You guys are overreacting. DDG said they would only down-rank sites associated with Russian disinformation. It’s normal for search engines to downrank low-quality sites such as SEO spam.
yeah, this was pretty much the consensus in the thread on this on /r/stallmanwasright. kinda surprised to see so much less of that here.
DDG unfortunately is more concerned about profiting, down ranking what’s told to do so, and what’s more convenient for itself, and has great marketing. It’s no better than Searx in that it’s also meta search engine, just with better marketing. Well perhaps not as simple as that, but not that far either. Quoting someone:
BTW, I always thought duckduckgo was a pure engine, and it does as well some meta searching through bing.
So, they succeeded with marketing. The situation is exactly the opposite. It’s 99.99% rebranded Bing (and Yahoo and Yandex) with a slight touch of DuckDuckBot.
From a delete Lemmy post:
https://lemmy.ml/post/43595/comment/22034
Besides, searx uses multiple sources, not just google, which you can enable disable on the settings, as a user of any instance, :)
/r/stallmanwasright
Google and most other BigTech are member-partners of the WEF/World Economic Forum. If that forum was meant to do good, it makes little sense that individual companies would need to join a group to do good…and, anyway, they haven’t! Walmart is one of the members and has a huge percentage of staff part-time because Walmart doesn’t want to pay for their benefits.
Most of those companies in WEF mistreat citizens weither directly or indirectly. Here’s the list: https://www.weforum.org/partners#S
Why was the well documented Western disinformation not ranked down, or why is Fox News the second result when “ukraine” is searched?
when I put in very concise words and get distantly-related MSM B.S., i don’t feel respected. My results were certainly filtered in order to shape opinion.
cool, the second hit for ukraine news is now Fox News 🤣
Once again, the problem here is: disinformation according to whom? Themselves? The US government? NATO?
Maybe propublica? I think there are areas of gray and there are areas that are clear, and we can respect the former and take action on the latter without putting on joker makeup and descending into sophomoric relativism about the fundamental impossibility of ever knowing “the truth.”
Freedom of choice solves issue such as this. that is why we always need choices.
here’s a list of public searx & SearXNG instances
If anyone has good experiences with any of them, definitely share!
I personally went with paulgo.io just because of the high quality ranking in searXNG lists the really clean UI.
UI/UX is currently the Aquilles’ heel for searXNG and I really want to see it improve.
Do any offer the option for larger text?
I use Firefox and I just do a Ctrl+mouseScrollUp or ctrl+= and it remembers the zoom for that website.
started using searx.be since the tweet, and it seems great.
Do you have a good experienced?
I haven’t used searx in a while, DDG’s !bangs were keeping me to it
The bangs in searx are pretty damn good now. Thsts what kept me on duckduckgo a while but im really satisfied with searx
SearX instances mysteriously do not have Yandex as an option, even though before this it used to be on most.
I looked through the git, it was removed here: https://github.com/searx/searx/pull/2566
It appears that Yandex would respond to requests with a captcha and they were unable to fix it, so they removed it.
That sounds correct. Yandex is a lot stricter now.
Yandex is a member of the WEF and therefore not to be trusted. If birds of a feather flock together, avoid yandex - at least for more serious things.
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You’re glad you move away from DDG because they’re fighting spam and misinformation? That doesn’t make sense to me. SearX is great, but ditching DDG because they’re doing a net positive is illogical.
What is truth and who gets to decide? There are gray areas there. EX: A huge percentage of the world’s population thinks Mohammed is the only prophet while another large percentage thinks only Jesus is the true prophet. Another pecentage thinks there are no prophets or gods. So, who gets to decide? Take almost any issue and there will be a few opinions and/or cherry-picking of facts.
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DDG has become popular with far right groups lately. So there’s some good to come from this move.
The overlap between alt left and alt right groups is the importance of privacy.
alt left doesn’t exist.
Why not?
Why does it?
https://www.logicalfallacies.org/burden-of-proof.html
I don’t know if they exist or not, which is why I asked.
You are doing it the wrong way around though.
No. You claim the alt left doesn’t exist. I want to know why. I don’t say they exist. If you proclaim something in an argument, the burden of proof lies on you.
