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That's actually not what is happening. We are not ranking based on my politics (or anyone's politics for that matter). We actually do not intentionally censor
by yegg 4y ago
That's actually not what is happening. We are not ranking based on my politics (or anyone's politics for that matter).
We actually do not intentionally censor any news results, meaning media outlets are not being removed or their stories displayed so far down in the results they are effectively removed. That is, unless legally prohibited, you should find all media outlets in our results, and they should generally show on top if you search for them by name or domain name. If you are seeing otherwise, please me know and we will investigate.
A search engine's primary job is to rank results, trying to put results that most quickly and accurately answer the query on top. We do this ranking in a strictly non-partisan manner. Ranking for news-related searches is particularly difficult because for most news stories there are often hundreds of media outlets covering the same story, many with similar relevancy in terms of keyword matching and popularity. As such, we look to another ranking factor to ensure just the top of the results aren't taken by obviously very low-quality news results so that users have more sources of relevant, high-quality news results to compare and choose between.
The non-partisan factor we've found to help accomplish this is a rare, but well-documented history of a site's complete lack of news reporting standards, such as routinely using spam or clickbait to artificially inflate traffic, consistently publishing stories without citing sources, censoring stories due to operating with very limited press freedom, or misleading readers about who owns, funds, and authors stories for the site. And since we do not censor sites, even state-sponsored media in countries with very limited press freedom, these sites will still show up in results, and even on top like when you search for them directly.
- mistermann 4y ago> a site's complete lack of news reporting standards, such as routinely using spam or clickbait to artificially inflate traffic, consistently publishing stories without citing sources, censoring stories due to operating with very limited press freedom, or misleading readers about who owns, funds, and authors stories for the site I'm curious of the implementation. Are these sites in a list and that alters their ranking in the results? Or some other approach?
- barbacoa 4y ago@yegg Would also be very curious to hear an answer to this. Its been long rumored that Google has weights or boost/throttle values that are manually assigned to websites by humans which impact ranking. Would be great to understand if DDG is following in Google's footsteps.
- cudder 4y agort.com does not show up in your search results when searching for either "rt" or "russia today".
- herdcall 4y agoI just searched for "russia today" on DDG and rt.com did NOT show up on the first page, instead the page has: aljazeera, dailymail, cnn, bbc, reuters, themoscotimes, wikipedia, cnbc, npr, and yahoo. And this is from California (Orange County).
- yegg 4y agoNot sure what is going on there (will investigate, not intentional), but try https://duckduckgo.com/?q=rt&ia=web https://duckduckgo.com/?q=rt&ia=web & https://duckduckgo.com/?q=rt+ukraine&ia=web https://duckduckgo.com/?q=rt+ukraine&ia=web
- boomboomsubban 4y agoTo be fair, they changed their name to RT over a decade ago. Neither their home page nor their about page feature the word "today."
- herdcall 4y agoWell, rt.com is the first result on Brave search for the same search.
- somenameforme 4y agoIn the meta it's listed as the author name. A good way to illustrate the consequences of "curating" searches is to search for its meta description but exclude the term RT (which presumably overrides the "curation") : https://duckduckgo.com/?q=the+first+Russian+24%2F7+English-language+news+channel+which+brings+the+Russian+view+on+global+news.&t=h_&ia=web https://duckduckgo.com/?q=the+first+Russian+24%2F7+English-l... You get lots of spammy stuff (top link is a site offering to sell a translation of RT), site-ranking sites (that rank RT), some rando lady quoting RT's meta description on Twitter (!!!), and even RT's pages on Twitter, Linkedin. And then it's finally there, just before getting into really high quality results like a page on rotten tomatoes ranking the 200 Best LGBTQ+ Movies of All Time. "Curating" results is a great way to completely break your own search engine.