[HN Gopher] DuckDuckGo for Mac beta now open to the public
___________________________________________________________________
DuckDuckGo for Mac beta now open to the public
Author : messyjoes
Score : 121 points
Date : 2022-10-18 12:26 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (spreadprivacy.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (spreadprivacy.com)
| jdp23 wrote:
| Is there a way to block Javascript? I couldn't find it on a quick
| tour through the preferences.
| Tepix wrote:
| Everytime you use an app instead of a web app you have to trust
| the author of the app not to permanently track you.
|
| Use web apps wherevery you can and delete the cookies and web
| storage whenever it makes sense.
| WallyFunk wrote:
| All apps should have a PWA[0] option. Crpytee[1] is the only
| service I know of that offers strictly a PWA. PWAs have less
| privileges and this is _good_.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progressive_web_app
|
| [1] https://crypt.ee/download
| core-utility wrote:
| But this is a browser....
| Bellyache5 wrote:
| How does that work for a web browser?
| AdriaanvRossum wrote:
| Too bad they don't show in the User Agent:
|
| Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7)
| AppleWebKit/605.1.15 (KHTML, like Gecko)
|
| Would love to show the amount of visitors in Simple Analytics
| dashboards. [1]
|
| Does anybody know a way to detect the DuckDuckGo browser?
|
| [1] https://www.simpleanalyics.com
| AdriaanvRossum wrote:
| They seem to set something on
| `window.navigator._duckduckgoloader_`
|
| If you run `JSON.stringify(window.navigator)`, it only shows
| the _duckduckgoloader_ variable. Anybody knows why
| JSON.stringify behaves like that?
| wifu wrote:
| JSON.stringify is outputting the "own, enumerable"
| properties. The default properties of window.navigator aren't
| enumerable and/or come through the prototype chain.
|
| The rules for JSON.stringify are actually pretty complicated:
| https://developer.mozilla.org/en-
| US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Refe...
| doitLP wrote:
| Brave does something similar. It just looks like a generic
| version of chrome
| WallyFunk wrote:
| It didn't always have a generic Chrome UA, if you go here[0]
| it had 'Brave' somewhere in the string, which you could fix
| by turning on fingerprinting prevention. Glad they fixed
| that. I don't want people to know I use Brave, although I'm
| sure there's ways to detect Brave with JS.
|
| [0] https://duckduckgo.com/?q=what+is+my+useragent&ia=answer
| WallyFunk wrote:
| > Does anybody know a way to detect the DuckDuckGo browser?
|
| Only in the DDG iOS app the useragent adds a DuckDuckGo string
| appended to a generic Safari string. You can test here:
|
| https://duckduckgo.com/?q=what+is+my+useragent&ia=answer
| tinza123 wrote:
| What is this, a browser? Why do I need a new browser?
| WallyFunk wrote:
| As a geek, I pride myself in using _all the browsers_. I have
| the free time to try them out and each one has its own unique
| selling point and feature set, which I leverage. Firefox and
| Brave for privacy. Microsoft Edge for normie stuff. Chrome for
| using Google services. Tor Browser Bundle for dodging the NSA.
| Opera & Vivaldi, because they're super customizable and
| quirky. Then various apps on my phone like Vanadium, Brave,
| DuckDuckGo, vanilla Safari, Firefox Focus, etc
| reaperducer wrote:
| Why try anything new? Why not just keep using Netscape
| Navigator or IE6, or whatever works on a Commodore 64.
| yegg wrote:
| Here's a tl;dr for you on "why do I need a new browser" from
| the post:
|
| * Better web tracking protections:
| https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-
| pages/privacy/we.... This includes a bunch of protections not
| offered by most other browsers and extensions by default (e.g.,
| embedded facebook content protection), or more robust versions
| of them (e.g., our HTTPS everywhere list is orders of magnitude
| bigger). More generally our web tracking protections are based
| on our open source crawler vs. community feedback, and we
| believe this approach is ultimately better and leads us to
| study and block new tracking techniques faster.
|
| * New feature: Duck Player, a YouTube player that helps protect
| your privacy (no targeted ads, no influencing your
| recommendations, etc.)
|
| * New feature: automatic cookie consent pop-up manager, which
| not only hides these but also makes sure to select the most
| private options before doing so (if you don't do that you can
| be subject to more tracking).
|
| * New feature: Fire Button, one click data clearing for tabs,
| windows, sites, or everything.
