DuckDuckGo to Down-Rank Sites Associated With Russian Disinformation

[Eduardo Lucas]

I don't need anglo-european NATO babyseaters to tell me what is right or wrong in politics and geopolitics and that russia is evil and the U.S saint, meanwhile being in a opressed country which suffered a coup from the same NATO they want to reproduce propaganda from. No DDG for me anymore.

[Pentium4User]

Really interesting is the fact Yandex (a Russian company) doesn't seem to censor DW.com (Deutsche Welle, banned from Russia). I can perfectly find content from their site with the Yandex search. I use the Hurricane Electric IPv6 tunnel broker endpoint Frankfurt, maybe the results are different when using IP ranges from AS in Russia, I will check that.

EDIT:
I connected from a TOR exit node in Russian, search results do not include dw.com, so it is also censored, just in another way. Maybe we will need to use more than one search engine to find what we want to.

[Moonchild]

Just as an update to this topic, I'm still trying to get full clarity from DDG regarding the issue of some sites being completely missing from results (which may be a problem with their sources for results actively censoring data, and not them -- but does mean they need to improve their quality by adding more neutral sources to their engine), but the official word otherwise is at least (all literal quotes!):

• "DuckDuckGo is not censoring results."
• "We are simply using the fact that these sites are engaging in active disinformation campaigns as a ranking signal that the content they produce is of lower quality, just like there are signals for spammy sites and other lower-quality content."
• "We are ... explicitly ignoring any political or bias assessments."
• "unless we're legally mandated to remove sites (like in the EU), sites still show up in search results, just a bit further down the page for general queries."

So this does bode well for our partnership so far.

As said I'm still waiting for more of an explanation of our observations in this thread (and my personal observations regarding search results as well) but so far it seem they are making an active effort to address these concerns; whether caused by too much weight of certain factors in their engine (a bug/misconfiguration causing results to be dropped on the floor) or simply poisoned/censored upstream results, there would be solutions for it.

[Pentium4User]

"unless we're legally mandated to remove sites (like in the EU)[...]"

Does that mean that the EU forced them to stop providing these results?
Why don't they tell that the users searching for that content?

[back2themoon]

[*]"We are simply using the fact that these sites are engaging in active disinformation campaigns...

Says who? And the entire rest of the internet doesn't? Again... says who?

[Moonchild]

Does that mean that the EU forced them to stop providing these results?

It seems like that's the case right now... What a twisted world this has become.
Gabriel Weinberg responded to me directly now and explained the following:
"Microsoft is complying with the order in the EU and we have no control over that."
"For long-tail web index results we mainly work with Microsoft, though even those results can still look different for a variety of reasons. In any case, Microsoft or otherwise, there is an EU law now saying search engines cannot link to RT/Sputnik."

It really does seem the EU is worse than the States at the moment regarding this matter; I guess VPNing out to somewhere outside the EU is the only way to get non-neutered search results at the moment.

Why don't they tell that the users searching for that content?

Perhaps an infobox that search results may be less complete if the search is performed from an EU country is a good idea if they can't redirect their queries to a non-censoring upstream source. I've suggested that to Gabriel.

Says who?

My point of contact (not the CEO) only said "We are looking to independent organizations who assess the objective reporting standards of sites that put out news content". I don't know exactly which independent organizations these are as they weren't named, but DDG only assesses objective reporting quality; as stated they explicitly ignore any political or bias assessments from those quality reports to determine ranking. They also assured me that it would not filter those results, merely put them lower on the list of search results, but that it only was one of the many factors determining a result's rank either way so relevance to search terms does remain an important factor, regardless.

[Pentium4User]

"For long-tail web index results we mainly work with Microsoft, though even those results can still look different for a variety of reasons. In any case, Microsoft or otherwise, there is an EU law now saying search engines cannot link to RT/Sputnik."

Thanks for making that clear.
Yandex still provides these results, maybe we will see when the European Union for censorship also like to ban them.

[Utnapishtim]

It seems like that's the case right now... What a twisted world this has become.

Indeed The saddest thing is I support this censorship. I live in CEE and was on business in St Petersburg and Sochi two years ago and considering the attitude of the people with money there (and also the kind of wannabe oligarchs Putin has praised in my home country) I have no trouble whatsoever believing NATO + the mainstream media's take on this war

[Moonchild]

Indeed The saddest thing is I support this censorship. I live in CEE ... I have no trouble whatsoever believing NATO + the mainstream media's take on this war

The problem is that by doing so, you are making your personal opinion/view on this war the only view available to anyone. That is what censorship means. You take away the ability of people to draw their own conclusions from presented narratives. What if next time the mainstream media's view on a situation is something you don't agree with or even just have doubts about? Would you still be in favour of the exact same thing if you aren't even allowed to read the other side of the story in that case?

