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u/EvilPhd666 Mar 11 '22
The founder mask offing "no no you guys are all mistaken. We were never meant to be the anti-google censors, just better on the privacy end that's all"
We're still going to do that whole Winston Smithing of the government's info and propoganda campaigns.
I just switched all my browsers search engines off ddg. Fun while it lasted. Another one bites the dust.
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u/The_Post_War_Dream Mar 11 '22
It's kinda nice to see both my leftist comrades and my libertarian friends agreeing on something.
Fuck censorship.
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u/dog-army Mar 11 '22 edited Mar 25 '22
.
I'm sure some people here are old enough to remember when being anti-censorship was something left and right were assumed to agree on. It was understood as part of the values of a nation that describes itself as free.
Red versus Blue, Right versus Left is a #1 tool of the corporate authoritarians who have hijacked our system. I just came from watching a few determined posters inserting partisan crap all over the place in a discussion of duckduckgo censorship on another board.
They are going to do what they do with every fascist/authoritarian step they want people to accept: try to herd us into our Red and Blue tribes and get us to fight over it so that half of consumers of corporate media will circle defensively around censorship even if they would never have supported it otherwise.
..
The other tactic they are using (besides employing an army of shills to yawn or even cheer at duckduckgo's decision) is flooding the threads with irrelevant arguments...stuff like "Search engines can't be unbiased anyway, because humans write the algorithms" and "DuckDuckGo never promised not to curate content; they are about privacy," and "It's not censoring; it's just lowering the rank, and the information is still there." All of those are red herrings and designed to render the discussion mundane and boring and make totalitarian narrative control seem DEBATABLE in a free society.
.They are doing everything they can to bury comments that clearly and directly express outrage over what's really being done to us here: the replacement, in supposedly free nations, of open access to information with censorship, rank propaganda, and authoritarianism.
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u/true4blue Mar 11 '22
Who decides what’s disinformation and what’s not?
I’ve seen a ton of pro Ukrainian propaganda on the internet
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u/Spiritual_Oven_3542 Mar 11 '22
DuckDuckGo has been trash a while now, switch to Brave or I’m sure there’s other alternatives as well
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Mar 10 '22
Another sellout!
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Mar 11 '22
Hmm? I thought this was a leftist sub
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u/veganmark Mar 11 '22
Any "leftist" who supports censorship is worse scum than the Repugs.
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u/Alledius Mar 11 '22
Nope, the republicans are now looking to create election police. It’s starting in Florida and the idea will likely spread to other red states. No one is worse than them at the moment.
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Mar 11 '22
Again this isn't censorship
Google and probably even DDG rank websites. And either put websites on the bottom or top of the pages. Thats just how it is.
From this screenshot it seems they just put sources tied to the government of Russia at the bottom. That's it.
Censorship would be DDG blocking RT and other Russian government sources. DDG hasn't done that. You can go to DDG and find RT perfectly fine. Just DDG is no longer putting them at the top and probably isn't recommending them. Again nothing new it happens with everything from pets to pies.
I wouldn't make my comments if it was censorship. But i also have to add. The internet isn't public. The internet is controlled by companies that legally aren't mandated to uphold freedom of speach. Even considering that many people whom are hateful (ben Shapiro) don't end up banned. Sites aren't trying to uphold some government conspiracy theory to censor Russia. They are just following profit and what keeps them popular. If people started a war on the color blue many sites and companies will try to erase blue. Simply because thats what makes then popular.
I genuinely doubt DDG really cares about the American government or even Ukraine. This is just for profit.
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u/Sdl5 Mar 11 '22
Oh rank BULLSHIT!
DDG just nuked their user base numbers to hell.
Good luck having a profit margin now.
The rest of that is classic shill narrative pushing. Fuck off yeah?
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Mar 11 '22
Yeah if people don’t support censorship on behalf of the US empire then they are fake communists
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Mar 11 '22
Why are we supporting any side? Shouldn't we be saying Russia bad , Ukraine bad and America bad? War is bad?
Also America isn't even involved in this conflict. Support yes. But the mighty of the industrial complex hasn't been flexed.
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Mar 11 '22
Unfortunately the US is involved in this conflict. Ukraine is essentially a proxy state of the US as they have installed many of Ukraine's political leaders as well as invested heavily in extracting their resources. It's not at all dissimilar to what's happened and still happening in the middle east since the 70's from the "help" of uncle sam.
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Mar 11 '22
If you want to censor Russia’s side of the story, you’re taking the US’ side.
We should have access to all sides of the story and decide for ourselves what we believe is true
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u/karmagheden Mar 10 '22 edited Mar 11 '22
So they will likely down-rank leftist anti-war/imperialist independent media sources because they consider it 'misinformation' or 'Russian disinformation' because it deviates from the official narrative of authoritative sources, like WH or MSM - which if often influenced by the security state apparatus/military industrial complex and peddles propaganda and disinformation, themselves. Shame to see DuckDuckGo go the way of Google and YouTube. But it's also happening on Twitter, Facebook and here on Reddit re censorship and control of information/discourse.