|
| * Our Email Protection integrated natively:
| https://spreadprivacy.com/protect-your-inbox-with-
| duckduckgo....
|
| * A focus on Privacy, simplified, which means working
| continuously on not breaking websites while still protecting
| you as much as we can, and keeping the interface clean and
| sleek.
| qohelet007 wrote:
| Do they still allow Microsoft trackers?
| qainsights wrote:
| When do we get the Extensions feature?
| ARandomerDude wrote:
| For those who know a lot more than I do, how does this compare to
| Brave?
| [deleted]
| resfirestar wrote:
| DDG isn't doing uBO level ad blocking like Brave does. It's
| just blocking common tracking domains and elements, so you
| don't get (much) cosmetic filtering and some ads will still
| show up. My local newspaper's site has grey boxes where the ads
| would be without content or DNS blocking. On YouTube, it can't
| block the ads unless you open in the "Duck Player" (a page
| where it embeds the video). It also doesn't support extensions.
|
| That said, it has a cleaner interface than Brave, and it has
| that fire button from DDG Mobile that deletes everything except
| for cookies on sites you "fireproof". It's a really nice
| compromise between "save everything until you delete
| everything" and "incognito mode" that I wish other browsers
| would adopt. Plus it uses WebKit so theoretically it should be
| fast and battery efficient like Safari.
|
| In my opinion there isn't much reason to use DDG Browser unless
| you really like the fire button. If you want a WebKit browser,
| Safari with the AdGuard extension blocks ads and trackers, has
| extensions including more password manager options, and has its
| own email relay feature. Otherwise Firefox and Brave are
| excellent and cross-platform.
| trts wrote:
| It seems to be designed as a standalone "incognito" only
| browser. You can except certain sites from being routinely
| cleared from memory (fireproofing as they call it).
|
| Doesn't really have other features or support for extensions
| from what I've seen.
| NayamAmarshe wrote:
| It's not that great. Brave is ahead when it comes to privacy
| and features and does a lot of things differently.
|
| Also the fact that their contract requires them to whitelist
| Microsoft trackers is something to be wary of.
|
| https://brave.com/privacy-features/
|
| https://github.com/brave/brave-browser/wiki/Deviations-from-...
| WallyFunk wrote:
| It's a browser with a bunch of privacy features, just like
| Brave but with a more opinionated design and subtle
| differences. It caters to people who don't want to configure a
| thousand things before they use their browser, which is the
| only unique selling point of this that I'm aware of.
| groovybits wrote:
| > Webkit-based browser [...]just like Brave
|
| Brave for Mac is not Webkit-based. It is Blink and V8.
| WallyFunk wrote:
| Thanks for pointing that out. I was mis-reading some of the
| comments here saying the DDG browser in question is Webkit
| (because it's a MacOS browser only, for now). So is it
| based off Chromium as the base then?
|
| (I know Brave is Chromium based)
| TheNorthman wrote:
| No, you read right. The DDG browser for Mac is WebKit.
| Specifically it's using the WKWebView Class from the
| WebKit Framework[0]
|
| [0]: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/webkit/wkw
| ebview
| Maursault wrote:
| Blink is a fork of the WebCore component of WebKit, and
| aside from sandboxing, has remained relatively similar to
| WebCore. As such, Brave necessarily is based on WebKit via
| transitve relation. V8 is a JavaScipt engine, not a browser
| rendering engine.
|
| Practically, there are only two rendering engines left, 1)
| WebKit (itself derived from KHTML) and its derivatives such
| as Blink, and 2) Gecko and its derivatives such as Goanna,
| (though I guess somewhere someone must be using Flow, which
| apparently is not based on either, but it is proprietary,
| thus it will have no derivatives or be used by any other
| browser other than Flow).
| elashri wrote:
| > All the app code - tab and bookmark management, our new tab
| page, our password manager, etc. - is written by our own
| engineers. For rendering, it uses a public macOS API, making it
| super compatible with Mac devices.
|
| Is this a new way of saying that they use Webkit?
| mrweasel wrote:
| I wonder why they went with WebKit? It is nice to see another
| WebKit browser and not just a Blink/Chromium spinoff. Still it
| is a surprising choice, even if there's really only WebKit and
| Blink available for wannabe browser makers.
| pasc1878 wrote:
| Because it is a standard Apple API so less work to do.
