'In a statement, Google said, “There is no merit to the suggestion that search results were manually edited.” But the company added that its algorithm would automatically adjust itself in some cases, shifting to rank trustworthy links higher than more relevant ones.'
“There is no merit to the suggestion that search results were manually edited.”
Right - the results themselves aren't manually edited. There's need to do so, and of course it wouldn't scale.
But if theirs is like any sufficiently featured search architecture we've ever seen -- the training data themselves have been almost certainly curated to favor certain baseline expected outcomes. It's quite likely a good portion of the metadata (read: allow/block lists, in GoogleSpeak) have been manually edited and ranked at some point in the process, as well.
I guess Google is trying to give you the correct answer to your query (especially with the knowledge graph stuff, although it’s not always perfect) and that’s not really what you want as a conspiracy theorist/manipulator/liar etc.
I say that semi-jokingly. Getting less filtered results from DDG is very useful in many circumstances including legitimate ones.
Perhaps some conspiracy theorists are turning to DuckDuckGo for the “wrong reasons”, but DDG is appealing to privacy conscious users everywhere. I wish this article had put more effort into the concerns around using Google. The title alone felt like a smear against DDG and anyone who recommends it.
And not that it matters, but I love vaccinations and encourage everyone to get them after speaking with their doctor.
5+ years ago, back when [0] people noticed that Nazi sites were the top Google results for "did the holocaust happen" — presumably because of the way Google prioritized literal text match in titles/headlines for esoteric queries — DDG had been providing bespoke responses via DuckDuckHack, its crowdsourced instant answer program [1]. Back then, and today, if you query a variation of "did the holocaust happen", the top result, in big large text, is "Yes"
DuckDuckHack was discontinued in 2017 because it didn't scale. The associated code repos are still available; for example, you can see how DDG's Instant Answer test suite specifically validated answers to questions about the Holocaust and the moon landing. [2]
DuckDuckGo is (for the most part, and to a much greater extent than Google) just delivering straight-up search results. Google has been suppressing sites for political reasons for decades now - I ran into my first blatant Google site suppression about 20 years ago!
Duckduckgo is better than CNN. This article is more like an indictment of DuckDuckGo than it is of misinformation. One must wonder if there’s a larger agenda or paylord behind this against DuckduckGo.
TrUsTwOrThY > relevant