You guys are overreacting. DDG said they would only down-rank sites associated with Russian disinformation. It’s normal for search engines to downrank low-quality sites such as SEO spam.
yeah, this was pretty much the consensus in the thread on this on /r/stallmanwasright. kinda surprised to see so much less of that here.
DDG unfortunately is more concerned about profiting, down ranking what’s told to do so, and what’s more convenient for itself, and has great marketing. It’s no better than Searx in that it’s also meta search engine, just with better marketing. Well perhaps not as simple as that, but not that far either. Quoting someone:
BTW, I always thought duckduckgo was a pure engine, and it does as well some meta searching through bing.
So, they succeeded with marketing. The situation is exactly the opposite. It’s 99.99% rebranded Bing (and Yahoo and Yandex) with a slight touch of DuckDuckBot.
From a delete Lemmy post:
https://lemmy.ml/post/43595/comment/22034
Besides, searx uses multiple sources, not just google, which you can enable disable on the settings, as a user of any instance, :)
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when I put in very concise words and get distantly-related MSM B.S., i don’t feel respected. My results were certainly filtered in order to shape opinion.
I read through some of the comments on this post, and although I get the arguments that there is not only disinformation from the Russian side, I must say that the specific intention of Russia’s disinformation is to directly destabilize our western democracies and spread the denial of the war and slaughter in Ukraine. And yes, we’ve gotta act against the false information from western news agencies also (I live in Germany, and therefore I know a pretty good example of this with “BILD”), but the criticism of DuckDuckGo’s actions and calling it censorship is, from my opinion, absolutely wrong, because we’ve gotta protect people from disinformation and stop the Russian war of information.
DDG has become popular with far right groups lately. So there’s some good to come from this move.
The overlap between alt left and alt right groups is the importance of privacy.
cool, the second hit for ukraine news is now Fox News 🤣
Well, DDG is basically a privacy friendly frontend to the G* search engine, so this was to be expected. Fortunately I switched to searx. The future of the internet is federation, there is no going back.
I mean it mostly uses Bing in the background rather than Google. Searx is kich the same in the sense it taps into other search engines. Except with Searx you get more control.
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You’re glad you move away from DDG because they’re fighting spam and misinformation? That doesn’t make sense to me. SearX is great, but ditching DDG because they’re doing a net positive is illogical.
What is truth and who gets to decide? There are gray areas there. EX: A huge percentage of the world’s population thinks Mohammed is the only prophet while another large percentage thinks only Jesus is the true prophet. Another pecentage thinks there are no prophets or gods. So, who gets to decide? Take almost any issue and there will be a few opinions and/or cherry-picking of facts.
Once again, the problem here is: disinformation according to whom? Themselves? The US government? NATO?
Maybe propublica? I think there are areas of gray and there are areas that are clear, and we can respect the former and take action on the latter without putting on joker makeup and descending into sophomoric relativism about the fundamental impossibility of ever knowing “the truth.”
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And who gets to decide what is misinformation?
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If the information is verifiably false, it doesn’t matter who proves it.
verified by whom? Our own parents lie to us sometimes, and even spouses do, so what makes you think media or gov’t won’t?
My point is that this information is typically not verifiable in an independent sense. This get essentially to what is truth, the truth we should all agree is the truth no matter who’s providing it to us. We can verify it for ourselves. As an example, if we have 14 videos of the same incident and they show roughly the same events then we can be fairly confident that that event occured because we trust that those 14 sources are real and non-colluding.
the truth we should all agree is the truth
that isn’t how human beings work. where have YOU been? China - where you can be thrown in prison for not having the same “truth” as another person? You do know that not all scientists even agree on “truth”, right? I think it was Feinman who showed that Einstein was wrong once upon a time.
Those 14 videos would have to be from 14 different sources, but I guess that is what you meant. Even that only leads to an event being more probably, but doesn’t guarantee its true.
DDG results have been feeling a little too curated for years now, and they’ve openly censored results since around the time of removing the scihub bang, which I thought was the first near-universally egregious example.
Question, what’s the main difference between searx and searxng? I’ve used them indistinctly, and the 1st result when searching for the difference on searx.be (a searxng instance) is a searxng github issue with the question:
https://github.com/searxng/searxng/issues/46
Is there another one? Also the list of searx instances includes both, searx and searxng instances:
How to know what meta search is each instance, without actually accessing each one (that if the instance tells you, like searx.be indicates it’s searxng)?
Also, it seems, searx has less features, but that’s on purpose, tying to prevent information gathering from the instances, whether by their owners or administrators. I like that. That makes me think I should really consider using searx only as much as possible, :)
searx.info used to be my preferred instance when alive, now searx.be is, :) But as searx.be is a searxng instance I might swtich to a searx one by default. I use Librewolf, and I’m wondering if there’s a way to alternate/bounce between just a specific sub set of instances (the ones which countries of origin suggests more respect for privacy for example, the ones more up to date, and the ones with better security, the searx ones excluding searxng, for example).
I stopped using DDG years back, when reading it wasn’t building their own indexes, and it was just another metasearch engine, just like searx itself, but worse, because it’s not decentralized, it’s for profit, and its head quarters are based on a non privacy respecting oriented country govt. You can read a dated post here in Lemmy:
https://lemmy.ml/post/43595/comment/22034
Unfortunately, it seems the original URL was “deleted”, however here it is the URL:
https://torrentfreak.com/popular-pirate-sites-disappear-from-duckduckgos-top-search-results-201112
I’m probably going to still use DuckDuckGo for now but this is such a stupid unnecessary move. Seeing some russian “disinformation” wasn’t going to suddenly turn me into a Putin stan.
Which alternatives should one consider?
Alright everyone, lets take bets. How long do you think before they remove that tweet?
The tweet responses are telling us if we think that way about DDG we must be in with the racist maga antivax crowd.
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Based on what?
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Yandex is not only a WEF member, but they also have an agreement with Uandex to allow Yndex browser to use Microsoft Suite - so i distrust it. Seeing that Microsoft has a contract with Ukraine gov’t, I suspect if Yandex isn’t filtering results yet, they will soon. The Hated One replied to me that Yandex (email or browser, idk) is worse than Google because Russian laws differ from those in the US.
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