| mrweasel wrote:
| True, but I as expecting them to want to port the browser
| to other platforms. Well, you can use webkit on those as
| well, so maybe it's less work, I don't know.
| gumby wrote:
| It's a better way to say it. For you and me it might be better
| to say "WebKit renderer". But for a non programmer, calling out
| the parts they wrote themselves is more reassuring, and
| highlights all the ways other browsers have to spy on you.
| yegg wrote:
| This was indeed hard to describe. When people say they "use
| Webkit", people seem to take away some kind of direct
| incorporation of Webkit code. That's not the case here in that
| we haven't forked anything.
| elashri wrote:
| So can you describe in a little detail on what exactly are
| you doing? I'm not sure if you have plans to open source the
| browser or not?
| yegg wrote:
| Yes, we plan to open source as we come out of beta. It's
| similar to our iOS app/browser, which is already open
| source here: https://github.com/duckduckgo/ios
| sholladay wrote:
| For all practical purposes, yes.
|
| Technically, the article links to the WKWebView class. So it
| sounds like they aren't directly using WebKit, but rather
| WebView, a cross-platform API that delegates rendering to the
| OS preferred rendering engine, which on Apple devices happens
| to be WebKit.
| jorams wrote:
| > they aren't directly using WebKit, but rather WebView, a
| cross-platform API that delegates rendering to the OS
| preferred rendering engine, which on Apple devices happens to
| be WebKit.
|
| WKWebView is a part of the WebKit API, so it always uses
| WebKit. As far as I know it's also a Cocoa API, so it's only
| cross-platform in the sense that it's available on both iOS
| and macOS.
| stuff4ben wrote:
| Other comments seem to say it's based on Webkit, but why not
| something like Mozilla Firefox? I stay as far away as I can from
| Chrome and Google, but Webkit doesn't seem like the answer. That
| being said, I may still try it.
| chrisjc wrote:
| The "The Browser" episode from the Acquired podcast might shed
| some light on the reasons why. If one of the key figures in the
| development of Mozilla and JavaScript didn't choose it for his
| own new browser, why would anyone else? :(
|
| The Browser (with Brendan Eich, Chief Architect of Netscape +
| Mozilla and CEO of Brave) https://www.acquired.fm/episodes/the-
| browser-with-brendan-ei...
| smoldesu wrote:
| It's worth noting that Brendan Eich is _far_ from the most
| impartial party you could hear criticize Firefox. He used to
| be the CEO, and resigned after Mozilla employees discovered
| his political contributions.
| resfirestar wrote:
| As mentioned in that interview, Brave's biggest reason for
| switching away from Gecko was that they couldn't support
| Netflix DRM. Gecko-based browsers can support it today
| because Widevine works (see Librewolf).
| wodenokoto wrote:
| A very long time ago, Mozilla decided it was too difficult to
| keep Firefox's engine API stable and said it's more important
| that we have developer velocity than we have other people
| releasing software based on our rendering engine.
|
| A decade or so later they kinda backtracked on that stance with
| boot to gecko and FirefoxOS but it is my understanding that
| they never took that momentum to make gecko into something that
| can be used for electron like platforms or indeed a new
| browser.
|
| Bottom line is that WebKit/blink gives you better website
| compatibility (because major parts of the web is only tested
| against chrome) and is easier to use as a library than trying
| to wrap something around Gecko.
|
| I think this has been one of Mozilla's worst decisions.
| tkfu wrote:
| This looks great! But I'm having a bit of trouble figuring out
| the bitwarden integration: I already have a bitwarden account (in
| fact, I run my own self-hosted server), and I can't figure out
| how to use it in this browser.
|
| Is it just that the password autofill feature uses bitwarden
| under the hood, but you can't actually use a bitwarden account?
| If so, that should be mentioned/documented somewhere.
| keawade wrote:
| It isn't yet released.
|
| > But we understand some folks want to continue using third-
| party password management across browsers and devices. So,
| we've teamed up with Bitwarden, the accessible open-source
| password manager, in the first of what we hope to be several
| similar integrations. In the coming weeks, Bitwarden users will
| be able to activate this seamless two-way integration in their
| browser settings.
| marc_io wrote:
| Glad to see the DDG Browser on the Mac!
|
| Some brief considerations regarding the UI, after some testing:
|
| - It would be nice to be able to set the initial zoom level to
| pages or, at least, to remember the previous zoom level. I have
| to do it every time I open the same website.
