I was able to convince my wife to switch for anything remotely "controversial", when, during the pandemic, we caught the relatively "real time" disappearance of several "against the grain" articles about covid [1]. By disappeared, I mean top results for the rough concept one day to not being able to find it, even with the exact title and text, the next.
I want a search engine, more than a curated guide.
In this particular case, it's about wanting information from the people actually researching a subject vs people making stuff for political or business purposes.
Even if researchers are wrong initially, because of lack of data, they are still acting in good faith. Which you can't say for people who are spreading made up or poorly sourced information to make a buck.
Society generally frowns upon allowing people to blatantly lie or act in bad faith order to sell products. While that might be a form of censorship, it's one that society largely benefits from having in place.
There were plenty of knowledgable scientists including those with specific familiarity that were censored because it didn't fit the media narrative at the time.
> Even if researchers are wrong initially, because of lack of data, they are still acting in good faith.
A researcher or other "expert" should have at least some sense of when the data being used are limited, flawed, or even unavailable.
Under such circumstances, the only way to act in good faith would be for such a person to say something along the lines of, "I don't know" or "It's not possible to say at this time."
Such a person making some other authoritative pronouncement (even with caveats attached), especially if it turns out to be incorrect, should not be seen as "acting in good faith".
How is your attitude not equivalent to "I can't trust myself to see things I disagree with, I am so weak-willed that there is the horrific danger that I will start believing them"?
There are reasons someone might want to find those links, even if they disagree with them. When Google hides them from you without your consent or ability to opt out, they're treating you as if you were a child. Or perhaps more like livestock.
> I am so weak-willed that there is the horrific danger that I will start believing them
That's what "Manufacturing Consent" isn't it? That entire concept seems sound and passes the smell test. People see things repeatedly from authoritive-sounding people and they believe it (in the case of the book, by governments and their catspaws).
There is no reason a search and social bubble wouldn't wind up with a similar outcome.
Is my authority defiance resource just cranked up to 11? I don't even like those groups I tend to agree with, and when I do find myself agreeing with them I silently sit there wondering if that somehow means I am wrong.
I only said it sarcastically about the original commenter because it's difficult to believe that anyone could truly be like that. Sure, we're all aware of the dregs who seem to form their political beliefs from Uncle Creepy's Facebook meme pictures, but I've always believed those people to be nothing more than a (sizable) minority.
> I can't trust myself to see things I disagree with, I am so weak-willed...
The thing is, this likely is true for him. Most people are not equipped to deal with the onslaught of aggressive memes from the internet. Unfortunately, this is an unsolved social problem, and "export my memetic censorship reflex to MEGACORP" is a pretty bad way of doing things.
I think a likely way of solving this problem (protecting not-especially-high-mental-horsepower people from getting BTFO by the internet, contracting transmissible psychological diseases and so on) is that religious organizations will start offering (voluntary, in first world countries) censorship services to their members. Your DNS queries or whatever will go through the Vatican/Synod/whatever central DNS server, which will prevent you from looking at porn sites. This would probably be a very socially positive outcome for the bottom 90-something percent of people on the "strength of memetic immune system" distribution.
> religious organizations will start offering (voluntary, in first world countries) censorship services to their members
I have seen something similar to this in the wild. Members of a church install spyware on their home computer that church officials can access to snoop on their internet traffic for "accountability" reasons. Members are shamed for looking at any content deemed wrong.
One young man got in trouble for looking at SFW images of models. Turned out he wasn't even the one who had visited the site, it was his sister looking at fashion ideas.
Yeah, a friend of mine found a (non-religious) service like this for help with porn addiction. Not my cup of tea, but I could see it working for many people.
It's true for basically everyone. Smart people, "rationalists", et c., fall for scams, nutty scientific or conspiracy theories, advertising, romantic political or economic ideas, cults or scam-religions, and other crap all the time.
Not everyone is a speech absolutist, that doesn't make them hypocrites.
In fact, as speech absolutists have taken over a few platforms, we've discovered that the primary hypocrisy surrounding speech is that there's a lot of people who claim to be speech absolutists, but aren't when push comes to shove.
Much of the "antivax garbage" turned out to be true. In hindsight, do you still believe that censoring true but inconvenient information is morally acceptable?
Truth is messy. The vaccine is an amazing achievement and saved many lives. Understating the health risks to young men (myocarditis), and overstating the efficacy fed the anti-vaxxers, and was a disservice to science and healthcare.
That in some patients there might be adverse health effects from the vaccine.
That the us funded gain of function research in novel coronaviruses.
That the virus would mutate faster than the vaccine rollout and Covid would go seasonal.
How much? Do you have any links to discussions or data that were against covid vaccination and turned out to be truthful and useful? I'm really curious because I've never heard of this in my personal information bubble, despite trying to widen it as much as I can.
It’s not inconvenient and more importantly not information. It’s annoying and not based on facts. I’d love to see any actual research done at a molecular biology lab that’d back an anti-vax fantasy. And then there’s the whole epidemiology level…
I somewhat agree. I don't mind if true falsehoods/spam is removed. The problem was, the "anti vax" label was applied to far too much, including things that were later found to be true.
The article I was looking for was about intravascular injection of the vaccine, and its possible relation to adverse effects, which now has merit in 2023 [1].
"remains at the injection side" was one of the more blatant lies. The funniest lie was "a corona virus outbreak of a novel strain in close distance to a biolab which does experiments on corona viruses ... is without a doubt of natural origin!"
Because you don’t get to come up with a “theory” and dump the burden of the proof on someone else. That’s incredibly stupid. Not how how science and common sense work.
Since when? It may not be a good argument but should we be deplatforming people over it? Go to Reddit front page right now and try to find something that isn’t a poorly argued political post. What’s the difference? Just because you may disagree with someone it doesn’t mean they NEED to be silenced.
We generally don't employ hypnosis. Sometimes we even skip the hypothesis step, because "what the hell is that" is enough to start generating data. Don't confuse all of scientific research with the scientific method; it's just one method of investigation.
A theory is usually based on some prior knowledge or observations. But let’s forget that for a second. In the anti-vax case, their argument is: “All your research in favor of vaccinating the population is wrong. We don’t have any evidence for it, but you should turn your public health policy 180 degrees!”. I don’t why it’s so hard to grasp the issue.
