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Comment by yegg | Hacker News Reader

(I'm the CEO & Founder of DuckDuckGo.)

It is simply not true that we have censored anything or made ourselves "the arbiters of truth." I realized I previously explained how our news rankings work very poorly on Twitter but I subsequently put out a clarification tweet[1] and then we made this help page with a much clearer (and detailed) explanation of how our news rankings work: https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/ne...

[1] "We are not ranking based on any political agenda or my (or anyone else's) personal political opinions. We are also not assessing any individual news stories." https://twitter.com/yegg/status/1515637392190935041

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It must be so satisfying to wake up on the morning of a product announcement after a long development cycle, pour a nice hot cup of coffee, and then type `news.ycombinator.com` into the browser's address bar

What you have basically done here is say "we only downrank spam" (this is fine), and then said "state-sponsored news is inherently spam" (this is not).

You are using a definition of "spam" that is not commonly held or understood by those who would be your users. Whether or not this is for a noble reason, this renders it a dark pattern. This is not only a violation of the principle of least astonishment, your explanation comes off as deceptive. You are making a value judgment on truth and working that into the product while claiming you are not making a value judgment.

Relevance and truth are two different things. It is not your job to be making calls on the second one, and I find your willful conflation of these concepts, and attempts to deflect from the fact that you have done so to be a bit gross.

> then said "state-sponsored news is inherently spam

So BBC is spam according to them?

> we rely on multiple non-governmental and non-political organizations that specialize in objectively assessing journalistic standards.

This is a vaguely worded workaround for applying censorship, especially without giving a specific list of organizations that they consult. The use of the term "objective" is very sneaky here, even manipulative. I didn't realize DuckDuckGo did this - how disappointing.

Time to start trying other search engines, perhaps a proxied or self-hosted one like SearXNG as GP suggested.

https://docs.searxng.org/

> censoring stories due to operating with very limited press freedom, and misleading readers about who owns, funds, and authors stories for the site

So does this mean you're going to deprioritize The Hill for firing Katie Halper because she wanted to do a story calling the Israel/Palestine regime apartheid?

Or the Washington Post owned by Bezos who is paid untold fortunes by the US intelligence apparatus, and whose reporter listed her news agency as "Amazon" on a sign in sheet to interview Assange?

Do you consider RT (a huge Russian news network) misleading about who "owns, funds, and authors its stories"?

I'm sorry, but I don't think you "accidentally made a bad tweet" -- you tried to publicly jump on the Ukraine bandwagon for cheap political points, it backfired, and you've been backpedaling ever since.

No, as it says on that referenced help page: "Many sites may occasionally do one or more of these things, but we take action very rarely, only in the most extreme cases...We trust that users can find the right information for themselves, so even in these rare cases we do not remove these sites from our search results page. Additionally, impacted sites are not moved so far down in the results that they are effectively removed. Unless legally prohibited, you should find all media outlets in our results, and they should generally show on top if you search for them by name or domain name. If you see otherwise, please let us know and we will investigate."

But how isn't this disingenuous? The reason you'd de-rank is because less users then get exposed to whatever narratives/information you want hidden, the reason why you de-rank.

Users use a search engine for passive exposure to a mix of information for them to then scan, ideally reviewing multiple sources thoroughly, for them then to make a determination/conclusion.

And certainly DDG would have actual statistics on the direct impact the down-ranking had/has, but not the statistics on the externalized impact of how that cascades - e.g. you're biasing their knowledge towards whatever has become the dominant/"acceptable" narrative and reducing the likelihood (greatly) by who sees competing narratives.

In general with searches, what % of clicks occur within say the first 2-3 pages, and were the Russian sites de-ranked to after those 2-3 pages?

Where do 80% of the clicks go for most search - within how many pages of results? Were the sites de-ranked passed that point?

Like the sibling comment says, that's not much better. To the majority of people who don't go that far down the list, and would have otherwise seen it if it weren't moved down the list, that information has been effectively hidden.

If you intend to make certain links harder to find, you have the same intentions as straight-up erasing them. It's those intentions I cannot get behind, because I don't trust a company's arbitrary morality to make those decisions, when you literally just get search results essentially verbatim from another search engine.

