohnswarts 5y agoCapitalism (as practiced by democracies) allows you to start an alternative site that doesn't censor results as well. Totalitarianism (Communism) would not have. Choose your poison from amongst the various governments that have succeeded (for a while) in the past as I don't think Utopia is a possibility with humans as messed up as we are.
- markdown 5y agoI'm not sure what your point is. The GP commenter asked what brought us here... it was capitalism. It was people starting other sites that didn't censor or didn't have ads or didn't do this or that. The winners of capitalism are what we have now.
- krick 5y agoIt has been like that for the long time, actually. I've seen examples where somewhat political search clause (in Russian) yields completely different results on Google & Yandex (it's actually hard to tell which one "tweaks" the results, and what tweaking even really means, when you think about it — my guess would be both, but differently). But in a sense of intentionally hiding something "neutral" that I know perfectly well must be there, but isn't (and it seems like you can guess why) — I've never actually noticed in on Yandex, while on Google it has been like that for the whole decade already. (I don't find is that surprising, really. To me, it's perfectly logical, but I won't elaborate, because it would be political and extremely unpopular on HN, which seems like a worthless flamewar topic to me.) But in my experience Yandex just isn't as good at searching things in English, as DDG/Bing. At least, I always preferred them for most use-cases except from some really specific ones. So it's a pity that this thing with DDG happened. I guess, I'll still continue to use it for now, because I don't want to hurt my productivity other that thing (and switching to a search engine I would have to adapt to most certainly would do that). But we'll see.
- GoblinSlayer 5y agoI suppose that's a real use case for a meta search engine: send queries to different search engines, then interlace the results removing duplicates.
- BurdensomeCount 5y agoDDG was supposed to be like this originally, but they stopped using Yandex a while ago so now its just a wrapper on Bing...
- coffeeblack 5y ago
- samoa42 5y agoi mean yes, it's suboptimal. but hardly news that for the real deal, you gotta leave the main road.
- samoa42 5y agoright, russians went from cyber-shady to cyber-pure-evil and now everyone has to cut ties...
- ldiracdelta 5y agoThey've "memory-holed", 1984-style, other conservative sites as well. Just another narrative-enforcing search-engine.
- uuyi 5y agoI prefer to say “shite removal” after the last half a decade. At least TPB adds value to peoples lives.
- colordrops 5y agoThe whole point is to have a place where you can see shite if you want. I don't need an online nanny.
- HeckFeck 5y agoI might agree with shite. Or I might wish to read it for my own amusement. Or perhaps I want to argue against the shite, in which case, I need to know what shite is out there. In any case, it doesn't matter. I only need the search engine to be an intermediary, not a curator. Besides, if someone accidentally searches for shite, he can revise his search terms. Just like how you might reword something if a listener was confused. This "curation" just doesn't need to exist. But that's a moral argument and those applying censorship aren't moral, so won't be partial to it.
- ldiracdelta 5y agoYes, the Overton Window must be enforced. We have always been at war with East Asia.
- somenameforme 5y agoIt depends on what you want out of a search engine. Do you want a search that tries to give you what it thinks you want? Or do you want a search that functions more like a library index where you're going to get what you searched for, even if that might ironically not really be exactly what you wanted - so the onus of creating a more correct search term is on you. This isn't a rhetorical question of course. There are major arguments for both. But I think a pretty good chunk of DDG users were more often after the library index than what ideally would be a librarian recommendation, but in reality is more like a stereotypical used car salesman style recommendation.
- Firmwarrior 5y agoMan, that's interesting, they removed rdrama.net but left KiwiFarms up, and now the main result for "rdrama" is the KiwiFarms thread about it
- scarburato 5y agoBing delisted rdrama too. I think it is related somehow (?)
- BurdensomeCount 5y agoYep, I think the delisting comes from Bing, not DDG since DDG just pulls all their results from Bing since they stopped also using Yandex.
- mgdlbp 5y agoI noticed some time ago that Google refuses to offer up Encyclopedia Dramatica unless you use the site: operator. There was some drama in 2010 over ED being censored in Australia, but it looks like Google has since quietly delisted it completely.
- Beltalowda 5y agoI once ended up on Encyclopedia Dramatica before I knew what it was. It was some semi-informational article about some person and then I scrolled down and there was an absolutely disgusting picture I'm not even going to describe here. I, for one, don't mind that it's not on the top of my search results. The entire job of a search engine is to curate results from a vast internet and boil it down to what is probably interesting for you. You also don't want all kind of "shock sites" on top if you search for "gun homicide" or "ISIS beheadings". Most likely you want some background information on these things, not "shock sites". That's the service Google and such provide.
- wyager 5y agoED is an incredible repository of useful factual data dressed as a trolling/shock site. Google is absolutely not de-listing it because they're worried about you. There's much worse content available on google; the difference that the other stuff isn't politically sensitive.
- DoItToMe81 5y ago
- Marsey 5y agoLuckily searching "Marsey the Cat" on Bing still yields the correct knowyourmeme and Twitter pages.
- asdff 5y agoIsn't DDG just reskinned bing anyhow?
- thaumasiotes 5y agoWell, youtube-dl.org is still delisted from bing, so clearly something is different.
- dmix 5y agoNow we have to wait for DDG to manually fix their results every time Bing censors something? Great… I wonder what Yandex is like these days…
- leach 5y agoI've started using Kagi myself
- mastazi 5y agoQuestion: I've seen Kagi and I'm very interested, is there a way to use it without creating an account? Is the account required due to it still being beta, or it will be required in the future as well?
- Gareth321 5y agoI think an account is required, for at least a couple of reasons. 1. They will eventually require payment. 2. The service provides a lot of customisation options. Up and down ranking domains, for example, and setting up special filters. This kind of customisation can be built over many years and should carry with the user between browsers and devices. Personally, I'm less worried about privacy and more about receiving accurate and unbiased search results. Of course, you can always use a VPN and use a burner email when you create the account.
- rideontime 5y ago> If I wanted "result curation" or whatever euphemism for censorship, I would just use Google. Both youtube-dl and the pirate bay are available on google.