I think in practice free speech should be limited if it’s clearly damaging. In case of anti-vax movement, it’s just crystal clear that allowing them to spread the word was detrimental to public health. So I’m in favor banning those who use their rights to free speech to undermine the policies and efforts that are put forward to save lives. Like, I don’t care about flat earth wackos.
And I see how the concept of “misinformation” can be used very broadly to silence political opponents. But I do wish there was a perfect solution.
> I think in practice free speech should be limited if it’s clearly damaging.
The problem with that position is, who decides what counts as "clearly damaging"? What if the government and media were extremely anti-vaccine and chose to censor pro-vaccine speech instead, calling it "clearly damaging"?
I personally don't mind deletion of antivax stuff because I'm not antivax. But I can see the point of view those mentioning what happens when there is deletion/censorship of things in the future that I could have interest in.
We also do know that there exists "some" subset of things that were mentioned that seemed antivax on the surface but did actually turn out to be true or at least somewhat true. But these were usually not outright false claims, but informed speculations or very niche.
It was such a dividing topic that any form of skepticism however small was seen as an attack. This as someone who is vaxed and has gotten every booster available.
> I personally don't mind deletion of antivax stuff because I'm not antivax
The term antivax is a problem.
Very few people are actually anti all vaccines, and nobody should be pro all vaccines for everyone all the time. There have been actual truly failed vaccines, are you "antivax" if you wouldn't volunteer to take them? Should articles about past failed vaccines be censored from the internet? Of course not.
The term is sloppy and careless, but people love it, probably because it lets you be part of a team. But everybody means something different by it.
Nobody should presume any new implementation of a class is good just because there have been previous successful implementations. Reality doesn't make things so easy for us.
Nonsense. There isn't some super clearly defined line between pro-vaxx and anti-vaxx across the thousands of issues and questions related to covid. Science isn't anti- or pro- anything. Particular beliefs that were labeled "anti-vaxx" were often just not clear or understood yet.
Also, it's not the job of a search engine to be your nanny. What if you are researching conspiracy theories or opposition beliefs, even if you don't believe in them? How would you find them?
I get so tired of seeing yegg raked over the coals for this one.
A search engine by definition takes an editorial stance on things. They take in all of the internet and decide what to present to users. For a search engine to take no editorial position is to yield the floor to whoever can best game the system, and a propaganda machine like Russia's is absolutely capable of exploiting a search engine that doesn't proactively take measures to avoid being exploited.
That DDG wanted to avoid spreading Russian propaganda that argues against the very existence of the Ukrainian people isn't DDG meddling in politics, it's them steering clear of enabling genocide.
They could simply add a “propaganda” tag and give an option to filter out the search results marked with that tag. If anything I can specifically search for Russian propaganda, for whatever reason.
Yes, you can, and downranking propaganda wouldn't stop it from turning up if you go looking.
But when my naive sister-in-law hears something about how Ukraine isn't a real country, I don't want the first page of results for "history of Ukraine" to turn up Russian propaganda.
I live in a red state, and there are astonishing numbers of people here who already buy Putin's story. I'm fully behind DDG deciding they didn't want to play a role in spreading his message even further.
> wouldn't stop it from turning up if you go looking.
Yeah, same goes for your naïve sister-in-law. So why don’t they add the “propaganda” tag, so that your relatives could clearly see it and I could search for it (for whatever reason)? They could even add some links to some better sources, as an option. And use some disclaimer when you click on these results, like “Hey, this is a propaganda resource, be careful. Here’s the links where you can read up on the topic if you need unbiased information”. That would probably have at least some educational value, unlike removing and/or downranking the results.
it is not a search engine's job to filter their results based on acceptable politics. the only explicit filtering out they should be doing is filtering out manipulation, explicitly illegal content, spam, fraudulent content and stuff like that. aside from that the filtering algorithm should be largely neutral and unbiased. it's not a search engine's job to refuse to answer search results because the owner finds it distasteful.
yes they should obviously be filtering out or downranking manipulated and fraudulent propaganda content. these policies would have existed before the invasion happened so there would be no reason to say that you are going to be downranking russian information unless you are planning on adding additional filtering and manipulation to the ranking on top of what you would normally do to content. they should be filtering all content neutrally and equally, not filtering russian content more because the owner wants to inject politics into their algorithm.
How do you think search engines detect manipulation, down, fraudulent content, etc, if not by judging the content? Content is all a search engine sees.
An article about a Nigerian prince who needs money is likely to be a scam. An article about how Ukraine is really just a rebellious Russian province is likely to be state-sponsored propaganda.
> A search engine by definition takes an editorial stance on things.
That editorial stance should be "show the user what they are looking for and want to see". The customer is always right, otherwise the real customer is someone else.
> For a search engine to take no editorial position is to yield the floor to whoever can best game the system
I am not against search engines having heuristics against state-sponsored propaganda, but there is no need for those heuristics to single out a particular state. Russian state-sponsored content shouldn't be treated differently than American, Chinese, Ukrainian, or any other state's propaganda.
Same here. I can't debate what the "other side" is thinking if I don't know what it is.
If they want to add a side link to more authoritative sources (like what Spotify does for podcasts discussing Covid), then fine, but don't censor me if I'm actively looking for "disinformation."
It was crazy to see suggestions to wear masks or claims that covid was airborne getting "fact-checked" by the media only to reverse their position months later after WHO put out new statements. In particular, the phrase "no credible evidence" was wildly thrown around without mentioning whether there were any credible high-powered studies that had even attempted to find evidence of the phenomenon.
The WHO has a lot of blame itself for misinformation. And, I personally believe, a lot of conspiracy theories definitely caught fire from their mistakes.
Also, as you can see in the replies, a lot of people called BS at the time, but who were they to question the official WHO line? Yes, the WHO later came around and came up with 6 feet instead of 1 meter, but those who called BS on the WHO's statement may have saved their lives.
Note that "airborne" has a specific meaning in medical literature. Everyone agreed COVID could be transmitted in the air by respiratory droplets. But to be truly "airborne" means the virus could be aerosolized and float freely, without being attached to a larger droplet.
Both droplet-based and aerosolized/"airborne" spread allows viruses to be transmitted in the air. But a truly "airborne" virus can travel much farther.
It's the difference between needing 6 feet and 20 feet of distance to prevent spread.
(To put it bluntly, it's the difference between avoiding spittle, or avoiding the equivalent of cigarette smoke. Two very different threat models.)
