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Comment by paxys | Hacker News Reader

Judging by the replies to this thread, I don't think anyone here knows what an algorithm is. How do you think any search engine on the planet "objectively" decides how to show you the top 10 results for a search term out of billions of possibilities? There are a thousand knobs constantly being turned behind the scenes depending on the preferences of the operator. "Non-biased search results" are impossible by definition.

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Unbiased search is impossible, so DDG should be deliberately biased?

The long term solution is to get away from "top 10 results". All this has done is provide a stream of effectively the exact same thing being said just across different platforms. It doesn't provide people with perspective, it just becomes a system for gamification. I want perspective, deduplication, and some way of seeing everything hierarchically.

i know what an algorithm is and it doesn't involve some human making a decision to remove russian content from the internet.

And making some stance about what results you should see based on a war that is going on is wrong. If someone searches for a keyword they should get back results that are relevant to the keyword. They should not have results filtered on this impression that those results come from paticular sources that are deemed by DDG as russian propaganda. Search engines are not supposed to filter out propaganda. That propaganda article could be the most relevant article even if every word in the article is a lie. Also what if you are specifically looking for disinformation? Now you can’t use the search engine properly. If they are such transparent kings give us the option ourselves to press the button to filter russia out but they wont because they know we will do a diff and expose the political bias

They are censoring russia and it is wrong in the global scheme of what the internet is supposed to give us access too. We are going backwards with this bullshit. Educate people dont hide stuff from them, its annoying

We expect them to filter spam and scams.

If RT / Sputnik use SEO to target the keyword “Ukraine conflict”, it creates a worse experience for users. Right now RT is not on the top page for that search term. I’m guessing that’s what they’re targeting.

If you search “rt Ukraine conflict”, the #1 result is RT. You can still easily find content you’re looking for.

It just won’t be part of those wide net searches I’m guessing.

They did not state anything about seo spam. You are just assuming. They stated they are down ranking domains associated with Russian disinformation, meaning they are censoring Russia. If it was SEO spam then the fix for that would benefit all of search. I highly doubt they care about that, they are introducing censorship by domain on the basis the content served by the domain is not correct. Very tricky to actually verify and sleazy

> If it was SEO spam then the fix for that would benefit all of search.

SEO spammers co-opt legit techniques, so there’s no 1 size fits all solution. Google has to ban and penalize sites all the time.

And what if the user is not specifically looking for propaganda? If I search for "Ukraine war", the top result can be CNN or Ukraine News or RT. The engine operator has to decide which one of these to show me. What is the objectively correct option according to you?

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