this post was submitted on 04 Aug 2023
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Privacy
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The DDG problems where with their app because it had some Microsoft tracker in, nothing with the search engine.
I'm pretty sure DDG said they were censoring certain results that were misinformation related to Covid stuff.
Some people flipped out because ddg said they were removing results for what they deemed as conspiracy theories about Covid, at least that's what I heard.
Yeah but... That was like 10 very loud idiots. There was a time where "news sites" spammed covid misinformation and they where right to block it.
Very true. Yeah I'm not saying I disagre with their choice, I just couldn't remember akk the exact details of the drama.
Some folks want zero "tampering" with search results. But honestly, a y search engine by definition is already curating the results before they ever get to the end user. The algos and crawler indexing they do, on top of all the ranking choices for relevance and organization is all effecting what comes back from a search.
Yeah, unfiltered results would include .onion websites...
Plus just a million random junk results that wouldn't be helpful.
Yeah that as well
The Microsoft trackers issue is bad and they eventually had to address it due to the backlash, but that's not the only issue.
They also began explicitly censoring search results and information. Regardless of any given persons stance on any particular issue, things like censoring or downranking particular results or labeling content mis, dis or mal information means an entity like DDG is acting as an arbiter of truth and limiting the information users have access to rather than acting as a tool for users to utilize in searching for info and presenting any and all viewpoints, allowing the user to make up their own mind.
https://reclaimthenet.org/duckduckgo-down-ranking-russian-disinformation
DDG does not index .onion websites, is it censorship?
And downranking search engine optimized Covid and Russia desinformation is part of being a useful search engine. If you search for "Ukraine" and the first 20 results are obviously Kremlin propaganda, your search engine is trash and nobody will use it because the results are unreliable at best.
The tracker issue had and has nothing to do with the search engine, just with the app. Yes that wasn't a good thing but rather insignificant.
I'll decide what is misinformation or propaganda for myself. If someone else is limiting what information you can and cannot have or determining what is objectively true for you before you even have exposure to other ideas, everything you "know" is unreliable at best.
Sounds like the biggest you problem imaginable... The search just downranks the shit, you can still find it.
What's the purpose of searching, if not finding?
Then why make finding harder?
Thats literally my point .