This is the excuse hospitals used to send nurses into covid units with no or insufficient PPE when they got caught flat-footed having no stored supply. (and it was BS)
Yes I believe it was the WHO or US government (the only sources I was following at the time) that explicitly stated they "did not have evidence" covid was airborne.
Yes, in the early days of the pandemic there was a lot of official resistance to acknowledging this, mostly because doing so would have meant accepting that COVID was effectively unstoppable.
Early in the pandemic there was a very aggressive "you don't need masks and please don't buy them because hospitals need them"
Ex: "US Surgeon General Dr. Jerome Adams not only wants people to stop buying facemasks to prevent the novel coronavirus, but warns that you actually might increase your risk of infection if facemasks are not worn properly. [...] On Sunday, Adams posted on Twitter that people should stop buying masks. Rather, he tweeted that to keep yourself and those around you healthy, wash your hands often, avoid touching your eyes, nose and mouth with unwashed hands and disinfect surfaces."
The consensus and official line amongst epidemiologists (and the health organizations and media that relayed this official line to the public) was that COVID was only transmitted by droplet transmission i.e. droplets that fall to the ground within several feet (hence the 6 feet / 2 meters social distancing rule) and don't float around in the air. This was despite obvious evidence of outbreaks that could have only occurred via ventilation systems or the virus floating around in the air in an elevator.
It turned out they were wrong not just about COVID, but a whole host of other diseases, based on erroneous criteria about what sized droplets could float in the air. Ironically, doctors from centuries ago with their theories of "miasma" / bad air would have been closer to the truth.
I mean there was a very sizable group that saw the mistakes in real time. Not necessarily the medical mistakes but the censorship mistakes. I’m not sure how anyone can know what to do in an uncertain situation like that but being unable to question authority isn’t good for most societies.
Unfortunately, we've learned that the experts are there mainly to reinforce whatever makes businesses money. That's who gets access to the airwaves and government press conferences. So if you think there's an alternative reality that might be unprofitable, you have to figure it out for yourself. The best COVID info is and was on Twitter since 2020. Just stunning amounts of primary lit being shared with expert opinion. You have to tune your bullshit sense though, and unfortunately that might require having a science background...
This is how many people realized that COVID is airborne and that only N95 and better respirators provide real protection. People now discuss air cleaning, the impacts of Long COVID, etc. The vaccines were seized upon by the political parties as a wedge issue to force the economy open. They help with medical system capacity, but do not block transmission and Long COVID.
Nobody knew if covid was airborne at the time, so the most correct answer was nobody knows. Some people got lucky by making things up on the spot and guessed it was airborne. At a certain point their confirmation bias and distrust of media broke their perception of the world and they became antivax etc, still no critical thinking taking place.
Thank you. Because what you're talking about is blind trust in someone who has been put into a position of supposed authority. I can't bring myself to do it - I don't know these people so until I'm presented with credible evidence that makes sense to me, I believe a position of extreme skepticism is warranted.
Following the best guess of those with the knowledge and experience is definitely the best best, but I find myself, like most people, questioning their motives. It's healthy to do so but also a sad commentary.
Sure as a general rule, but that doesn't render those experts free from criticism when they make mistakes. That low confidence scientific hypotheses were treated as high confidence scientific results is a valid critique of expert interaction with the general public, as it led to search engine censorship of objectively true information.
I used it to convey some external concept, rather than my own thoughts.
"controversial": Others called it controversial. I did/would not.
"against the grain": Others thought that there was a grain. I did/would not.
"real time": Not literal.
Maybe this is a regional/age thing?
edit: actually, asking ChatGPT why they're in quotes gives the similar answers as mine, so I guess it's not too odd. New session prompt with 4.0: "Why are some of these words in quotes?"
Fluff removed, same order as my answers:
> ... In this case, "controversial" could imply that the speaker doesn't personally find the topics controversial, but acknowledges that others may perceive them as such.
> ... indicating that it's being used in its typical idiomatic sense.
> ... Here, the quotation marks might be used to stress that the term isn't being used in its strictest sense.
It is simply not true that we have censored anything or made ourselves "the arbiters of truth." I realized I previously explained how our news rankings work very poorly on Twitter but 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://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/ne...
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."
> Many sites may occasionally do one or more of these things, but we take action very rarely, only in the most extreme cases. To identify these rare, extreme cases, we rely on multiple non-governmental and non-political organizations that specialize in objectively assessing journalistic standards. To take any ranking action using this factor, we must see at least three of these organizations independently assess a site as having extremely low journalistic standards and also see that none of these organizations have assessed the same site as having even somewhat robust journalistic standards.
This is far too vague. Last year Bazbaz told Recode that sites like RT and Sputnik were "extreme" cases (https://www.vox.com/recode/22981115/duckduckgo-free-speech-p...). While I tend to agree, which other sites are extreme cases? This isn't published. Despite the claim that none of this is done for political reasons, I find it hard to trust that these "non-governmental and non-political organizations" act and are chosen without any bias. Your method isn't published or explained. I really think these organisations should, at minimum, be listed. So too should all the sites DDG considers to be "extreme" cases. Then we could decide if we think DDG is being politically neutral.
My confidence in DDG is shaken, and I don't think I'm alone. We live in a world where so many major software brands we love have made overt moves towards censorship on political grounds. If DDG could prove they reject this authoritarianism I think it would serve as a major USP.
Oh, DuckDuckGo just does that sometimes. Pretty often I'll pick a result then back out to the search results, and the one I had in mind to click next just isn't there anymore. However annoying, I wouldn't immediately jump to a political motivation.
They're actually reasonably good. I often find that they do weird things like linking to non-US versions of websites instead of a US version. So I end up on the British or Dutch version of a website, with prices quoted in GBP or EUR.
I find myself using the "!g" shortcut (which takes me to Google) more often than I'd have liked to.
Thankfully, Apple offers this as one of their search engine options (despite being paid "tres comas" every year from Google to be the default search engine).
The sole benefit of DDG is their claim that they don't track.
One problem with this narrow focus is that many people mistakenly carry this statement over to an assumption that DDG doesn't censor their search results. I suspect that DDG both knows and counts on this as an aspect of an undeserved reputation.
DDG's search results aren't acceptable for anything even mildly controversial. I'll use them for image searches, but there are better search engines for internet access and that give equivalent or better privacy.