|
| - While any website is working on something (loading, for
| example), there's no indication of that. I ended up closing a tab
| by mistake while a process on the website was still active. This
| is something that Chrome does well, adding a loading icon to the
| tab.
|
| - The text on the main search bar jumps abruptly from the center
| to the left when clicked. In Safari, there's a smooth animation
| there, which feels more natural.
|
| - The contrast between the search field and its surroundings is
| very low. Again, in Safari, there's a fine line that helps with
| it.
| unsupp0rted wrote:
| Will this eat more battery than Chrome does?
| core-utility wrote:
| Rough guess: no. It's based on WebKit so it should perform more
| similarly to Safari than Chrome.
| boywitharupee wrote:
| I like the flame animation when clearing the browser history. Is
| that Lottie based animation?
| WallyFunk wrote:
| I have the DDG iOS app and there is an option to remove the
| flame animation. Never liked it. Too fancy and seems over the
| top when I just want a brand new temporary session.
| cdubzzz wrote:
| Settings > Fire button animation > None
| DavideNL wrote:
| So will uBlock Origin be "crippled" in this browser, like in
| Chrome/Chromium and Safari?
| nvrspyx wrote:
| Does uBlock Origin even exist for Safari? If not, then I
| imagine it won't exist for this browser either, since it's just
| a wrapper around a macOS-provided, Safari-/WebKit-based
| webview.
| jnrk wrote:
| It used to, but the developer pulled it after extensions were
| moved to the App Store (requiring an Apple dev account and
| certification) and some other technical restrictions
| introduced in Safari 14 IIRC.
| lioeters wrote:
| Looks like the answer is no, Safari is not supported.
|
| > ..as of 2022, uBlock Origin's extension is available for
| several of the most widely used browsers, including: Chrome,
| Chromium, Edge, Opera, Firefox and all Safari releases prior
| to 13.
|
| https://ublockorigin.com/
|
| Explanation of the state of uBlock Origin (and other
| blockers) for Safari - https://github.com/el1t/uBlock-
| Safari/issues/158
|
| Apparently, the only WebKit-based browser that can run uBO is
| Orion browser (beta, Mac only).
|
| https://browser.kagi.com/
| seanw444 wrote:
| I used to be a fan of DuckDuckGo. I mained it as my search engine
| for a long while because it was better for privacy, and it gave
| me my choice. Then, they decided that they were the arbiters of
| truth, and they'd start censoring "Russian disinformation
| campaigns." Because apparently that's important to them. The fact
| that they also get most of their results from Bing also subtracts
| points. I also eventually realized that I was still giving a
| company all of my search queries, and companies are eventually
| too greedy to trust. It's only a matter of time before DDG
| becomes the next Google, after hype for Google dies, and everyone
| knows DDG as that upcoming cool kid.
|
| Now, I just spend $6/month on a DigitalOcean droplet and run a
| SearxNG instance on it. Until I can get it moved over to my
| physical server at home, that's a much better option for my
| privacy and freedom of access to information. Who needs Google,
| or Bing, or DDG, or Yahoo, etc.; when you can have all of them in
| a single search?
|
| If you run your own instance, it's better to share that instance
| with friends or family so they can dilute your search queries
| with theirs, and it makes it much harder for your instance to be
| tracked the same as they'd track you. Or, you can use a public
| instance which is better for privacy, but worse for security and
| customizability.
| yegg wrote:
| (I'm the CEO & Founder of DuckDuckGo.)
|
| It is simply not true that we have censored anything or made
| ourselves "the arbiters of truth." I realized I previously
| explained how our news rankings work very poorly on Twitter but
| I subsequently put out a clarification tweet[1] and then we
| made this help page with a much clearer (and detailed)
| explanation of how our news rankings work:
| https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/ne...
|
| [1] "We are not ranking based on any political agenda or my (or
| anyone else's) personal political opinions. We are also not
| assessing any individual news stories."
| https://twitter.com/yegg/status/1515637392190935041
| TobyTheDog123 wrote:
| I don't know how you claim that you have not made yourselves
| the arbiters of truth after posting tweets like
| https://twitter.com/yegg/status/1501716484761997318
|
| "At DuckDuckGo, we've been rolling out search updates that
| down-rank sites associated with Russian disinformation"
|
| and
|
| "we also often place news modules and information boxes at
| the top of DuckDuckGo search results (where they are seen and
| clicked the most) to highlight quality information for
| rapidly unfolding topics"
|
| Your post here and your tweets tell completely contradictory
| stories, which only harms your credibility more.