> Search ranking and censorship are entirely different things

They are not, actually. Especially when you already have made your plans public previously based on your reaction to a political situation.

Hi, didn't expect to see you here.

I have a question I always wanted to ask. Why should people trust your privacy centric services when you are famous for your previous project which was essentially a pyramid scheme for harvesting user data, which you then sold along with the data? Any rational person would expect DDG to also be a user data harvesting scheme.

I don't know how you claim that you have not made yourselves the arbiters of truth after posting tweets like https://twitter.com/yegg/status/1501716484761997318

"At DuckDuckGo, we've been rolling out search updates that down-rank sites associated with Russian disinformation"

and

"we also often place news modules and information boxes at the top of DuckDuckGo search results (where they are seen and clicked the most) to highlight quality information for rapidly unfolding topics"

Your post here and your tweets tell completely contradictory stories, which only harms your credibility more.

A search engine does have to make a judgement call on what results to rank over other results. However, making that call based on anything but relevancy to the user's query means I'm not going to take your search engine seriously. If anyone but the user is deciding what "russian disinformation" is, you've already lost the game.

Personally, that's fine for me: I don't have to take my search engine seriously to use it, and I dont turn to search engines for my news anymore. In fact, I think the only things I use engines for these days are a replacement for the StackOverflow search bar...

Do you know if DDG also did the same - or perhaps their rankings were already captured by the likes of Reuters et al ("fact checkers") - for the COVID pandemic narrative?

It's quite apparent their desired narrative is falling apart now, where a Pfizer executive publicly admitted they didn't even test for transmissabiity - meanwhile that was arguably the primary promotion point for the mRNA shots propagated by the captured MSM (arguably primarily by big pharma), by politicians (captured heavily by big pharma, enough to be toeing their line); and where Pfizer's CEO at last minute cancelled his in-person testimonial to EU parliament inquiry - arguably because they know they've been caught and will be held accountable by those who aren't toeing their line/profiting from it.

This is the "new" war using "soft" power, a war against all of society that arguably billions of people are now awake to; which speaking of it gets you flagged and lazily downvoted as "conspiracy theorist" to suppress a seemingly endless and growing amount of concrete proof points to support the hypothesis of what's actually going on.

I'm not very inclined to discuss mRNA on a tech forum, but "fact-checkers" do also fall under this kind of umbrella, yeah.

Any large organization presenting what they claim to be the truth is subject to all sorts of unscientific biases, which is why it's so important that people aren't shouted down, that sites aren't de-ranked.

If you let anyone but individual people decide their conclusions, it's a nice, paved, flower-laden walkway to the dystopian corporate hellscape that's bemoaned by the same people who advocate for "fact checkers" and de-ranked search results.

P.S. For those who believe that putting "fact-checkers" in quotes is denying truth, promoting misinformation, etc, etc -- I put it in quotes because even giving them that title gives them more power than they should have.

"P.S. For those who believe that putting "fact-checkers" in quotes is denying truth, promoting misinformation, etc, etc -- I put it in quotes because even giving them that title gives them more power than they should have."

It's part of the same problem of media et al referencing "experts" or "the science" - where the majority of society seems to blindly trust those words or concepts, trusting that the utterers of it are equally trustworthy.

My dad is a expert video-game fact checker and Half-Life 3 should be coming out tomorrow.

It almost beggars belief to have to say that of course the vaccine testing is on efficacy of infection prevention, not transmissibility. But wouldn't you know it? The less likely you are to get infected and the faster your body clears the virus, the less the virus is or can be transmitted. Yes, peak viral load for infections that do "breakthrough" may be the same as unvaccinated. That's not a smoking gun.

There is a lot of sinister stuff happening in our world, a lot of coordinated efforts against labor and the working class. Tying that narrative to a conspiracies about COVID vaccines rightly nudges you into conspiracy theorist territory.

And that is the last comment I will ever make about vaccines on this site.

You admit to there being coordinated efforts against labor and the working class - so how do you deal with the cognitive dissonance with 1) the history that the pharmaceutical industry continuously being a very bad actor with the reward of billions in profit, 2) that pharma industry in the U.S. (for example) accounts for something like 80% of the advertising revenue on all mainstream-legacy media channels (capturing the narrative of what news is able to air), and 3) practically all U.S. politicians on both the Republic and Democrat side are given $$ - lobbied by the pharmaceutical industry?