Also in my opinion, DDG's penchant for censorship harms the credibility of their assertion that they do not track.
A huge benefit of DDG for me is that I can use it in a private browser window and it just works without stupid popups getting in the way. In contrast Google is far less useable for a quick search. This alone is why I have DDG as default and I only drop back to Google when I'm struggling to find what I want. Most of the time DDG is fine for me.
Recently so many unrelated sites pop up a tiny Google login window somewhere on the page, obstructing what I want to see, like as if Google was super desperate for more tracking and engagement. Like why would I like to login to Google while viewing a forum about skyscrapers if I just wanted to read about the progress of some construction? Passive-aggressive at its core.
Another benefit is that it keeps getting increasingly better compared to Google – not because DDG is doing anything particularly innovative, but because Google search keeps getting worse and worse.
It is simply not true that we have censored anything or made ourselves "the arbiters of truth." I realized I previously explained how our news rankings work very poorly on Twitter but 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://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/ne...
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."
> It is simply not true that we have censored anything or made ourselves "the arbiters of truth."
> 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.
The bugs around Exact match and text/content (not site!) exclusion operators not working at all are what keeps me from using it as an actual substitute for Google or Bing. I hope that getting that stuff fixed is a high priority.
DDG is the default in a lot of privacy-oriented browsers and forks, but it gives users a really bad first impression when their first search just doesn't work.
But I suppose that the average mobile search engine user these days doesn't use most search modifiers or operators so maybe they aren't the things to prioritize.
The bugs around Exact match and exclusion operators not working at all are what keeps me from using it as an actual substitute for Google or Bing.
Duck used to be great for only searching for what you asked for. But in the last few months, it's fallen into the Google trap of showing me things it thinks I want, and not what I asked for. And no method of punctuation seems to get around that.
At this point, the only reason I still use Duck is because the other option is Google.
I think in this case, the functionality outright broke - that is, this is a bug - due to how their indexing works. The CEO (HN user yegg) talked about it a bit in another post - they modified their READMEs to remove mention of some operators because they're malfunctioning.
So they still get the benefit of the doubt (as you say, the other choices are just Google) but the real test will be in how they communicate about this going forward and whether they fix it.
I strongly second this. Respecting exact terms was the main factor that got me to switch from Google search. The functionality has been declining for a while now and seems particularly bad lately.
Ah, I've hit this several times in the past few years, with quotes and minus not working as expected, I wasn't aware that was a bug, thanks for pointing this out.
These companies are solely built around the concept of trust. Your average person just doesn't care that Google is tracking them, and will therefore not take the obvious productivity hit by using a service with lower quality results (anything not Google).
I feel like DuckDuckGo has had enough controversy in the trust department that it's entirely worthless as a company and as a service. Anything I do need to actually search these days, I just use Google, as I don't care about Google knowing I needed help with a Golang compiler error. It's not a worthwhile tradeoff for me.
> Anything I do need to actually search these days, I just use Google, as I don't care about Google knowing I needed help with a Golang compiler error. It's not a worthwhile tradeoff for me.
The problem is when you need to research or learn about something that is verboten.
Even something as simple as "x worker strike" or "x protest" won't necessarily break any laws but will be of interest to certain automations, agencies and systems that may then endeavor to make your life hard without necessarily stepping over the legal line.
Not for being an undesirable to a ruling authority, but for looking up information related to them. And of course, this will evolve in more dystopic ways when it is all inevitably factored in to (financial|social) credit scores, insurance, access to services, etc. in the future. Either directly or laundered through AI or other systems.
That is less an argument in favor of DDG and more of a statement of why search engine privacy will become more and more important in the mid term.
I was using DDG exclusively for over a year. It gives way better results than Google. Recently I switched to Kagi, for its ability to prioritize my favorite sites, and block others. I'm paying $5 a month for it, and I've honestly not been this confident in the search results I'm getting for a long long time.
Same. Kagi has better results than Google in general. Even programming ones. I don't mind paying for better
Love that it can do groupings, especially when you're searching for something that will also turn up seo garbage, like products for your home. So you can see the cluster of "review sites" and then actual product companies
Would be nice if you could ask the DDG team to cite the links you provided as footnotes to your claim "DuckDuckGo owns the #2 position in mobile market share in the US, and 18 other markets ..." in TFA.
I switch to DDG from brave when I want to do an image search. Brave forwards image searches to either Google or Bing based on your choice. Even if DDG is getting their images from those sources, I still prefer the DDG image search UI.
From that page: "To advertise on DuckDuckGo, visit Microsoft Advertising." Is DDG the #2 position or Microsoft? Kind of a notable difference there... if DDG is just an arm of Microsoft it rings a different tune.
DDG grew up being a whitelabeled version of Bing. As far as I understand, DDG has since started implementing more of their own search patterns and results, but has not completely removed themselves from Bing
We actually always had a bunch of our own stuff, and still do, as well as work with other partners. For example, the number one module on mobile is local, and we don't get any local stuff from Bing at all. Similarly, the number one module desktop is knowledge graph, and we don't get that from Bing at all either.
Hi Gabriel, would you be potentially available to write a technical blog post about how DDG plugins are federated for The Informer, the blog of the British Computing Society's Information Retrieval specialist group (BCS IRSG)? (Is Kamyl Bazbaz the best person to discuss such requests, or how can you be reached? Thanks!)
Sorry to piggyback on this. I applied for a Director role at DDG about a month ago. Had the autoreply which said DDG would follow up whether it was a yes, let's talk! or a nope, sorry. But nothing at all which was a bit disappointing. The role has been taken down for a few weeks now. I wasn't looking for a new position at all but the description strongly appealed and it was DDG, a company I'd admired for years (and fully remote!).
Note that you can turn off advertisements in DDG. Not sure how long that business model will continue to last, but I would _happily_ pay money to not see ads and blog spam on my serps. You need to trust your search engine before you can trust just about anything else you find on the internet, and I truly feel like Google is no longer a trustworthy company.
Take a look at Kagi Search [1] where you pay with money instead of your data. Have been using it for over a year now and must say that the search engine is surprisingly good. The only time I ever use !g bangs is when I want live updates of sports events or so.
I've used DDG as my main search engine for about 4 years now. Until recently I found I was still having to go to Google for specific queries, mainly answering coding problems.
But in the last 6 months or so, Google's results have gotten so bad and DDG has continued to improve to the point where I no longer bother with !g.