Edit: Same thing that happened to Wikipedia (and RationalWiki) and 'Fact-checkers' like Snopes, Politifact etc. The astroturf, gaslighting and manufacturing consent and bad faith actors reporting content to get it removed, is another issue but ties in with the govt backed censorship happening on social media.
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u/liberalnomore Mar 11 '22
That was always the plan. When I tried to explain that to shitlibs cheering for censoring this or that media, because its pro-Trump, that eventually this will be used against the left they thought that's conspiracy nonsense.
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Mar 10 '22 edited Mar 11 '22
Censorship test. Decide which results seem best to you
https://www.google.com/search?q=ukraine+biolabs
https://gigablast.com/search?c=main&qlangcountry=en-us&q=Biolabs+ukraine
https://www.mojeek.com/search?q=Ukraine+biolabs
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=ukraine+biolabs&t=h_&ia=web
Edit:
https://yandex.com/search/touch/?text=ukraine+biolabs&mda=0&lr=145413
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u/Blackhalo Mar 11 '22
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u/liberalnomore Mar 11 '22
Interesting experiment. Google was worst, followed by DDG, gigablast was best? But I just took a quick look.
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u/Blackhalo Mar 11 '22
I dunno. DDG was actually, not bad, compared to GOOG.
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Mar 11 '22
Google is by far the worst. DDG still has decent results, much better than Google, but notably worse than the other two. I take their CEO’s tweet as announcing their intention to start censoring more, but doesn’t look like they have fully implemented it yet.
Searching with ivermectin related search terms would be another good test. Big tech is huge on censoring ivermectin in particular for some reason.
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u/Centaurea16 Mar 10 '22
Doesn't Gabriel Weinberg realize that the reason DDG has grown is because people want an alternative to censorship? If it just does what Google does, why would anyone go out of their way to use it?
Seems like he may have just killed his golden goose, er, duck.
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u/Candyvanmanstan Mar 11 '22
DuckDuckGo doesn't get most of its results from crawling the web on its own, it just aggregates results from Google, Bing++
DuckDuckGo's main selling point is privacy - not uncurated results.
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u/JMW007 Mar 10 '22
Jesus Christ, how fucking hard is it for people to resist the temptation to fire all of their principles into the sun the second they have an odious enough enemy to excuse it?
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u/thepeebrain Mar 10 '22
This could have been handled so much better. All it would’ve took was a highly visible toggle that lets users utilize their down-rank system to see what their company considers to be reliable information.
Why search engines don’t give users a high degree of control for what they are searching truly baffles me.
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u/penelopepnortney Mar 10 '22 edited Mar 10 '22
Copying u/Sdl5's excellent comment here so that it can be pinned.
Glad I searched for a prev Post first.
This is what my reaction mirrored- and some options gleaned.
DUMP DUCKDUCKGO SEARCH ASAP
They are manually downgrading certain websites based on domain names, not the accuracy of each piece of content. I agree this isn't censorship, its worse.
DDG: ”The whole point of the search engine is to show more relevant content over less relevant content, and that is what we continue to do.”
Lol so that’s the whole point of a search engine?
I could have sworn is was to have a wealth of information show up at the press of a few buttons for you to go through and decipher for yourself - but I guess we’re all just stupid fucking drones who don’t know any better.
Shove the multi billion corporate state media to the top of my search please. ITS THE WHOLE POINT YOU FUCKING CORRUPT SCUM!
more like fuckfuckno
OPTIONS:
Brave Search is it's own search engine and not just reposting Bing or Google.
Brave so far seems to be the most "mainstream" alternative that isn't pozzed. Yet. Inevitable it'll be sold or infiltrated. Though maybe the founder learned from his mistakes after getting kicked from Mozilla.
Instead of Google Search, use Searx or Yacy for searching.
The ones you should look at are the EDIT to Four up top.
The Best options:
https://gigablast.com/
https://searx.me/
https://yacy.net/
EDIT TO MOVE UP
https://www.mojeek.com/
The rest: (Google re-feeds)
https://yippy.com/
Duck duck go is just bing
Qwant is Google (or Bing if not)
Start page is just Google results
Basically these search engines results will be the exact same as Bing or Google because none of them spend all the money to crawl the web on their own.
The only difference is they have some different info boxes at the top like Wikipedia or not, maps etc
Edit to add this from u/tabesadff:
Another option is non-US based search engines. Yandex and Baidu come to mind for that (though, warning with Baidu, lots of those results will be in Chinese, so might not be very useful unless you either understand Chinese or use a translator, lol). I think the best advice with search engines is to use a variety of them, each one is going to have different results, so if you can't find what you're looking for on one, then try another.
Problem with Searx is that it doesn't do its own indexing, it's something called a "meta search engine", which means it just pulls results from other search engines. So if the search engines that Searx pulls results from censor something, then that will get censored on Searx as a result.