It'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.
Agreed; 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.
But 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.
Manipulation 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.
Lol 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.
>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.<
Telling 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.
It'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.
"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".
The 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.
> "The network was removed from the services offered by DirecTV on March 1, 2022, following Russia's invasion of Ukraine, with Ora Media pausing production on several shows it produced for RT America.[19] Dish Network dropped the channel on March 4.[20]"
I 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…
30 comments
[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 67.7 ms ] threadIf 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.
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.
> 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.
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".
https://www.politifact.com/article/2016/jan/04/does-vladimir...
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...
Also Russia basically banned real news: https://www.cnn.com/2022/03/04/media/bbc-cnn-russia-putin-me...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/RT_America
> "The network was removed from the services offered by DirecTV on March 1, 2022, following Russia's invasion of Ukraine, with Ora Media pausing production on several shows it produced for RT America.[19] Dish Network dropped the channel on March 4.[20]"
RT America ceases productions and lays off most of its staff https://edition.cnn.com/2022/03/03/media/rt-america-layoffs/...
At same time in EU and UK
EU officials defend move to ban RT and Sputnik amid censorship claims https://www.euronews.com/my-europe/2022/03/08/eu-officials-d...
UK regulator Ofcom revokes RT’s license to broadcast https://www.politico.eu/article/uk-regulator-ofcom-revokes-r...
> Also Russia basically banned real news:
They suspended themselves probably to make a point about of the new law, but at least BBC resumed broadcasting
BBC to resume English language reporting in Russia https://www.theguardian.com/media/2022/mar/08/bbc-resume-eng...
Rt.com was down for some days. Only accessible by Tor or some VPNs https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30466791
There was no TV channel calling the Iraq war other than freedom for the Iraqi people, or security for the US/UK
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=cNUCD4F4T1c
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=5BwxI_l84dc
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=WejYdT3Lof8
It could be Putin speaking
I would stop using DDG, but I am not yet aware of anything better…
Calling things people want to censor "spam" is just the trendy talking point of the day.
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.
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.