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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

5 comments fedilink hide all child comments

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:

all 15 comments

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[–] OsrsNeedsF2P@lemmy.ml 11 points 2 years ago (2 children)

Extremely surprised to see Bing show it, since DDG apparently gets their search results from there

[–] AgreeableLandscape@lemmy.ml 7 points 2 years ago

DDG has been increasingly home growing their search algorithm.

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[–] dessalines@lemmy.ml 7 points 2 years ago (1 children)

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.

[–] toneverends@lemmy.ml 9 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

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.

[–] Faresh@lemmy.ml 7 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (2 children)

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...

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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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[–] Jama@lemmy.ml 6 points 2 years ago

Works for me, tho. HTML ddg put dessalines essay on first result

[–] const_void@lemmy.ml 5 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Catering to their right wing user base, maybe?

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[–] sculpordwarfmuffin@lemmy.ml 1 points 2 years ago

"Why not signal essay" shows it as the first result.