I thought I'd test this. I got the essay as the 4th result, the top 3 are about mobile phone signal, with the essay coming in as 4th.
I use Vivaldi on Android. DDG has my location set to the UK.
this post was submitted on 26 Mar 2022
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Same here. 4th result on DDG browser and 3rd result on Chromium DDG.com
DDG browser:
Chromium DDG.com:
Same, using Firefox with DGG as default search engine
Thanks for doing this work! I just tested it now, and same results: ddg doesn't show my page while google does.
My only guess is that ddg is completely removing pages that have links to sites they have on political blocklist.
See other comments though; It's looking more likely that it's just bugs in the parsing mixed with an undocumented not operator.
Still a chance it's bugs in the (hypothetical) downranking mixed with bugs in the parsing, but nothing conclusively demonstrates that yet.
Don't ask me why but try ""why not signal"" with two quotation marks at the beginning and the end
I tried a couple more:
- DDG why not signal (no quotes) = same result as original.
- DDG why "not" signal = gives the essay as the first result and a bunch of other signal-related results.
..looks like DDG has an undocumented NOT operator, which for some reason is not deactivated when in a long quote, but is deactivated when the phrase is bracketed in quoted nothings. "" ""
But still doesn't quite explain how "why not signal" dessalines does return a result.
"regex is hard", I guess.
- DDG: why not signal dessalines
- Good results.
- DDG: dessalines why not signal
- No good results. The hint (
Not many results contain signal Search only for dessalines why "signal"?) gives a clue thatnothas a special interpretation and that the parsing algorithm is very confused about what it's being told to do.
- No good results. The hint (
Tinfoil hat or Hanlon's razor? :-P
Wow! You are on to something. I triedit with a couple of search strings and it looks like the not operator is working, e.g. reeperbahn not hamburg returns results which are not related to hamburg. And two quotes will ignore the not operator
Yeah, DDG search results have left me disappointed in the recent months. Have you tried Searx?
Edit: Why do I have this stupid habit of diagonally reading posts...
Interesting. I got curious as to whether it was actually delisted or just that DuckDuckGo was bad at ranking results, so I tried searching a quote from the article:
Signal became one of the first platforms to develop and use an end-to-end-encryption (E2EE) system and open standard, which many other platforms adopted or modified for their own use.
And it did show Dess's page as the first result at the time of posting this.
Though, this doesn't conclusively exonerate DDG, it's still entirely possible that they really are intentionally ranking it down which is why it didn't show up with a more general search term, or maybe it truly is just a bad relevancy-finding algorithm, but I guess it does prove that at least they haven't removed it entirely. 🤷
It's the first result if you use double quotes instead of singles, i.e. "".
Extremely surprised to see Bing show it, since DDG apparently gets their search results from there
DDG has been increasingly home growing their search algorithm.
DDG was the only ones you could count on to make Bing worse than it is.
I don't see it when I search for Why not signal but I see it if I search Why not signal lemmy
"Why not signal essay" shows it as the first result.
The main issue is that DDG is so bad that you can't tell if it's just downranking because they didn't like the topic or if it's just DDG being the utter shite that DDG is.
Apparently it takes results from Bing and Yahoo so no wonder it sucks. Funny, I was looking at the Wiki page and it says "DuckDuckGo does not show search results from content farms". That's gonna be a big X to doubt from me.
@rcbrk Yes, there's something wrong. I've been using ddg for years but lately more and more often I have to use something else to find what I'm looking for.
Catering to their right wing user base, maybe?