Last Bastion of Uncensored Search Killed By Its CEO - DuckDuckGo Updates Search Engine, Will Penalize Sites 'Associated With Disinformation'
Posted by freedomforall 2 years, 1 month ago to Philosophy
Excerpt:
"The search engine DuckDuckGo has begun penalizing sites linked to “Russian disinformation” amid the Russia–Ukraine war, according to the company’s CEO.
“Like so many others I am sickened by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the gigantic humanitarian crisis it continues to create,” Gabriel Weinberg, the CEO, wrote on social media.
“At DuckDuckGo, we’ve been rolling out search updates that down-rank sites associated with Russian disinformation,” he added."
"The search engine DuckDuckGo has begun penalizing sites linked to “Russian disinformation” amid the Russia–Ukraine war, according to the company’s CEO.
“Like so many others I am sickened by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the gigantic humanitarian crisis it continues to create,” Gabriel Weinberg, the CEO, wrote on social media.
“At DuckDuckGo, we’ve been rolling out search updates that down-rank sites associated with Russian disinformation,” he added."
There are scores of alternatives, though reliable data on whether or not they censor is hard to find. Here's a good list I've had bookmarked for a year or so:
https://www.guru99.com/private-search...
This list is indexed to the issue of anonymity - no Orwoogle-style retention of search data - but it identifies one, http://Gibiru.com , as being specifically "Uncensored Private Search." I will be giving that one a try, forthwith. Here's a review:
https://vpnpro.com/web/gibiru-search-...
DuckDuckGo has crossed over to the Dark Side, irretrievably. It's either zero censorship or it's censorship. The fact that they believe they're censoring for "a good cause" is not only immaterial, that's actually a more dangerous indicator: If it were a definite ideological thing it would be bad enough, but this appears to be a range-of-the-moment cave on a currently trendy emotional sentiment.
No, I am in no way a defender of Putin's Russia or what is essentially an attempted armed theft of an entire country. That is indeed a clear evil.
But a provider of raw information that arrogates to itself the prerogative of doing its users' thinking for them - as though we're all clueless and impressionable children in need of a nanny to keep the Bad Things away from our undiscerning little minds - is analogous to a trusted friend who betrays you at a critical moment. There is no gaining back that trust. Particularly when from the start Duck has billed itself as a zero-manipulation search engine.
I am done with DDG. Lately Qwant has been my main search engine anyway, but I have no idea whether its commitment to zero-data-retention extends to zero-censorship. I'm glad this issue came up because I'd completely forgotten about this list and about Gibiru. I'm going to switch to that one, pending more info on Qwant. SwissCows states openly that it's designed to be child-friendly and will not return results on pornography or violence. So a form of censorship, but they state this right up front so no deception and no double-crosses. I have no need for porn search results (honest!) but "no violence" begs definition - also SwissCows seems a bit slower than most - so I only use it as an alternative. YMMV.
So Gibiru (tentatively,) and Qwant for me, and SwissCows when I want to dig for different results and need an alternate.
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Have you found any way to install either qwant or gibiru as the default search in the browser?
(The 'install link' on gibiru.com is not working.)
I use Epic Privacy Browser as my usual browser - an extremely stripped-down and completely de-Googled version of Chrome, so it can be a little wonky at times - and the only option under Search is for "Search engine used in the address bar," and that only allows you to toggle between Epic and Yahoo. So I just access it via Home page or new tab.
I'm finding that Gibiru seems to take forever to load. But since I'm stuck with Charter/Spectrum as my local cable monopoly and it's easily the worst I've ever had to use, it's possible it's entirely network-related.
With Vivaldi, I'm accustomed to just searching from the address bar,
and from a rt-clk menu of selected text. That uses the user selected 'default' browser.
Unfortunately, neither qwant or gibiru work that way when installed as default browser.
Vivaldi has features I loved in Opera and I guess I'm a lazy web researcher.
Your cable should be at least 10x the speed of the 6mb ATT we have here,
but when I had cable 10 years ago, it failed every time I heard thunder. ISP's are not ideal. ;^)
I guess the rumors are true. Time to stop usage. The whole thing was probably a honey pot anyway.
On the other hand remember when Google claimed that the “Miserable Failure” search that ended up at whitehouse.gov during Cheney’s SockPuppet’s term was supposedly “Beyond our control.” We now know empirically that their answer was complete horse shit.
https://restoreprivacy.com/private-se...
An interesting point it makes is that some alternative search engines are proxies that are dependent on big-name censored operations like Orwoogle and Bing:
"Many of the alternative and private search engines are nothing more than private proxies that deliver the same search results from the big players. This means that when Google and Bing (Microsoft) engage in censorship and search result manipulation, so will your alternative search engine that delivers those same results."
And...
"An exception to this may be with independent search engines that deploy their own crawlers, such as with Mojeek, or Brave Search. Additionally, with Searx, you can select which engines it uses."
So some good insight and some more options to consider.
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I switched all my default search engines in my browsers to DuckDuckGo to get away from the bias of GOOFAL. Now what?
I want to be the judge of what's disinformation or fake news, not some politically biased idiot doing it for me. The various media and tech know-it-alls have been proven wrong way too many times for me to trust their judgment. Give me the facts I seek and I'll do the rest.
Not yet a top search engine but not so strong on downranking.
Or is that disinformation from Gulagle?