When I do use Google I often find myself in the strange position of not actually being able to find what I'm looking for. It's a very unsettling feeling, and not one I've experienced in a long time, possibly not since the pre-Google days of Yahoo, Lycos and AltaVista. Amazing that Google have let their core value proposition of 'we are much better at finding what you're looking for than everyone else' rot quite so much.
Yeah ChatGPT is pretty good at solving coding problems - 'My apologies for the confusion, I misunderstood your requirements earlier. Let's try another approach...' is much better than 'Never mind I fixed it' on a four-year-old Stack Overflow post.
And takes 10x as long. It's good, but it's gotta get a whole lot faster (which I'm sure it will.) It would be really nice if it would in-line the source links it summarized piece of info from too.
I recently used it while traveling in rural NZ. When I had poor cell signal it was actually way faster because all of the web page loading was taking place in a datacenter, and I only needed to load a websocket response (with cited sources!).
> But in the last 6 months or so, Google's results have gotten so bad and DDG has continued to improve to the point where I no longer bother with !g.
One place that still consistently gives me trouble is Stack Overflow. More often than not, I DDG my search, get two SO links, one irrelevant and the other bad, repeat the search with "!g" and get a half-dozen SO links, 3-4 of which are relevant, and 1-2 of which are good.
Could be that, but it feels like it weights search-term-proximity higher, and/or tracks more dimensions related to word-connectedness. Like, DDG is more likely to find me a page with all the words but with them scattered about, while Google will get more hits where the words are closer to one another, which is often better specifically for technical searches. Quoting rarely seems to help much, in either case.
[EDIT] Another poster mentioned searches for "X reddit" seeming to have a very-small cap on the number of results from Reddit that it'll display, and that might be part of my problem with SO results, too: maybe their algo prefers to avoid having too many results from one source, which is bad if you expect or want most results to be from one source. That would explain why Google sometimes finds me results with the exact language of my search, that were absent from DDG's listings—maybe it found them, but they got filtered out by a max-from-one-source preference.
And Google groups the SO results, which is very handy. I find myself adding g! after I've seen the limited SO results in DDG just knowing I'll see them grouped and I can click "More from SO"
The main thing I still use Google for is when I want to look up offline stuff near me. DDG uses a rough location, but even if I zoom in on their maps near me it's missing a whole lot of local stores etc.
For other searches I usually try DDG first and only fall back on !g when the results are bad, and often the Google results are also bad in those cases.
I was just using Google maps yesterday to find a restaurant I knew was there. But it wasn't showing up on the map. Then I noticed it was omitting about half the restaurants in the area. The place I was looking for finally showed up when I zoomed almost all the way into it, and then clicked "search this area." I don't know why they are leaving out so many search results on maps these days.
Just a few weeks ago, I was on Capitol Hill in Seattle. Looking for a weed shop. The only ones it would show me were miles away, and I knew there were multiple near me within walking distance. It literally gave me 2 weed shops on the map across the entire city. None anywhere near by.
Their map search has started to really suck balls too.
Absolutely agree Google Maps is also awful. For transit I've completely ditched google for Citymapper (I'm in London). I think at this point Google is a reasonable fallback mostly when you expect to want someone you think would be paying Google.
Remember Goto [1]? The search engine that at the time was much maligned for letting people ... buy sponsored results and arguing it made their results better...
Goto became Overture...
Overture was bought by Yahoo.
But where Yahoo faded away, Google has largely become Goto 2.0.
There are narrow niches where that model works for users. When you're specifically searching for a shop for example, it's often ok.
But more to answer the OP, we've been making a lot of investments to improve our results (along with other things) -- high-level updates posted quarterly at https://duckduckgo.com/updates
I use ddg as my daily driver for about 3 years as well. I do find that searching things like exact error messages from programs are a bit better with !g, but almost all other searches are comparable or better.
Actually, now that you mention it, maybe that's my problem with SO searches I called out in another post. Maybe they've got some kind of same-source limit that becomes a major hindrance when you expect most results to be from a single source. I almost never get more than two SO links for a search on DDG, and very often neither is what I need—Google gives me a bunch more, and usually at least one is helpful. And it hadn't occurred to me, but I often end up tossing in a "!g" to reddit searches for a similar reason: not enough results are from Reddit, on DDG. (yes, I could probably do some kind of "site:reddit.com" or something, but "!g" is faster to type and gets the job done)
Bing decided to remove it for some reason and DDG now also removes it from search results, presumably because it uses Bing underneath. For Google it's #1 page when you search "fortran".
Reading between the lines it sounds like they are only using their own crawlers and other partners for things like widgets, while all their regular search results are still just Bing.
I was going to say that if the two search engines index and rank in a similar way, you would expect the search to be similar. But, for the `uefi hack` search, the results really are pretty close to identical, and when I do the same search on Kagi and Google, I get different results. I still don't know if it proves anything, but it's a little suspicious.
As I understand it, the problem with Google's search results is that they made SEO the primary determinative factor and didn't publish how their page ranking system worked.
However, it seems that businesses have figured out how the system works, and since there is big money in being the #1 result, people are constantly cramming every technique they can get into their sites to get to that #1 result location, even if it means that humans can no longer find what they are looking for.
Google needs to rework their search algo or they need to die.
Check out Phind (https://www.phind.com/) for your coding searches. I’ve been happy with the handful of times I’ve used it. It’s nice to have options beyond Google.
I use the widget and it's freeing to do silly searches without having them tied to my Google account.
The problem is that you can't remove the Google equivalent on a Pixel phone, so it's really wasted screen space and feel like anti-competitive. Until someone in the EU commission notices it and regulates it I guess...
Duckduckgo search results are spotty at best. I can live with the mild censorship (yes yes I know, they censor the side that you don't like so it's totally not censorship and just blocking evil propaganda, they're the good guys etc etc).
Their web browsers are great however and I've been using them on android for years and on desktop for months! I wish I could use them with a better search engine, though (Typing !g in all queries is now a reflex for me).
No idea about general numbers (our no-js server side logging has FF barely behind chrome) , but while 2 orders of magnitude behind Google, DDG is actually 2nd for us as well (German photography site).
I was pretty happy with DDG for years (switched to Kagi last year), and I think they are great for general usage (I often read about issues with local search, their search for Germany (!ddgde) was always topnotch).