The rest of what you shared seems to be relatively shallow narratives you've been trained/programmed to believe for you to then parrot.

My question above isn't about "vaccines" - so hopefully you're willing to answer and won't avoid the cognitive dissonance you're certain to encounter if you attempt to answer it; or perhaps we'll see what mental gymnastics you need to use to dismiss the multiple very clear conflicts of interest and guaranteed-obvious influence that pharma has on our society via politicians that make policy decisions - and via narratives propagated to the masses via mainstream-legacy media channels.

"Coordinated efforts against labor and the working class" doesn't convince anyone of anything. Almost every company ever tried to pay their workers the least they could get away with. There are also "coordinated efforts by labor against the wealthy class" - ie union organizing. Every worker in the world hopes to get paid more, even me. But there's no coordinated effort to lie to you about the fact that covid vaccine helps protect you from getting covid. No one made all the scientists believe that a virus causes covid. Fauci didn't want to get people vaccinated because he was being paid, he studied public health and wasn't an idiot, that is all it took for those professionals to see we should encourage vaccination.

There is zero cognitive dissonance for me. I freely admit to everything you stipulated above in paragraph 1. But none of those statements logically flows to your conclusion, despite how strongly you seem to think they do. Such statements of fact do not implicitly or explicitly compromise the quality of the science and the weight of the evidence for vaccine efficacy, especially when those results are independently verified using multi-source methods.

> The rest of what you shared seems to be relatively shallow narratives you've been trained/programmed to believe for you to then parrot.

What more does this merit than an eye roll? You know nothing about me, but you're telling me all I need to know about you. It's frankly distressing, but such are the times.

> There is zero cognitive dissonance for me. I freely admit to everything you stipulated above in paragraph 1. But none of those statements logically flows to your conclusion, despite how strongly you seem to think they do. Such statements of fact do not implicitly or explicitly compromise the quality of the science and the weight of the evidence for vaccine efficacy, especially when those results are independently verified using multi-source methods.

You didn't actually support any of your statements or specifically state what's wrong with my logic, you're just saying them as matter of fact - but such are the times.

> It's quite apparent their desired narrative is falling apart now, where a Pfizer executive publicly admitted they didn't even test for transmissabiity

This was known when the clinical trial docs where first published. No one said it did at the very beginning, it was never hidden by anyone. The data of reducing transmission was collected when the vaccines began to roll out. And for pre-omicron strains it did reduce transmission.

This whole thing about the recent Pfizer thing is just some anti-vaxx narrative.

Yeah, all the conspiratorial anti-vax BS is just sad. There weren't millions of people killed by getting vaccinated, so all that pre-shot BS about the danger of a new vaccine didn't pan out - because they'd been testing it for years, and it wasn't actually dangerous.

There was an update clarifying that tweet.

https://twitter.com/yegg/status/1515637392190935041

I saw it - it didn't help their case much:

>Search ranking and censorship are entirely different things. We make our results useful by ranking spam lower.

They're only different things if the ranking decision is based on relevance. If you de-rank something based on political agenda, that's censorship. But hey, it looks like they talk about that:

>We are not ranking based on any political agenda or my (or anyone else's) personal political opinions. We are also not assessing any individual news stories.

Why did the initial tweets say the opposite? Are they conflating "russian disinformation" with spam?

Frankly it reads like the PR hit was larger than they expected.

The tweet:

"Search ranking and censorship are entirely different things. We make our results useful by ranking spam lower.

We are not ranking based on any political agenda or my (or anyone else's) personal political opinions. We are also not assessing any individual news stories."

Entirely different things? Are we supposed to just swallow that statement and pretend one doesn't cause suppression - even if it isn't 100% suppression like outright censorship is?

And, if it's not political, then why did the down-ranking occur after political incident.. and the rest of the tweet is trying to minimize.

Thank you for this clarification!

He "clarified" by twisting and lying about the situation. Simply said - down-ranking is censorship, whether you agree with it or not. Pushing a result to page 3 or 4 in a search engine means that 99.99% of people won't see it, effectively hiding (ie. censoring) it from public view.

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