[Pentium4User]

Does anybody here knows an alternative that doesn't censor at all?
I tried Yandex (Russian operated), they don't seem to censor stuff banned in Russia when connection from German autonomous systems, but I also don't trust them, from Russian AS the results are different.

[Moonchild]

I don't think there's currently any way to get completely unfiltered/unmodified results. depending on your apparent location and which service you are using, some results will be filtered.
It does seem that DDG from an American AS gives the least manipulated results at the moment.

If I wasn't busy with other things I'd look into setting up my own search service with as little as possible manipulation but for the moment that's not on the table, and might suffer from lack of scalability.

[andyprough]

Does anybody here knows an alternative that doesn't censor at all?
I tried Yandex (Russian operated), they don't seem to censor stuff banned in Russia when connection from German autonomous systems, but I also don't trust them, from Russian AS the results are different.

Searx removed the yandex search engine from their code in early 2021 because yandex was returning a captcha each time: https://github.com/searx/searx/pull/2566

I don't know any other meta-search engine that includes yandex, but maybe someone can find one. I think you just have to use multiple search engines (and possibly some country specific vpn's) in order to get all the different views. DuckDuckGo in America does seem pretty good right now in terms of using it as your primary day-to-day search engine.

[Utnapishtim]

Indeed The saddest thing is I support this censorship. I live in CEE and was on business in St Petersburg and Sochi two years ago and considering the attitude of the people with money there (and also the kind of wannabe oligarchs Putin has praised in my home country) I have no trouble whatsoever believing NATO + the mainstream media's take on this war

The problem is that by doing so, you are making your personal opinion/view on this war the only view available to anyone. That is what censorship means. You take away the ability of people to draw their own conclusions from presented narratives. What if next time the mainstream media's view on a situation is something you don't agree with or even just have doubts about? Would you still be in favour of the exact same thing if you aren't even allowed to read the other side of the story in that case?

I thought about this for a good while. In a vacuum my opinion is only pragmatic: we're at the brink of world destruction and should shut out disinformation and insurrectionism from the less responsible side to improve our chances of survival. I've actually been reading RT since the start of the invasion, not to get information, but as a barometer of how aggressive Russian govt feels right now, but after they added DDOS guard I didn't even realize it later got banned since there's no way I'm enabling JS there... And yeah that's my personal view, informed by things I know but can't prove to you over the web. I can try to tell you where I went, who I talked to, what I read to make up my mind but that's all going to be hearsay, there's no reason you should believe me who you've never met.

And that kind of brings me to the problem with online news/social media in general, it's all hearsay and everybody with a chip on their shoulder has taken advantage of this. Fake news and "influencers" telling you what you "want" to hear has clearly won over real information. Smart (wise? cunning?) people can sort the wheat from the chaff and from intentional lies, but the majority of people apparently aren't "smart" enough, even though they all believe they are. I hear so many contradictory comments from people around me and people I've met elsewhere and kept in touch online, contradicting each other and/or things I've seen for myself, that I'm now 100% sure that people who pay attention to news/politics (or at least people who tend to talk about it) are truly less informed than people who don't. IME these days the only thing you can do to stay informed is to travel as much as you can and somehow succeed at meeting people from different walks of life. People who rely on media whether mainstream/alt websites/social/... never seem to be that well informed.

So on that note, the less media people watch, the more chance they have of breaking out of their personal echo chamber. Yet I do agree that banning RT/Sputnik/etc is not going to get us there in the long run. For most people it's not going to make them go out and travel. It's going to cut most of them off from Russian govt propaganda, calm them down, but they'll be more likely to retreat into their social circle and become more single-minded and more vulnerable to another echo chamber. Censorship is selling the future to buy the next week. And maybe it's better to let people recognize lies for what they are, maybe there's still time for that. But I'm not hopeful


Edit: on the topic of DDG, they have been "adjusting" results depending on your IP for at least several months now, even if you have it set to "All regions" and then also click "Clear all", no matter if you have cookies enabled/disabled. The main reason I've been using them is that I knew they don't try to guess what I "want to hear". Today, I guess I'm staying because they still have !bangs for everyone else

[Moonchild]

Edit: on the topic of DDG, they have been "adjusting" results depending on your IP for at least several months now, even if you have it set to "All regions" and then also click "Clear all", no matter if you have cookies enabled/disabled. The main reason I've been using them is that I knew they don't try to guess what I "want to hear". Today, I guess I'm staying because they still have !bangs for everyone else

Like I already explained and quoted from Gabriel Weinberg: their long-tail results (which is the full list of results, not the instant answers DDG offers at the top) depend on several upstream search result providers, primarily Microsoft. Any geo-based filtering is likely the direct result of what Microsoft does to massage their results for specific geos, either to comply with mandates or otherwise.