Might as well ask here: Why does DDG change my search results when I use the Back button, and how can I get it to stop.
When I use DDG if I do a search, click on a link to open it in the same tab, then click back to the search results I notice the results are in a different order. This drives me crazy.
249 comments
[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 252 ms ] threadI want a search engine, more than a curated guide.
[1] https://www.mobihealthnews.com/news/google-takes-covid-19-va...
edit: I think the core problem is that "misinformation" was applied too broadly, and sometimes incorrectly.
Even if researchers are wrong initially, because of lack of data, they are still acting in good faith. Which you can't say for people who are spreading made up or poorly sourced information to make a buck.
Society generally frowns upon allowing people to blatantly lie or act in bad faith order to sell products. While that might be a form of censorship, it's one that society largely benefits from having in place.
A researcher or other "expert" should have at least some sense of when the data being used are limited, flawed, or even unavailable.
Under such circumstances, the only way to act in good faith would be for such a person to say something along the lines of, "I don't know" or "It's not possible to say at this time."
Such a person making some other authoritative pronouncement (even with caveats attached), especially if it turns out to be incorrect, should not be seen as "acting in good faith".
There are reasons someone might want to find those links, even if they disagree with them. When Google hides them from you without your consent or ability to opt out, they're treating you as if you were a child. Or perhaps more like livestock.
That's what "Manufacturing Consent" isn't it? That entire concept seems sound and passes the smell test. People see things repeatedly from authoritive-sounding people and they believe it (in the case of the book, by governments and their catspaws).
There is no reason a search and social bubble wouldn't wind up with a similar outcome.
I only said it sarcastically about the original commenter because it's difficult to believe that anyone could truly be like that. Sure, we're all aware of the dregs who seem to form their political beliefs from Uncle Creepy's Facebook meme pictures, but I've always believed those people to be nothing more than a (sizable) minority.
The thing is, this likely is true for him. Most people are not equipped to deal with the onslaught of aggressive memes from the internet. Unfortunately, this is an unsolved social problem, and "export my memetic censorship reflex to MEGACORP" is a pretty bad way of doing things.
I think a likely way of solving this problem (protecting not-especially-high-mental-horsepower people from getting BTFO by the internet, contracting transmissible psychological diseases and so on) is that religious organizations will start offering (voluntary, in first world countries) censorship services to their members. Your DNS queries or whatever will go through the Vatican/Synod/whatever central DNS server, which will prevent you from looking at porn sites. This would probably be a very socially positive outcome for the bottom 90-something percent of people on the "strength of memetic immune system" distribution.
I have seen something similar to this in the wild. Members of a church install spyware on their home computer that church officials can access to snoop on their internet traffic for "accountability" reasons. Members are shamed for looking at any content deemed wrong.
One young man got in trouble for looking at SFW images of models. Turned out he wasn't even the one who had visited the site, it was his sister looking at fashion ideas.
It's true for basically everyone. Smart people, "rationalists", et c., fall for scams, nutty scientific or conspiracy theories, advertising, romantic political or economic ideas, cults or scam-religions, and other crap all the time.
I wouldn't necessarily exclude myself from the set of people who would benefit from externally managed filtering.
If you think there's nothing wrong with the idea that "censorship is good as long as I'm not the one being censored", I don't know what to tell you.
In fact, as speech absolutists have taken over a few platforms, we've discovered that the primary hypocrisy surrounding speech is that there's a lot of people who claim to be speech absolutists, but aren't when push comes to shove.
It's astounding how many people are incapable of making judgments except along artificial lines given to them by sophists.
And you’re still avoiding the question.
[Citation Needed]
The article I was looking for was about intravascular injection of the vaccine, and its possible relation to adverse effects, which now has merit in 2023 [1].
[1] https://pure.hud.ac.uk/en/publications/inadvertent-injection...
Correct: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9313234/
Because you don’t get to come up with a “theory” and dump the burden of the proof on someone else. That’s incredibly stupid. Not how how science and common sense work.
The evidence comes at the end not before the theory
And I see how the concept of “misinformation” can be used very broadly to silence political opponents. But I do wish there was a perfect solution.
The problem with that position is, who decides what counts as "clearly damaging"? What if the government and media were extremely anti-vaccine and chose to censor pro-vaccine speech instead, calling it "clearly damaging"?
That seems like a slightly tortured double negative.
Christians say God exists
Atheists say God doesn't exist.
Christians tell the atheists to prove that God doesn't exist.
Atheists say you can't disprove a negative.
Christians take that as winning the argument.
Atheists take that as Christians being stupid and close minded.
Atheists counter with telling the Christians to prove God does exist.
Christians say you have to take it on faith.
Repeat ad nauseum extremis infinitum.
I personally don't mind deletion of antivax stuff because I'm not antivax. But I can see the point of view those mentioning what happens when there is deletion/censorship of things in the future that I could have interest in.
We also do know that there exists "some" subset of things that were mentioned that seemed antivax on the surface but did actually turn out to be true or at least somewhat true. But these were usually not outright false claims, but informed speculations or very niche.
It was such a dividing topic that any form of skepticism however small was seen as an attack. This as someone who is vaxed and has gotten every booster available.
The term antivax is a problem.
Very few people are actually anti all vaccines, and nobody should be pro all vaccines for everyone all the time. There have been actual truly failed vaccines, are you "antivax" if you wouldn't volunteer to take them? Should articles about past failed vaccines be censored from the internet? Of course not.
The term is sloppy and careless, but people love it, probably because it lets you be part of a team. But everybody means something different by it.
Nobody should presume any new implementation of a class is good just because there have been previous successful implementations. Reality doesn't make things so easy for us.
Also, it's not the job of a search engine to be your nanny. What if you are researching conspiracy theories or opposition beliefs, even if you don't believe in them? How would you find them?
A search engine by definition takes an editorial stance on things. They take in all of the internet and decide what to present to users. For a search engine to take no editorial position is to yield the floor to whoever can best game the system, and a propaganda machine like Russia's is absolutely capable of exploiting a search engine that doesn't proactively take measures to avoid being exploited.
That DDG wanted to avoid spreading Russian propaganda that argues against the very existence of the Ukrainian people isn't DDG meddling in politics, it's them steering clear of enabling genocide.
But when my naive sister-in-law hears something about how Ukraine isn't a real country, I don't want the first page of results for "history of Ukraine" to turn up Russian propaganda.