|
| A search engine does have to make a judgement call on what
| results to rank over other results. However, making that call
| based on anything but relevancy to the user's query means I'm
| not going to take your search engine seriously. If anyone but
| the user is deciding what "russian disinformation" is, you've
| already lost the game.
|
| Personally, that's fine for me: I don't have to take my
| search engine seriously to use it, and I dont turn to search
| engines for my news anymore. In fact, I think the only things
| I use engines for these days are a replacement for the
| StackOverflow search bar...
| jasonlotito wrote:
| There was an update clarifying that tweet.
|
| https://twitter.com/yegg/status/1515637392190935041
| TobyTheDog123 wrote:
| I saw it - it didn't help their case much:
|
| >Search ranking and censorship are entirely different
| things. We make our results useful by ranking spam lower.
|
| They're only different things if the ranking decision is
| based on relevance. If you de-rank something based on
| political agenda, that's censorship. But hey, it looks
| like they talk about that:
|
| >We are not ranking based on any political agenda or my
| (or anyone else's) personal political opinions. We are
| also not assessing any individual news stories.
|
| Why did the initial tweets say the opposite? Are they
| conflating "russian disinformation" with spam?
|
| Frankly it reads like the PR hit was larger than they
| expected.
| loceng wrote:
| The tweet:
|
| "Search ranking and censorship are entirely different
| things. We make our results useful by ranking spam lower.
|
| We are not ranking based on any political agenda or my
| (or anyone else's) personal political opinions. We are
| also not assessing any individual news stories."
|
| Entirely different things? Are we supposed to just
| swallow that statement and pretend one doesn't cause
| suppression - even if it isn't 100% suppression like
| outright censorship is?
|
| And, if it's not political, then why did the down-ranking
| occur after political incident.. and the rest of the
| tweet is trying to minimize.
| loceng wrote:
| Do you know if DDG also did the same - or perhaps their
| rankings were already captured by the likes of Reuters et
| al ("fact checkers") - for the COVID pandemic narrative?
|
| It's quite apparent their desired narrative is falling
| apart now, where a Pfizer executive publicly admitted they
| didn't even test for transmissabiity - meanwhile that was
| arguably the primary promotion point for the mRNA shots
| propagated by the captured MSM (arguably primarily by big
| pharma), by politicians (captured heavily by big pharma,
| enough to be toeing their line); and where Pfizer's CEO at
| last minute cancelled his in-person testimonial to EU
| parliament inquiry - arguably because they know they've
| been caught and will be held accountable by those who
| aren't toeing their line/profiting from it.
|
| This is the "new" war using "soft" power, a war against all
| of society that arguably billions of people are now awake
| to; which speaking of it gets you flagged and lazily
| downvoted as "conspiracy theorist" to suppress a seemingly
| endless and growing amount of concrete proof points to
| support the hypothesis of what's actually going on.
| HelloMcFly wrote:
| It almost beggars belief to have to say that of course
| the vaccine testing is on efficacy of infection
| prevention, not transmissibility. But wouldn't you know
| it? The less likely you are to get infected and the
| faster your body clears the virus, the less the virus is
| or can be transmitted. Yes, peak viral load for
| infections that do "breakthrough" may be the same as
| unvaccinated. That's not a smoking gun.
|
| There is a lot of sinister stuff happening in our world,
| a lot of coordinated efforts against labor and the
| working class. Tying that narrative to a conspiracies
| about COVID vaccines rightly nudges you into conspiracy
| theorist territory.
|
| And that is the last comment I will ever make about
| vaccines on this site.
| loceng wrote:
| You admit to there being coordinated efforts against
| labor and the working class - so how do you deal with the
| cognitive dissonance with 1) the history that the
| pharmaceutical industry continuously being a very bad
| actor with the reward of billions in profit, 2) that
| pharma industry in the U.S. (for example) accounts for
| something like 80% of the advertising revenue on all
| mainstream-legacy media channels (capturing the narrative
| of what news is able to air), and 3) practically all U.S.
| politicians on both the Republic and Democrat side are
| given $$ - lobbied by the pharmaceutical industry?
|
| The rest of what you shared seems to be relatively
| shallow narratives you've been trained/programmed to
| believe for you to then parrot.
