Posted on 02/23/2022 10:12:09 AM PST by yesthatjallen
On an episode of Joe Rogan’s popular podcast last year, he turned to a topic that has gripped right-wing communities and other Americans who feel skeptical about the pandemic: search engines.
“If I wanted to find specific cases about people who died from vaccine-related injuries, I had to go to DuckDuckGo,” Mr. Rogan said, referring to the small privacy-focused search engine. “I wasn’t finding them on Google.”
Praise for DuckDuckGo has become a popular refrain during the pandemic among right-wing social media influencers and conspiracy theorists who question Covid-19 vaccines and push discredited coronavirus treatments. Some have posted screenshots showing that DuckDuckGo appears to surface more links favorable to their views than Google does.
In addition to Mr. Rogan, who has recently been at the center of an outcry about misinformation on his podcast, the search engine has received ringing endorsements from some of the world’s most-downloaded conservative podcasters, including Ben Shapiro and Dan Bongino.
“Google is actively suppressing search results that don’t acquiesce to traditional viewpoints of the left,” Mr. Shapiro claimed last March. “I recommend you install DuckDuckGo on your computer, rather than Google, to combat all this.”
The endorsements underscore how right-wing Americans and conspiracy theorists are shifting their online activity in response to greater moderation from tech giants like Google. They have increasingly embraced fledgling and sometimes fringe platforms like the chat app Telegram, the video streamer Rumble and even search engines like DuckDuckGo, seeking conditions that seem more favorable to their conspiracy theories and falsehoods.
SNIP
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
StartPage for me. I love it.
Welcome to the club ;)
Here is a Reddit post from four years ago complaining about the idealogical tilt of Google search results:
Does DuckDuckGo use Google search results?
One poster says that DDG uses the Yahoo and Bing search engines. I've heard this before. I clicked the link he provided to DDG "sources" and that DDG page refers you to their Wiki page which informs us:
DuckDuckGo's results are a compilation of "over 400" sources, including Yahoo! Search BOSS, Wolfram Alpha, Bing, Yandex, its own web crawler (the DuckDuckBot) and others. It also uses data from crowdsourced sites, including Wikipedia, to populate knowledge panel boxes to the right of the results.Note that Wiki says that "Yandex N.V. is a multinational corporation primarily for Russian and Russian-language users, providing 70 Internet-related products and services, including transportation, search and information services, e-commerce, navigation, mobile applications, and online advertising.Weinberg has refined the quality of his search engine results by deleting search results for companies he believes are content mills, such as Demand Media's eHow, which publishes 4,000 articles per day produced by paid freelance writers, which Weinberg states to be "low-quality content designed specifically to rank highly in Google's search index". DuckDuckGo also filters pages with substantial advertising.
The firm is registered in Schiphol, the Netherlands as a naamloze vennootschap (Dutch public limited company), but the company founders and most of the team members are located in Russia."
I've been very impressed with the design of Yandex. So you, too, can join the Hillary Russian Conspiracy Kookism by using DDG which farms searches out to the Russians!
Yes. The self-proclaimed "newspaper of record" said so.
Everyone that doesn’t repeat commie democrat talking points is a conspiracy theorist.
Google is evil, use something less evil.
Exactly. Which negates the whole thing that made it great early on.
Before you would go to the Library, and you might go to the book section on auto repairs and browse around, or look in the card catalog. You would pull out your book, check it out at the counter, and be done with it.
Now, it is like going to the Library and they don't let you browse around. You have to tell the Librarian what you want, say, a book on car repair for Ford Mustangs.
She disappears, and comes back with a book on how to repair electric cars like a Toyota Prius. You might complain that it isn't what you want, and she says "You should be driving an electric car. Cars that run on fossil fuels should be banned, so we don't carry the books on those."
As does Brave Search.
Google is darn sure not my default.
You bet.
Bill Whittle is excellent, his videos are generally 8-15 min long, and I have been so impressed with him I signed up for a membership, but you can see all of his videos on Rumble except the newest ones, which he reserves for a few days for paying members.
The man is a treasure. I suggest the whole video, and the first Stolen Election one (Part I) since they are both informative and entertaining.
Thanks, I will check him out.
I’m not a conspiracy theorist, I’m a conspiracy REALIST.
Been using DDG for many years, even my phone browser and Vivaldi as browser on desktop.
Bookmark
That’s a good analogy.
Must be a lot of conspiracy theorist, or they wouldn’t be commenting.
Tor with Tor VPNs.
It is bizarre to see DuckDuckGo commercials that end with the Google logo prominently displayed advising for you to find it in the Google app store.
I'm thinking Google's manipulation is becoming obvious and annoying to people who are now looking for alternatives so they asked the self-proclaimed "newspaper of record" to spread rumors and lies.
... yet their Internet experience continues to revolve around G**gle Chrome, G**gle Android, and G-mail.
All those bad stereotypes about Librarians are going to come back and haunt them...
The good stereotypes about the Naughty Librarians aren’t going to go away, though!
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