Or maybe the burden of proof lies on your parent commentee, but certainly not on me, because I just asked for clarification and didn’t state anything.
I don’t know whether the Alt Left exists or not and I would like either proof that they exist or the contrary. If neither of you can provide that, it’s Schrödinger’s Alt Left, both existing and not existing at the same time. Which would mean you’re both equally right and wrong.
What is the alt left and who is it? What’s ‘alt’ about them?
Which alternatives should one consider?
Searx. It is a meta search engine but imho is the best one out there
Still needs better UX/UI if it ever wants to get close to being used by average folk. That’s how DDG and Startpage grew so much.
Isn’t it one of the goal of searXNG (https://docs.searxng.org/) ? It is a fork of searx, that started mid-2021
Oh, I had no idea it existed, I stopped using searX around that time.
I admit some instances have a design that looks MUCH better than before, but it’s still not good enough for the general public, since most larger instances still use searX instead of searXNG and not all instances have a nice looking interface still.
That said, I’ll give one of the instances a shot as my main search engine.
You know you can change theme in the SearX config, right?.
The default is not attractive but there are some that are very attractive.
The instances you saw with other theme just did that, change the default value without real customization, with the exception of Disroot one.
yes you can, but most instances don’t use the new, nice looking theme
those that used it by default were the only ones at least, and I don’t have the funds to host my own instance, which I’d certainly like to do tho
You can chance that in the configuration and will be saved for your browser.
No need to host your own.
The configuration is at user level when you load the website.
doesn’t that also not solve the problem if the search engines it is searching are manipulating results?
MetaGer is what I use.
You can find better alternatives to DuckDuckGo here. I hope you find it helpful!
There’s a similar table-style website like this but for messengers; do you have it? Cause I saw it once and haven’t been able to find it again.
I know which one you mean, and unfortunately, I can’t find it in my bookmarks :(
I think now a days, Jami and Briar (peer-to-peer/distributed, meaning serverless) are really missing in that list. There’s also Tox, but current Tox has its security issues, and it’s not as audited. I’m not fond of Tor anymore, with entry and exit nodes caught doing nasty stuff, examples of people not so anonymous under Tor and so on. But that’s just my point of view. So Jami it is for me. Unfortunately it’s hard to get contacts even on Signal which UI doesn’t differ that much from whatsapp, so just imagine how hard on Jami/Briar/Tox, :(
I agree with you, Jami and Briar are great alternatives. Tox, however, I have not tried it yet. But I still haven’t been able to get my contacts to ditch WhatsApp, so…
Well, I installed Jami on my family phones and PCs, that’s a start. Perhaps that expands forward. But never say never, :)
Nice to hear that! And what did they think of Jami?
My mom thought it was easier to do video calls, for some reason I don’t understand. It was harder for me to get synchronization working. And I found the hard way, the best is not to use username (which gets stored centrally, and makes synchronization between devices harder). Although the UI is not best in class, is good enough. One can chat with several people by joining people, but there’s a Swarm group feature I’m still waiting for. Emotions and sensations are not measurable, so I can’t really tell why my mom said what she said, :)
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DDG results have been feeling a little too curated for years now, and they’ve openly censored results since around the time of removing the scihub bang, which I thought was the first near-universally egregious example.
i did not know about that, that’s a way more legit reason to go around saying “duck duck gone”
Question, what’s the main difference between searx and searxng? I’ve used them indistinctly, and the 1st result when searching for the difference on searx.be (a searxng instance) is a searxng github issue with the question:
https://github.com/searxng/searxng/issues/46
Is there another one? Also the list of searx instances includes both, searx and searxng instances:
How to know what meta search is each instance, without actually accessing each one (that if the instance tells you, like searx.be indicates it’s searxng)?
Also, it seems, searx has less features, but that’s on purpose, tying to prevent information gathering from the instances, whether by their owners or administrators. I like that. That makes me think I should really consider using searx only as much as possible, :)
searx.info used to be my preferred instance when alive, now searx.be is, :) But as searx.be is a searxng instance I might swtich to a searx one by default. I use Librewolf, and I’m wondering if there’s a way to alternate/bounce between just a specific sub set of instances (the ones which countries of origin suggests more respect for privacy for example, the ones more up to date, and the ones with better security, the searx ones excluding searxng, for example).