|
| My question above isn't about "vaccines" - so hopefully
| you're willing to answer and won't avoid the cognitive
| dissonance you're certain to encounter if you attempt to
| answer it; or perhaps we'll see what mental gymnastics
| you need to use to dismiss the multiple very clear
| conflicts of interest and guaranteed-obvious influence
| that pharma has on our society via politicians that make
| policy decisions - and via narratives propagated to the
| masses via mainstream-legacy media channels.
| someNameIG wrote:
| > It's quite apparent their desired narrative is falling
| apart now, where a Pfizer executive publicly admitted
| they didn't even test for transmissabiity
|
| This was known when the clinical trial docs where first
| published. No one said it did at the very beginning, it
| was never hidden by anyone. The data of reducing
| transmission was collected when the vaccines began to
| roll out. And for pre-omicron strains it did reduce
| transmission.
|
| This whole thing about the recent Pfizer thing is just
| some anti-vaxx narrative.
| TobyTheDog123 wrote:
| I'm not very inclined to discuss mRNA on a tech forum,
| but "fact-checkers" do also fall under this kind of
| umbrella, yeah.
|
| Any large organization presenting what they claim to be
| the truth is subject to all sorts of unscientific biases,
| which is why it's so important that people aren't shouted
| down, that sites aren't de-ranked.
|
| If you let anyone but individual people decide their
| conclusions, it's a nice, paved, flower-laden walkway to
| the dystopian corporate hellscape that's bemoaned by the
| same people who advocate for "fact checkers" and de-
| ranked search results.
|
| P.S. For those who believe that putting "fact-checkers"
| in quotes is denying truth, promoting misinformation,
| etc, etc -- I put it in quotes because even giving them
| that title gives them more power than they should have.
| loceng wrote:
| "P.S. For those who believe that putting "fact-checkers"
| in quotes is denying truth, promoting misinformation,
| etc, etc -- I put it in quotes because even giving them
| that title gives them more power than they should have."
|
| It's part of the same problem of media et al referencing
| "experts" or "the science" - where the majority of
| society seems to blindly trust those words or concepts,
| trusting that the utterers of it are equally trustworthy.
| bobsmith432 wrote:
| My dad is a expert video-game fact checker and Half-Life
| 3 should be coming out tomorrow.
| hairofadog wrote:
| It must be so satisfying to wake up on the morning of a
| product announcement after a long development cycle, pour a
| nice hot cup of coffee, and then type `news.ycombinator.com`
| into the browser's address bar
| NayamAmarshe wrote:
| > Search ranking and censorship are entirely different things
|
| They are not, actually. Especially when you already have made
| your plans public previously based on your reaction to a
| political situation.
| user3939382 wrote:
| > censoring stories due to operating with very limited press
| freedom, and misleading readers about who owns, funds, and
| authors stories for the site
|
| So does this mean you're going to deprioritize The Hill for
| firing Katie Halper because she wanted to do a story calling
| the Israel/Palestine regime apartheid?
|
| Or the Washington Post owned by Bezos who is paid untold
| fortunes by the US intelligence apparatus, and whose reporter
| listed her news agency as "Amazon" on a sign in sheet to
| interview Assange?
|
| Do you consider RT (a huge Russian news network) misleading
| about who "owns, funds, and authors its stories"?
|
| I'm sorry, but I don't think you "accidentally made a bad
| tweet" -- you tried to publicly jump on the Ukraine bandwagon
| for cheap political points, it backfired, and you've been
| backpedaling ever since.
| yegg wrote:
| No, as it says on that referenced help page: "Many sites
| may occasionally do one or more of these things, but we
| take action very rarely, only in the most extreme
| cases...We trust that users can find the right information
| for themselves, so even in these rare cases we do not
| remove these sites from our search results page.
| Additionally, impacted sites are not moved so far down in
| the results that they are effectively removed. Unless
| legally prohibited, you should find all media outlets in
| our results, and they should generally show on top if you
| search for them by name or domain name. If you see
| otherwise, please let us know and we will investigate."
| loceng wrote:
| But how isn't this disingenuous? The reason you'd de-rank
| is because less users then get exposed to whatever
| narratives/information you want hidden, the reason why
| you de-rank.
|
| Users use a search engine for passive exposure to a mix
| of information for them to then scan, ideally reviewing
| multiple sources thoroughly, for them then to make a
| determination/conclusion.
