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Comment by toomim | Hacker News Reader

Do search engines censor political topics these days? If you search "truthsocial" on ddg, the truthsocial.com website is the first hit. But if you search "trump truthsocial", it doesn't give you trump's truthsocial page, and doesn't even give you truthsocial.com within the first few pages of search results.

Since ddg uses bing, does anyone know what is happening here at bing? It looks like google results are similar.

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DuckDuckGo (and by extension perhaps Bing, assuming identical upstream results) has some terrible results when trying to filter by all kinds of domains.

There's a power tools review/news site that returns zero hits for the actual domain when searching its name (which is the same as its .com address). While for some domains even searching using the `site:` parameter will give far fewer results when paired with a query than just searching the domain name + query sans the TLD (the router firmware site openwrt.org is among such).

It's a mess and reporting it hasn't any difference ime in the past 3 years. So I'd be reluctant to say irrelevant results are due to censorship unless there was more evidence.

I doubt you're seeing censorship. If you search for "truthsocial trump" on ddg, you'll see his profile, for better or worse.

Oh, interesting. So it depends on the order of the terms:

- "truthsocial trump" works

- "trump truthsocial" doesn't work

I have concluded that Google definitely censors search results relating to the Ukraine war, after vainly searching for articles about documented Ukrainian war crimes (reported in mainstream Western media like NYT/WaPo).

I'm not seeing this. I Googled "war crimes by ukrainian soldiers" and the top link was an Amnesty International Article, "Ukraine: Ukrainian fighting tactics endanger civilians".

https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2022/08/ukraine-ukrai...

I use Google as little as possible because I don't like surveillance advertising but fair is fair.

You're right: I just checked and there are several hits for events that happened over a year ago that I couldn't find at all with Google back then. Shame on me for not checking before I posted. I have no idea what happened but apparently it's now fixed.

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