I live in a red state, and there are astonishing numbers of people here who already buy Putin's story. I'm fully behind DDG deciding they didn't want to play a role in spreading his message even further.
Yeah, same goes for your naïve sister-in-law. So why don’t they add the “propaganda” tag, so that your relatives could clearly see it and I could search for it (for whatever reason)? They could even add some links to some better sources, as an option. And use some disclaimer when you click on these results, like “Hey, this is a propaganda resource, be careful. Here’s the links where you can read up on the topic if you need unbiased information”. That would probably have at least some educational value, unlike removing and/or downranking the results.
An article about a Nigerian prince who needs money is likely to be a scam. An article about how Ukraine is really just a rebellious Russian province is likely to be state-sponsored propaganda.
This seems to be the case being argued here
>explicitly illegal content
Illegal according to who?
>fraudulent content
Fraudulent according to who?
These things you name are an editorial decision and are not unbiased
That editorial stance should be "show the user what they are looking for and want to see". The customer is always right, otherwise the real customer is someone else.
> For a search engine to take no editorial position is to yield the floor to whoever can best game the system
I am not against search engines having heuristics against state-sponsored propaganda, but there is no need for those heuristics to single out a particular state. Russian state-sponsored content shouldn't be treated differently than American, Chinese, Ukrainian, or any other state's propaganda.
Sometimes a company takes an ethical stance for the sake of being ethical. Shocking, I know, but it occasionally happens.
If they want to add a side link to more authoritative sources (like what Spotify does for podcasts discussing Covid), then fine, but don't censor me if I'm actively looking for "disinformation."
https://twitter.com/who/status/1243972193169616898?lang=en
Also, as you can see in the replies, a lot of people called BS at the time, but who were they to question the official WHO line? Yes, the WHO later came around and came up with 6 feet instead of 1 meter, but those who called BS on the WHO's statement may have saved their lives.
Examples:
- https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/cdc-reverses-agai...
- https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-00925-7
- https://archive.is/wPD2D (Tweet from WHO)
Note that "airborne" has a specific meaning in medical literature. Everyone agreed COVID could be transmitted in the air by respiratory droplets. But to be truly "airborne" means the virus could be aerosolized and float freely, without being attached to a larger droplet.
Both droplet-based and aerosolized/"airborne" spread allows viruses to be transmitted in the air. But a truly "airborne" virus can travel much farther.
It's the difference between needing 6 feet and 20 feet of distance to prevent spread.
(To put it bluntly, it's the difference between avoiding spittle, or avoiding the equivalent of cigarette smoke. Two very different threat models.)
Ex: "US Surgeon General Dr. Jerome Adams not only wants people to stop buying facemasks to prevent the novel coronavirus, but warns that you actually might increase your risk of infection if facemasks are not worn properly. [...] On Sunday, Adams posted on Twitter that people should stop buying masks. Rather, he tweeted that to keep yourself and those around you healthy, wash your hands often, avoid touching your eyes, nose and mouth with unwashed hands and disinfect surfaces."
https://www.cnn.com/2020/03/02/health/surgeon-general-corona...
Here's an article going over the issue and what convinced them to change their mind: https://www.wired.com/story/the-teeny-tiny-scientific-screwu...
It turned out they were wrong not just about COVID, but a whole host of other diseases, based on erroneous criteria about what sized droplets could float in the air. Ironically, doctors from centuries ago with their theories of "miasma" / bad air would have been closer to the truth.
This is how many people realized that COVID is airborne and that only N95 and better respirators provide real protection. People now discuss air cleaning, the impacts of Long COVID, etc. The vaccines were seized upon by the political parties as a wedge issue to force the economy open. They help with medical system capacity, but do not block transmission and Long COVID.
You can find an ongoing science based pandemic response policy at https://pandemicjustice.icu
Their was no vaccine at this point so no one against it yet.
The critical thinking can be found in the independent minds of those who made the choice to wear a mask. Listening to an expert didn't play out well.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/the-phrase-no-evidence...
"controversial": Others called it controversial. I did/would not.
"against the grain": Others thought that there was a grain. I did/would not.
"real time": Not literal.
Maybe this is a regional/age thing?
edit: actually, asking ChatGPT why they're in quotes gives the similar answers as mine, so I guess it's not too odd. New session prompt with 4.0: "Why are some of these words in quotes?"
Fluff removed, same order as my answers:
> ... In this case, "controversial" could imply that the speaker doesn't personally find the topics controversial, but acknowledges that others may perceive them as such.
> ... indicating that it's being used in its typical idiomatic sense.
> ... Here, the quotation marks might be used to stress that the term isn't being used in its strictest sense.
(I'm the CEO & Founder of DuckDuckGo.)
It is simply not true that we have censored anything or made ourselves "the arbiters of truth." I realized I previously explained how our news rankings work very poorly on Twitter but 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://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/ne...
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."
This is far too vague. Last year Bazbaz told Recode that sites like RT and Sputnik were "extreme" cases (https://www.vox.com/recode/22981115/duckduckgo-free-speech-p...). While I tend to agree, which other sites are extreme cases? This isn't published. Despite the claim that none of this is done for political reasons, I find it hard to trust that these "non-governmental and non-political organizations" act and are chosen without any bias. Your method isn't published or explained. I really think these organisations should, at minimum, be listed. So too should all the sites DDG considers to be "extreme" cases. Then we could decide if we think DDG is being politically neutral.
My confidence in DDG is shaken, and I don't think I'm alone. We live in a world where so many major software brands we love have made overt moves towards censorship on political grounds. If DDG could prove they reject this authoritarianism I think it would serve as a major USP.
I find myself using the "!g" shortcut (which takes me to Google) more often than I'd have liked to.
Thankfully, Apple offers this as one of their search engine options (despite being paid "tres comas" every year from Google to be the default search engine).
One problem with this narrow focus is that many people mistakenly carry this statement over to an assumption that DDG doesn't censor their search results. I suspect that DDG both knows and counts on this as an aspect of an undeserved reputation.
DDG's search results aren't acceptable for anything even mildly controversial. I'll use them for image searches, but there are better search engines for internet access and that give equivalent or better privacy.
Also in my opinion, DDG's penchant for censorship harms the credibility of their assertion that they do not track.
https://developers.google.com/identity/gsi/web/guides/offeri...