|
| And certainly DDG would have actual statistics on the
| direct impact the down-ranking had/has, but not the
| statistics on the externalized impact of how that
| cascades - e.g. you're biasing their knowledge towards
| whatever has become the dominant/"acceptable" narrative
| and reducing the likelihood (greatly) by who sees
| competing narratives.
|
| In general with searches, what % of clicks occur within
| say the first 2-3 pages, and were the Russian sites de-
| ranked to after those 2-3 pages?
|
| Where do 80% of the clicks go for most search - within
| how many pages of results? Were the sites de-ranked
| passed that point?
| seanw444 wrote:
| Like the sibling comment says, that's not much better. To
| the majority of people who don't go that far down the
| list, and would have otherwise seen it if it weren't
| moved down the list, that information has been
| effectively hidden.
|
| If you intend to make certain links harder to find, you
| have the same intentions as straight-up erasing them.
| It's those intentions I cannot get behind, because I
| don't trust a company's arbitrary morality to make those
| decisions, when you literally just get search results
| essentially verbatim from another search engine.
| asyncapiabuse wrote:
| Thank you for this clarification!
| MarcellusDrum wrote:
| He "clarified" by twisting and lying about the situation.
| Simply said - down-ranking is censorship, whether you agree
| with it or not. Pushing a result to page 3 or 4 in a search
| engine means that 99.99% of people won't see it,
| effectively hiding (ie. censoring) it from public view.
| Karunamon wrote:
| What you have basically done here is say "we only downrank
| spam" (this is fine), and then said "state-sponsored news is
| inherently spam" (this is not).
|
| You are using a definition of "spam" that is not commonly
| held or understood by those who would be your users. Whether
| or not this is for a noble reason, this renders it a dark
| pattern. This is not only a violation of the principle of
| least astonishment, your explanation comes off as deceptive.
| You are making a value judgment on truth and working that
| into the product while claiming you are not making a value
| judgment.
|
| Relevance and truth are two different things. It is not your
| job to be making calls on the second one, and I find your
| willful conflation of these concepts, and attempts to deflect
| from the fact that you have done so to be a bit gross.
| vinaypai wrote:
| > then said "state-sponsored news is inherently spam
|
| So BBC is spam according to them?
| vintagedave wrote:
| Could you share more about this please?
|
| Some quick reading of SearxNG's docs* and testing out an
| instance** shows some very good search results.
|
| > If you run your own instance, it's better to share that
| instance with friends or family so they can dilute your search
| queries with theirs, and it makes it much harder for your
| instance to be tracked the same as they'd track you. Or, you
| can use a public instance which is better for privacy, but
| worse for security and customizability.
|
| Is there no way to clear all state after each query, or every
| 24 hours, etc? I'd wonder if sharing with family just means
| you'd build a closer data association with them. Or, what kind
| of things do you find important to customise (and why?) that
| aren't configured by public SearxNG instances?
|
| * https://docs.searxng.org
|
| ** https://searx.space/
| seanw444 wrote:
| Well all Searx does is act as a single-request-in, multiple-
| requests-out proxy. Whatever you search on it, you search on
| those same sites, just from the IP address of the Searx
| instance. They will assume your Searx instance is a person,
| and build a profile of its searches. Eventually, if you're
| the only one using it, and someone is able to link your
| search history on your Searx instance to your history on that
| same engine from before you used Searx, they have an
| uninterrupted search history / profile built on you.
|
| Building a profile of one person using queries from multiple
| people is difficult, and it gives you plausible deniability
| if it's ever brought against you in some accusation.
|
| So I guess I'm not entirely sure what you mean by clear
| state. If you mean clear state on the instance side of
| things, the point is that it doesn't really keep any state
| unless you want it to. The problem is the state that is
| stored on the search engine side of things.
|
| The more people in your instance of choice, the more
| anonymous you become. But since you're not the one running
| the public instances, you don't have the power to tweak all
| the settings you may want to. There are plenty of public
| instances that have great defaults though, but you're
| ultimately trusting _that_ instance owner to not log your
| queries as well. So make sure it 's a trustworthy-enough
| instance. Or use multiple instances, as a counter to that.
|
| Ultimately, even the worst-configured public Searx instance
| I've used in the past, was much better than using any
| mainstream search engine directly. The most important
| settings are which engines you want to pull results from.
| Most public instances don't let you set all of those, if I
| remember correctly. So being able to choose those may or may
| not be important to you. Again, some public instances have
| pretty good search engine settings.
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