That can't be right, DDG's CEO has assured me that DDG isn't just a dumb proxy to Bing. DDG uses several sources as well as its own index so it cannot suffer from what is being claimed [1][2][3].
1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32360874
1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32360874
- We have on the order of a million lines of search code at this point and have a lot of talented people working them. That code does a myriad of things across many indexes.
- As an example, mobile searches are the largest category of searches, and local searches are the largest category of searches within mobile. We don't get any local search module content from Bing.
- Similarly, on desktop, knowledge graph / Wikipedia-type answers come up the most and we don't get any of that module content from Bing either.
- Bing is our largest source of traditional web links, which have become less and less relevant/engaged with over time as more and more modules are in search results and put on top of traditional links (and people interact with things on top of the search results page about two orders of magnitude vs. things on the bottom).
- When Bing has dropped things out of the traditional web index, we have put them back, and we've been working with them so this happens less and less. In fact, there hasn't been hardly any reports of this in the past month or so, which is why I've asked for other examples in the comments.
Once this particular issue is sorted out I'd would also be cool to see some sort of post-mortem report. Seeing why this sort of thing happens and a standard process for fixing it would be beneficial to all involved I think. Complex systems are complex and shit happens. But if this happened to a site far smaller than TechDirt (they're not even that big AFAIK) I don't think there would be any avenue to cure the situation for them.
/2¢
I'd be interested to know because it gets to the heart of the matter and why confusion seems prevalent. If we ignore the modules and local search, what differentiates DDG and Bing when returning bread and butter traditional web links?
> At DuckDuckGo, we've been rolling out search updates that down-rank sites associated with Russian disinformation.
- Gabriel Weinberg via Twitter, March 10, 2022. Archived: https://archive.is/SLGYb
I'll note that there is a April 17th update tweet referenced in that thread. That is unrelated and it was about a rumor that DGG was purging certain media sites. Nothing to do about censoring Russian sites. Archive of that: https://archive.ph/I2iUp
I realized I previously explained how our news rankings work very poorly on Twitter that got grossly misinterpreted, so I subsequently put out a clarification in this help page with a much clearer (and detailed) explanation of how our news rankings actually work: https://duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/news-ra...
From that page: "When we apply our own ranking signals we do so in a strictly non-political manner, meaning we don’t evaluate or otherwise take into account any potential political bias or leanings of websites in our search result rankings." That is, we did not/do not have a disinformation/"truth" detector, nor did we go looking for any Russian narrative (or any other narrative for that matter). Instead, we just have essentially a spam detector that had detected some spam from Russian state sites. That's it.
For example, if the top three results for a news story come from CNN, MSNBC, Fox News, the next search would display MSNBC, Fox News, CNN.
Anyways, 4+ year user of DDG and still love it!