How dare a website try to determine what’s credible! Yeah! How dare a search engine try to determine quality results!
Let's get right to the heart of the matter in this excerpt from an article written by Mike Masnick on Friday 11 March 2022. ". . .the job of a search engine is to rank websites based on what that website thinks will provide the searcher with the most relevant information. It is, inherently, biased. It can’t not be. This is why the entire concept of “search neutrality” is nonsense.
A “neutral” search engine is a search engine that just returns random results, rather than useful results. Every search engine is biased, because that bias is what determines what results will be ranked first, second, third, etc. . ."
OK...then let's shift to hyper-local for two reasons;
(1) Duck Duck Go is based here in Arizona
(2) Reference in the content includes an election contest here in Arizona - a Peter Thiel-backed Senate candidate, Blake Masters, who is shocked, shocked, shocked, that a search engine might try to minimize false information
Performative Conservatives Are Mad That A Search Engine Wants To Downrank Disinformation
"DuckDuckGo, of course, is a popular “alternative” search engine, using Microsoft’s Bing as its underlying search engine but then doing a bunch of generally good stuff for the wider internet/public, such as not trying to collect as much information on you as possible for tracking based ads, but focusing instead of intention based ads around your search (like Google did in the early days). I regularly use it and appreciate the more privacy protective approach.
Like lots of internet companies over the last few weeks, apparently DuckDuckGo has been trying to figure out how to deal with the Russian invasion of Ukraine, as well as the concerted effort by certain sources to push a Russia-driven narrative about the invasion. A few days ago, DDG’s founder and CEO Gabriel Weinberg announced on Twitter that the company was rolling out a search update that downranked “sites associated with Russian disinformation.”
See this >> "But… a whole bunch of overly performative Trumpists who must always play the victim, responded to Gabriel’s announcement by falling on their fainting couches to bemoan the fact that a search engine was downranking false information. This includes a Peter Thiel-backed Senate candidate, Blake Masters, who is shocked, shocked, shocked, that a search engine might try to minimize false information. . “I will determine for myself what is quality”
But there were lots more, and all seemed to be based on the idea that before this, DDG’s results were somehow… pure and untouched by any bias.
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