Also, you can kinda-disable this per browser
https://myaccount.google.com/security -> "Signing in to other sites"
DDG is limited to Bing now that Yandex was cancelled. All the censorship comes from Microsoft not DDG.
It is simply not true that we have censored anything or made ourselves "the arbiters of truth." I realized I previously explained how our news rankings work very poorly on Twitter but 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://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/ne...
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."
> 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.
Yeah? What about that?
https://www.reddit.com/r/PrivacyGuides/comments/tb6cj8/duckd...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2181585
Better link - DDG is in #2 with a behemoth 1.8% market share, closely followed by yahoo and and bing at 1.6% and 1.3%.
DDG is the default in a lot of privacy-oriented browsers and forks, but it gives users a really bad first impression when their first search just doesn't work.
But I suppose that the average mobile search engine user these days doesn't use most search modifiers or operators so maybe they aren't the things to prioritize.
Duck used to be great for only searching for what you asked for. But in the last few months, it's fallen into the Google trap of showing me things it thinks I want, and not what I asked for. And no method of punctuation seems to get around that.
At this point, the only reason I still use Duck is because the other option is Google.
So they still get the benefit of the doubt (as you say, the other choices are just Google) but the real test will be in how they communicate about this going forward and whether they fix it.
I feel like DuckDuckGo has had enough controversy in the trust department that it's entirely worthless as a company and as a service. Anything I do need to actually search these days, I just use Google, as I don't care about Google knowing I needed help with a Golang compiler error. It's not a worthwhile tradeoff for me.
The problem is when you need to research or learn about something that is verboten.
Even something as simple as "x worker strike" or "x protest" won't necessarily break any laws but will be of interest to certain automations, agencies and systems that may then endeavor to make your life hard without necessarily stepping over the legal line.
Not for being an undesirable to a ruling authority, but for looking up information related to them. And of course, this will evolve in more dystopic ways when it is all inevitably factored in to (financial|social) credit scores, insurance, access to services, etc. in the future. Either directly or laundered through AI or other systems.
That is less an argument in favor of DDG and more of a statement of why search engine privacy will become more and more important in the mid term.
Love that it can do groupings, especially when you're searching for something that will also turn up seo garbage, like products for your home. So you can see the cluster of "review sites" and then actual product companies
[1] https://kagi.com/
But in the last 6 months or so, Google's results have gotten so bad and DDG has continued to improve to the point where I no longer bother with !g.
When I do use Google I often find myself in the strange position of not actually being able to find what I'm looking for. It's a very unsettling feeling, and not one I've experienced in a long time, possibly not since the pre-Google days of Yahoo, Lycos and AltaVista. Amazing that Google have let their core value proposition of 'we are much better at finding what you're looking for than everyone else' rot quite so much.
One place that still consistently gives me trouble is Stack Overflow. More often than not, I DDG my search, get two SO links, one irrelevant and the other bad, repeat the search with "!g" and get a half-dozen SO links, 3-4 of which are relevant, and 1-2 of which are good.
[EDIT] Another poster mentioned searches for "X reddit" seeming to have a very-small cap on the number of results from Reddit that it'll display, and that might be part of my problem with SO results, too: maybe their algo prefers to avoid having too many results from one source, which is bad if you expect or want most results to be from one source. That would explain why Google sometimes finds me results with the exact language of my search, that were absent from DDG's listings—maybe it found them, but they got filtered out by a max-from-one-source preference.
For other searches I usually try DDG first and only fall back on !g when the results are bad, and often the Google results are also bad in those cases.
Just a few weeks ago, I was on Capitol Hill in Seattle. Looking for a weed shop. The only ones it would show me were miles away, and I knew there were multiple near me within walking distance. It literally gave me 2 weed shops on the map across the entire city. None anywhere near by.
Their map search has started to really suck balls too.
Remember Goto [1]? The search engine that at the time was much maligned for letting people ... buy sponsored results and arguing it made their results better...
Goto became Overture...
Overture was bought by Yahoo.
But where Yahoo faded away, Google has largely become Goto 2.0.
There are narrow niches where that model works for users. When you're specifically searching for a shop for example, it's often ok.
But for everything else it's absolutely awful.
[1] https://thehistoryoftheweb.com/goto-forgotten-search-engine/
But more to answer the OP, we've been making a lot of investments to improve our results (along with other things) -- high-level updates posted quarterly at https://duckduckgo.com/updates
This would be very useful because "x reddit" is probably my most common search
EDIT: There's also a !bang that does the same thing: !ddgr
See here for details:
https://fortran-lang.discourse.group/t/fortran-lang-no-longe...
Bing decided to remove it for some reason and DDG now also removes it from search results, presumably because it uses Bing underneath. For Google it's #1 page when you search "fortran".
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=uefi+hack https://www.bing.com/search?q=uefi+hack
And the exclusion filters fail identically, on "uefi hack -bootkit": https://duckduckgo.com/?q=uefi+hack+-bootkit https://www.bing.com/search?q=uefi+hack+-bootkit
And partially succeed identically: 'uefi hack "absolute computrace"': https://duckduckgo.com/?q=uefi+hack+%22absolute+computrace%2... https://www.bing.com/search?q=uefi+hack+%22absolute+computra...
The only differences seem to be the suggestions, infoboxes and similar "value adds."
However, it seems that businesses have figured out how the system works, and since there is big money in being the #1 result, people are constantly cramming every technique they can get into their sites to get to that #1 result location, even if it means that humans can no longer find what they are looking for.
Google needs to rework their search algo or they need to die.
If you don't care about privacy, you use Google because it is the best.
If you care about privacy, you use DDG because it is the best that offers improved privacy.
The problem is that you can't remove the Google equivalent on a Pixel phone, so it's really wasted screen space and feel like anti-competitive. Until someone in the EU commission notices it and regulates it I guess...
I recommend Neo Launcher, which is free and open source: https://github.com/NeoApplications/Neo-Launcher
Their web browsers are great however and I've been using them on android for years and on desktop for months! I wish I could use them with a better search engine, though (Typing !g in all queries is now a reflex for me).
I was pretty happy with DDG for years (switched to Kagi last year), and I think they are great for general usage (I often read about issues with local search, their search for Germany (!ddgde) was always topnotch).
When I use DDG if I do a search, click on a link to open it in the same tab, then click back to the search results I notice the results are in a different order. This drives me crazy.