I stopped using DDG years back, when reading it wasn’t building their own indexes, and it was just another metasearch engine, just like searx itself, but worse, because it’s not decentralized, it’s for profit, and its head quarters are based on a non privacy respecting oriented country govt. You can read a dated post here in Lemmy:
https://lemmy.ml/post/43595/comment/22034
Unfortunately, it seems the original URL was “deleted”, however here it is the URL:
https://torrentfreak.com/popular-pirate-sites-disappear-from-duckduckgos-top-search-results-201112
I think the github link sums up the differences between searx and his fork.
Version names of searx are of the form “1.0.0”, whereas version names of searXNG are of the form “2022.03.07” (second column on https://searx.space).
Great !!! That tells I should pay more attention, hahaha. Thanks a lot !
Interesting. DDG has been my primary preference since I boycott Google (search, Gmail, Play & Play Services) in 2020. I know SearX, I use it sometimes for research, but I want to get sure how metasearch works. I struggle to find information whether it ‘crawls’ and caches all the information from search engines, such as Google, Bing, DDG, Qwant, etc., on its server, or does it just pass your search query to these search engines and sums it up, like StartPage. But if DDG is just another nonfree metasearch, as you say, then it does not matter.
Alright everyone, lets take bets. How long do you think before they remove that tweet?
The tweet responses are telling us if we think that way about DDG we must be in with the racist maga antivax crowd.
The day i am no longer open to hearing the other side of the story is the day I am no longer myself, but instead am an extension of someone else (media, the group, muh team, a nationalist agenda, yesterday/the past, etc). Not wanting to understand the other side (or all sides if there is time for that) is a sign of a weak character and probably of weak intelligence, as well. Understanding is not the same as agreeing or condoning.
Well, DDG is basically a privacy friendly frontend to the G* search engine, so this was to be expected. Fortunately I switched to searx. The future of the internet is federation, there is no going back.
I mean it mostly uses Bing in the background rather than Google. Searx is kich the same in the sense it taps into other search engines. Except with Searx you get more control.
DDG is a privacy friendly frontend to the Bing search engine.
Bing, right, not “Big” (had to re-read)
@[email protected] its own web crawler (duckduckgobot) uses Google search API (anonymously) It combines data from hundreds of sources including Wolfram Alpha, Wikipedia and Bing, but mostly Google.
@[email protected] Yep, if you want a completely independent and distributed search engine there is yacy.
I read through some of the comments on this post, and although I get the arguments that there is not only disinformation from the Russian side, I must say that the specific intention of Russia’s disinformation is to directly destabilize our western democracies and spread the denial of the war and slaughter in Ukraine. And yes, we’ve gotta act against the false information from western news agencies also (I live in Germany, and therefore I know a pretty good example of this with “BILD”), but the criticism of DuckDuckGo’s actions and calling it censorship is, from my opinion, absolutely wrong, because we’ve gotta protect people from disinformation and stop the Russian war of information.
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And who gets to decide what is misinformation?
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If the information is verifiably false, it doesn’t matter who proves it.
verified by whom? Our own parents lie to us sometimes, and even spouses do, so what makes you think media or gov’t won’t?
My point is that this information is typically not verifiable in an independent sense. This get essentially to what is truth, the truth we should all agree is the truth no matter who’s providing it to us. We can verify it for ourselves. As an example, if we have 14 videos of the same incident and they show roughly the same events then we can be fairly confident that that event occured because we trust that those 14 sources are real and non-colluding.
the truth we should all agree is the truth
that isn’t how human beings work. where have YOU been? China - where you can be thrown in prison for not having the same “truth” as another person? You do know that not all scientists even agree on “truth”, right? I think it was Feinman who showed that Einstein was wrong once upon a time.
Those 14 videos would have to be from 14 different sources, but I guess that is what you meant. Even that only leads to an event being more probably, but doesn’t guarantee its true.
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Rather then step in as arbiters of truth, they should provide tools, links and APIs to let their users decide what is true and what is misinformation. If their users express some concensus, like 90%+ of real human users, then I think they’re right to demote or provide warning labels on particular links.
So, like Ukrainian and Western disinformation?
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