[Mæstro]

I had long ago chosen Qwant and MetaGer over DuckDuckGo because the former let me search for images without JavaScript and give more European sites and fewer wikis. DuckDuckGo doing this strikes me as yet another feature in this ‘monstrous harlequinade in which everyone is constantly bounding across the stage in a false nose’ (Orwell) in which anyone who has anything to say about the Ukraine seems to be joining. I applaud Moonchild’s reconsideration, here as elsewhere. True neutrality is too rare.

[andyprough]

I had long ago chosen Qwant and MetaGer over DuckDuckGo because the former let me search for images without JavaScript and give more European sites and fewer wikis. DuckDuckGo doing this strikes me as yet another feature in this ‘monstrous harlequinade in which everyone is constantly bounding across the stage in a false nose’ (Orwell) in which anyone who has anything to say about the Ukraine seems to be joining. I applaud Moonchild’s reconsideration, here as elsewhere. True neutrality is too rare.

Qwant announced on March 1 that they were silencing RT and Sputnik: https://nitter.net/qwantcom/status/1498755728877801472

[Mæstro]

I had long ago chosen Qwant and MetaGer over DuckDuckGo because the former let me search for images without JavaScript and give more European sites and fewer wikis. DuckDuckGo doing this strikes me as yet another feature in this ‘monstrous harlequinade in which everyone is constantly bounding across the stage in a false nose’ (Orwell) in which anyone who has anything to say about the Ukraine seems to be joining. I applaud Moonchild’s reconsideration, here as elsewhere. True neutrality is too rare.

Qwant announced on March 1 that they were silencing RT and Sputnik: https://nitter.net/qwantcom/status/1498755728877801472

I dislike this in principle, but I am not surprised. Journalism is drivel and Frenchmen are French; these facts will hold as long as the world endures.

Update: After reading MetaGer’s Web log to see they are meddling with ranking results also, you have led me to discover Mojeek, a British metasearch engine which lets users choose Yandex among its references. Thank you for leading me to find this!

[Pentium4User]

Update: After reading MetaGer’s Web log to see they are meddling with ranking results also, you have led me to discover Mojeek, a British metasearch engine which lets users choose Yandex among its references. Thank you for leading me to find this!

Seems to be good, rt links are in their search results from German IPv4 address (sadly they don't support IPv6).

[Eduardo Lucas]

It seems like that's the case right now... What a twisted world this has become.

Indeed The saddest thing is I support this censorship. I live in CEE and was on business in St Petersburg and Sochi two years ago and considering the attitude of the people with money there (and also the kind of wannabe oligarchs Putin has praised in my home country) I have no trouble whatsoever believing NATO + the mainstream media's take on this war

Did you visit anywhere outside of the americanized middle class neighborhoods? by your talk i seriously doubt it

[Utnapishtim]

It seems like that's the case right now... What a twisted world this has become.

Indeed The saddest thing is I support this censorship. I live in CEE and was on business in St Petersburg and Sochi two years ago and considering the attitude of the people with money there (and also the kind of wannabe oligarchs Putin has praised in my home country) I have no trouble whatsoever believing NATO + the mainstream media's take on this war

Did you visit anywhere outside of the americanized middle class neighborhoods? by your talk i seriously doubt it

"Americanized" in Russia? Riight. I don't think you'll even find what you'd call a "middle class" neighborhood in many Russian cities. Russians know they live in an extremely politically influential country and have least illusions and least interest of all to experience what a US occupation and "creating democracy" looks like. People don't want to risk a Gaddafi 2011 type "success story" playing out there, even if they want Russia to turn into a EU style democracy.

The thing is when people start casually referring to the ethnicity in their neighboring country as a whole with WW2 appelations, and the government picks it up, well I really should've already known what would end up happening. That's why I'm not surprised by the no-Geneva-convention war. I mean, what would you do to a country where everyone is a nazi?