DuckDuckGo CEO Gabriel Weinberg wrecked his company's brand in 3-simple tweets | Hacker News Reader

DuckDuckGo CEO Gabriel Weinberg wrecked his company's brand in 3-simple tweets

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35 pointsrmason28 comments

Semi related anecdote: I was using DDG yesterday to do some research on mold remediation and effects of mold on humans. Page after page of naturopathic and holistic healing type things, usually repeated. Only one result for an overly generic CDC brochure. No ads for mold remediation services, thankfully, but I was pretty disappointed in the results.

Spoiler: Google was basically the same, but with ads.

I had to ask myself if I would rather see those and just skip them, or if I would rather have those results removed. I am still not sure.

IMO, I'd much rather see those downranked. They ain't relevant search results, so why should they be anywhere near the top of the list?

Yeah.. i have being using DDG primary for several years and recently the search results have dropped in quality in my opnion.

In my phone i always had a bunch of unrelated russian sites in the results even with region filter enabled (i am on Brasil)..

clearing the cache did show a improvement but i wonder if it might be consequence of those tweaks..

hope they sort things all soon i have being using the google bang so frequently lately that i might just search for an alternative.

On the contrary, I think DDG's brand just went up.

DDG never was pro-propaganda, they were pro-privacy. Good on them.

Not pro-propaganda, but was supposed to be un-biased.

This Tweet certainly didn’t age well:

“When you search, you expect unbiased results, but that’s not what you get on Google” @DuckDuckGo 4/6/19

Are the search results unbiased when people game the algorithm to artificially inflate their relevance. Is it biased when you counter their moves by down ranking their relevance?

Good questions! I think the answers in both cases is a resounding NO.

However, as Gabriel Weinberg mentioned in his post, DDG already displays content warnings on questionable sources and I would be very much in favor of that over outright banning or severely downrating sources.

At the very least, if they choose to downrank, I would prefer they be transparent about the mechanics of the algorithm and specify which sources will be downranked. That way there is at least a mechanism for feedback should they make mistakes. Everyone makes mistakes and no algorithm is perfect which is why I prefer transparency to an opaque black-box algorithm.

When you game the search engine by abusing SEO to artificially put your content above the others, then the content isn't unbiased either.

You either do something about it to keep a fair balance, or the signal gets drowned in noise.

I'm fine with this because I know my side is always right, and I am happy to be protected from information that I disagree with.

Yes, I actually do know which side is in the right here, and I do know that 'my side' isn't always in the right.

>and I am happy to be protected from information that I disagree with.

Interested to hear your response to the other, more relevant half..

Robert comes across as a complete goose in this video. There are quite a number of people out there at the moment who are not sure which side of this thing to be on, including russians. Any effort that helps to filter truthful quality information to the top of a search and push down misinformation (but still let's it be found) is useful in my books.

This guy just seems like he's upset for the sake of creating online content and polarising viewers.

First of all, he said they will be downranking sites associated with disinformation. I'm not going to tell anyone how to interpret that, but it's worth mentioning.

Also something worth mentioning that you can take as you will: this guy's other tweets are going on about the biolab theories and seem to have a clear bias

Again I don't want to tell anyone what to conclude, just wanted to surface those things so you can decide for yourself.

He's also been suspended from YouTube (according to his own tweets).

He's also pushed disinformation on his own channels, most notably (for me) around the so-called "freedom convoy" occupation of Ottawa, very much pushing the right-wing talking points around the whole thing.

I suspect that the reason he's upset about DDG filtering disinformation is that he's worried people like him who push false narratives will be next.

We live in an age where "fact checkers" twist themselves into pretzels for the following:

A person belongs to a bombing organization.

The person is convicted for the possession of hundreds of pounds of explosives.

The fact-checker's conclusion? It's unclear whether the person should be labeled a terrorist.

"People like me who wanted to just look at information, let me be the judge of what I see"

What does this dude think a search engine does, exactly?

I may be a bit of a purist but once you start downranking sites as a search engine it's a bit of a slippery slope. What I have learned is you have to listen to both sides of an issue.

I don't think that Weinberg even knew who all his customers were for his search engine. People have started using DuckDuckGo to unearth what Google is downranking. Quite simply they do not believe the downranking will end with Russian misinformation. This is also counter to what those who built the Internet believed.

If you don't do some downranking based on something, then your search engine is always going to be garbage, because people are always going to be trying to game your ranking metrics - whether its blogspam or political "misinformation" - however you choose to define either of those

What people believe or not is irrelevant, what was actually done is what matters. Russian disinfo is spread far and wide on the net (including on HN), anything that helps to curb it is a plus.

Ranking is the whole point of a search engine.

In ideal world search engine should not need manual interventions in the algorithm.

But then stuff happens in world, SEO optimizations start and some years later you get to know why google is shitty.

Because it is a lost fight and only way to win is to take money.

Other move is to not take money from advertisers and slowly die as you grow and more and more SEO optimizers mess up with you and find way to feed you garbage.

Another losing move is to stay small and then you are not in a position to dictate anything or change anything but get scraps for survival≥

then what’s the point of the tweets? The only way this make sense is the status quo has relevant, ranked results that are potentially propaganda. What changed? The war made the information less relevant?

A couple of problems with your argument

1) assumption that search engines should be neutral

2) assumption that downranking info that almost all fact checkers agree is false is a slippery slope will lead to downranking info that consensus reality says is true

3) assuming you know anything about Duck Duck Go's customer base or Weinberg's intent

"Fact checking" is just some rando's opinion, Facebook even admitted this in court. There's zero evidence that those who keep pushing for blind faith in those "fact checkers" even care in the least about really being accurate.

That's what facebook did. Not all fact checkers are facebook.

> 2) assumption that downranking info that almost all fact checkers agree is false is a slippery slope will lead to downranking info that consensus reality says is true

You mean I should put my trust in random doofuses who police narrative more than fact.

Say, is a person a terrorist or not?

Well, they belonged to an organization that bombed buildings and committed armed robberies. The person was also convicted of possessing hundreds of pounds of explosives.

But! They have the right politics, so it earns a "Mixed" rating and squirming about the lack of "a universal definition of terrorism" so you can't really say that yeah, the person was a terrorist. Maybe they had the bombs to admire them peacefully with no intent of ever handing anything over to other members of a criminal organization she was explicitly a part of.

That's the problem. Fact-checking is checking whether Californians like something, not a check of whether the facts actually line up.

maybe elitist but I think popular search engines should not be neutral for most people who are not me or your typical HN user. I personally want warts and all results. ie a search engine to treat me like an adult

I am personally done with DDG. And i abhor Putin's agression.

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