Privacy

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DuckDuck..Gone: "Why not signal" (archive.ph)

submitted 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) by rcbrk@lemmy.ml to c/privacy@lemmy.ml

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So, this is interesting. I wanted to find that essay by @dessalines@lemmy.ml outlining the many issues of Signal and suggested alternatives, but DuckDuckGo had nothing for me. Not on the first page, not on the 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th page.

I thought maybe I just imagined the title, but sure enough, on searching lemmy posts, it was right there. Then I thought "hang on, there's hardly a mention let alone criticism of signal on any page of those search results!".

Hmm.. the wording might be a bit ambiguous, but let's compare:

DuckDuckGo "why not signal" - NOTHING
Google "why not signal"
- Plenty of results! Dessaline's essay is first up, followed by a plethora of discussions about the essay on HN, Reddit, lemmys, mastodons, and more. Not evil! ..this time.
DuckDuckGo "why not signal" dessalines
- Okay, so DDG has indexed it just fine. Maybe dessalines is "downranked" à la RT.com?
DuckDuckGo "why not market socialism"
- Nope, finds one of dessalines' socialism essays just fine, half way down the page.

All of the following except Gigablast returned a healthy list of results including the original essay:

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[–] AgreeableLandscape@lemmy.ml 6 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (1 children)

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.

https://archive.ph/lKfIu

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. 🤷

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