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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 be

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!

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!