Technology

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.

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?

here's a list of public searx & SearXNG instances

If anyone has good experiences with any of them, definitely share!

Which alternatives should one consider?

You can find better alternatives to DuckDuckGo here. I hope you find it helpful!

DDG has become popular with far right groups lately. So there's some good to come from this move.

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.

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:

https://searx.space

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

Alright everyone, lets take bets. How long do you think before they remove that tweet?

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.

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.

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.

For those of you here standing up for freedom of the press, freedom of information, high five and I wish you were my close neighbors. Thank you for respecting me enough to trust me to sort things out for myself.