DuckDuckGo Search Engine Wants To Penalize Sites Associated With Disinformation

greatgameindia.com ^ | March 12, 2022 | GGI Staff

[ransomnote]

The CEO of search engine DuckDuckGo Gabriel Weinberg has said that they want to penalize sites which are associated with Russian disinformation.

Weinberg took to social media and said “Like so many others I am sickened by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the gigantic humanitarian crisis it continues to create.”

“At DuckDuckGo, we’ve been rolling out search updates that down-rank sites associated with Russian disinformation,” he added.

“To highlight quality information for rapidly unfolding topics,” Weinberg noted, DuckDuckGo is also inserting information bubbles at the top of the search results page.

DuckDuckGo is a Google alternative that has grown in popularity in recent years, in part due to the fact that it does not track users. In the past, Weinberg has enticed consumers to switch from Google by promising “unbiased results.”

Some users, including Tom Fitton, president of the Judicial Watch nonprofit, questioned the CEO’s response right away.

“Contrary to its implicit promises to the contrary,” he said on Twitter, DuckDuckGo “is now in the censorship business.” “Are there any search engines that respect users?”

“Today, you are removing Russian disinformation Tomorrow you will be removing genuine protests,” another user wrote.

A request for comment from DuckDuckGo was not answered.

Some of the critics were eventually addressed by Weinberg.

“Search engines by definition try to put more relevant content higher and less relevant content lower—that’s not censorship, it’s search ranking relevancy,” he added.

Since 2017, Google has ranked Russian official media posts lower in its search results.

At the time, Google parent company Alphabet’s CEO, Eric Schmidt, remarked “We don’t want to ban the sites. That’s not how we operate. I am strongly not in favor of censorship. I am very strongly in favor of ranking. It’s what we do.”

One of the outlets, Russia Today, pushed back at the time, claiming, “His colleagues admitted three weeks ago that RT did not violate any rules of the platform.”

In early March, Google also stopped selling web advertising in Russia.

Around the same time, DuckDuckGo’s senior public policy manager, Katie McInnis, informed a congressional subcommittee that the company had terminated its partnership with Yandex, a Russian search engine.

“In light of Russia’s assault on democracy and Ukraine, we have paused our relationship with Yandex,” McInnis told the House Committee on Energy & Commerce. “The index was used to provide traditional links, meaning non-news links, in Russia and Turkey.”

[Carriage Hill]

Brave is what I’m now using, too.

[butlerweave]

I’m talking to DuckDuckGo you fool

[Paladin2]

GoFUDD

[dsrtsage]

Guess its fuq duck bye

[TangoLimaSierra]

I’m talking to DuckDuckGo you fool

Yeah, I'm the fool. Learn how to be clear when you comment, moron.

[oblomov]

I immediately switched from DDG to Brave Browser+Qwant search engine. So far, so good.

[sten]

russian disinformation? like the US biolabs?

turns out, that was all true. we do have bioweapons labs in ukraine.

the disinformation was US disinformation.

would he block that? would he penalize the American media for trying to push that disinformation?

[Surrounded_too]

*** what Weinberg and Zelinsky have in common. ****

Both a gluttons for spaghetti and meatballs?

[Flick Lives]

“Search engines by definition try to put more relevant content higher and less relevant content lower—that’s not censorship, it’s search ranking relevancy,” he added.

—

Lying f*cker. It is censorship if you bury search results to suit your bias.

[roving]

Their search engine sucks. I find better results with Bing

[wiseprince]

Thanks for letting me know duck duck is a political rag too. All the results are super manipulated. The very fact that that RT is not on the front page of any of the search engines when you search Russia Ukraine suggest a special sauce in all of them.

[Openurmind]

I fired them...

[Chad C. Mulligan]

Already dropped DDG months ago, when I discovered they were ghosting some of my (antique!) gun parts suppliers.

For now I'm on Brave, with Startpage as backup.

Browsers have to filter for really bad stuff like hard core porn, so there'll never be a site that won't offend somebody. But with the need for judgement comes a requirement for responsibility.

[EEGator]

And Zuckerberg?

[EEGator]

Yandex gave me partial returns in Cyrillic.

[EEGator]

Yandex gave me partial returns in Cyrillic.

[bigbob]

Startpage buys search results from Google but it if makes you feel better, go for it.

[Governor Dinwiddie]

I immediately replaced DDG in my web browsers.

Two alternatives:

• Brave:   https://search.brave.com/search?q=%s
   
• Yandex: https://yandex.eu/search/?text=%s

Could anyone imagine going to a library and finding that the librarian had deleted entries from the "card" catalog so that you couldn't find books which she considered "disinformation"?

By the way, if you use "yandex.eu" you won't be getting Cyrillic in your search results.

[Governor Dinwiddie]

What other characteristic beside looking like Pajama Boy do all these "tech moguls" like Weinberg share?

[Mean Daddy]

Dropped them