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That can't be right, DDG's CEO has assured me that DDG isn't just a dumb proxy to Bing. DDG uses several sources as well as its own index so it cannot suffer fr

That can't be right, DDG's CEO has assured me that DDG isn't just a dumb proxy to Bing. DDG uses several sources as well as its own index so it cannot suffer from what is being claimed [1][2][3]. 1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32360874 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32360874 2. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36149682 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36149682 3. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31492631 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31492631

WheatMillington 3y ago
And yet here we are hmmmm
yegg 3y ago
None of that is contradictory. To paraphrase: - We have on the order of a million lines of search code at this point and have a lot of talented people working them. That code does a myriad of things across many indexes. - As an example, mobile searches are the largest category of searches, and local searches are the largest category of searches within mobile. We don't get any local search module content from Bing. - Similarly, on desktop, knowledge graph / Wikipedia-type answers come up the most and we don't get any of that module content from Bing either. - Bing is our largest source of traditional web links, which have become less and less relevant/engaged with over time as more and more modules are in search results and put on top of traditional links (and people interact with things on top of the search results page about two orders of magnitude vs. things on the bottom). - When Bing has dropped things out of the traditional web index, we have put them back, and we've been working with them so this happens less and less. In fact, there hasn't been hardly any reports of this in the past month or so, which is why I've asked for other examples in the comments.
- giantrobot 3y ago
  As a long time DDG user I think it's cool you're personally engaged here. The disappointing part is it seems like TechDirt has had to resort to customer-service-via-social (Reddit/HN/Twitter) which sucks. Once this particular issue is sorted out I'd would also be cool to see some sort of post-mortem report. Seeing why this sort of thing happens and a standard process for fixing it would be beneficial to all involved I think. Complex systems are complex and shit happens. But if this happened to a site far smaller than TechDirt (they're not even that big AFAIK) I don't think there would be any avenue to cure the situation for them. /2¢
- aftergibson 3y ago
  It's great to see you on here answering/responding to all the unfounded rumours on here. I'd be interested to know because it gets to the heart of the matter and why confusion seems prevalent. If we ignore the modules and local search, what differentiates DDG and Bing when returning bread and butter traditional web links?
tenpies 3y ago
Only sometimes. Recall that DGG censored Russian sites quite hastily and seemingly without so much as an e-mail from any government: > At DuckDuckGo, we've been rolling out search updates that down-rank sites associated with Russian disinformation. - Gabriel Weinberg via Twitter, March 10, 2022. Archived: https://archive.is/SLGYb https://archive.is/SLGYb I'll note that there is a April 17th update tweet referenced in that thread. That is unrelated and it was about a rumor that DGG was purging certain media sites. Nothing to do about censoring Russian sites. Archive of that: https://archive.ph/I2iUp https://archive.ph/I2iUp
- yegg 3y ago
  It is simply not true that we have intentionally censored anything for political reasons or made ourselves "the arbiters of truth" in general, which people have also accused us/me of doing. I realized I previously explained how our news rankings work very poorly on Twitter that got grossly misinterpreted, so I subsequently put out a clarification in this help page with a much clearer (and detailed) explanation of how our news rankings actually work: https://duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/news-rankings/ https://duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/news-ra... From that page: "When we apply our own ranking signals we do so in a strictly non-political manner, meaning we don’t evaluate or otherwise take into account any potential political bias or leanings of websites in our search result rankings." That is, we did not/do not have a disinformation/"truth" detector, nor did we go looking for any Russian narrative (or any other narrative for that matter). Instead, we just have essentially a spam detector that had detected some spam from Russian state sites. That's it.
  - cbracketdash 3y ago
    For news websites, what about having them randomly rearrange among themselves for each search? For example, if the top three results for a news story come from CNN, MSNBC, Fox News, the next search would display MSNBC, Fox News, CNN. Anyways, 4+ year user of DDG and still love it!

WheatMillington 3y ago

And yet here we are hmmmm

yegg 3y ago

None of that is contradictory. To paraphrase: - We have on the order of a million lines of search code at this point and have a lot of talented people working them. That code does a myriad of things across many indexes. - As an example, mobile searches are the largest category of searches, and local searches are the largest category of searches within mobile. We don't get any local search module content from Bing. - Similarly, on desktop, knowledge graph / Wikipedia-type answers come up the most and we don't get any of that module content from Bing either. - Bing is our largest source of traditional web links, which have become less and less relevant/engaged with over time as more and more modules are in search results and put on top of traditional links (and people interact with things on top of the search results page about two orders of magnitude vs. things on the bottom). - When Bing has dropped things out of the traditional web index, we have put them back, and we've been working with them so this happens less and less. In fact, there hasn't been hardly any reports of this in the past month or so, which is why I've asked for other examples in the comments.

giantrobot 3y ago
As a long time DDG user I think it's cool you're personally engaged here. The disappointing part is it seems like TechDirt has had to resort to customer-service-via-social (Reddit/HN/Twitter) which sucks. Once this particular issue is sorted out I'd would also be cool to see some sort of post-mortem report. Seeing why this sort of thing happens and a standard process for fixing it would be beneficial to all involved I think. Complex systems are complex and shit happens. But if this happened to a site far smaller than TechDirt (they're not even that big AFAIK) I don't think there would be any avenue to cure the situation for them. /2¢
aftergibson 3y ago
It's great to see you on here answering/responding to all the unfounded rumours on here. I'd be interested to know because it gets to the heart of the matter and why confusion seems prevalent. If we ignore the modules and local search, what differentiates DDG and Bing when returning bread and butter traditional web links?

tenpies 3y ago

Only sometimes. Recall that DGG censored Russian sites quite hastily and seemingly without so much as an e-mail from any government: > At DuckDuckGo, we've been rolling out search updates that down-rank sites associated with Russian disinformation. - Gabriel Weinberg via Twitter, March 10, 2022. Archived: https://archive.is/SLGYb https://archive.is/SLGYb I'll note that there is a April 17th update tweet referenced in that thread. That is unrelated and it was about a rumor that DGG was purging certain media sites. Nothing to do about censoring Russian sites. Archive of that: https://archive.ph/I2iUp https://archive.ph/I2iUp

yegg 3y ago
It is simply not true that we have intentionally censored anything for political reasons or made ourselves "the arbiters of truth" in general, which people have also accused us/me of doing. I realized I previously explained how our news rankings work very poorly on Twitter that got grossly misinterpreted, so I subsequently put out a clarification in this help page with a much clearer (and detailed) explanation of how our news rankings actually work: https://duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/news-rankings/ https://duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/news-ra... From that page: "When we apply our own ranking signals we do so in a strictly non-political manner, meaning we don’t evaluate or otherwise take into account any potential political bias or leanings of websites in our search result rankings." That is, we did not/do not have a disinformation/"truth" detector, nor did we go looking for any Russian narrative (or any other narrative for that matter). Instead, we just have essentially a spam detector that had detected some spam from Russian state sites. That's it.
- cbracketdash 3y ago
  For news websites, what about having them randomly rearrange among themselves for each search? For example, if the top three results for a news story come from CNN, MSNBC, Fox News, the next search would display MSNBC, Fox News, CNN. Anyways, 4+ year user of DDG and still love it!