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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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.”
cool, the second hit for ukraine news is now Fox News 🤣
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.
alt left doesn’t exist.
Why not?
Why does it?
https://www.logicalfallacies.org/burden-of-proof.html
I don’t know if they exist or not, which is why I asked.
You are doing it the wrong way around though.
No. You claim the alt left doesn’t exist. I want to know why. I don’t say they exist. If you proclaim something in an argument, the burden of proof lies on you.
Or maybe the burden of proof lies on your parent commentee, but certainly not on me, because I just asked for clarification and didn’t state anything.
I don’t know whether the Alt Left exists or not and I would like either proof that they exist or the contrary. If neither of you can provide that, it’s Schrödinger’s Alt Left, both existing and not existing at the same time. Which would mean you’re both equally right and wrong.
What is the alt left and who is it? What’s ‘alt’ about them?
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.
here’s a list of public searx & SearXNG instances
If anyone has good experiences with any of them, definitely share!
I personally went with paulgo.io just because of the high quality ranking in searXNG lists the really clean UI.
UI/UX is currently the Aquilles’ heel for searXNG and I really want to see it improve.
Do any offer the option for larger text?
I use Firefox and I just do a Ctrl+mouseScrollUp or ctrl+= and it remembers the zoom for that website.
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I looked through the git, it was removed here: https://github.com/searx/searx/pull/2566
It appears that Yandex would respond to requests with a captcha and they were unable to fix it, so they removed it.
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.
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.
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.
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.
DDG is a privacy friendly frontend to the Bing search engine.
Which alternatives should one consider?
Searx. It is a meta search engine but imho is the best one out there
Still needs better UX/UI if it ever wants to get close to being used by average folk. That’s how DDG and Startpage grew so much.
You can find better alternatives to DuckDuckGo here. I hope you find it helpful!
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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.
