I read through some of the comments on this post, and although I get the arguments that there is not only disinformation from the Russian side, I must say that the specific intention of Russia’s disinformation is to directly destabilize our western democracies and spread the denial of the war and slaughter in Ukraine. And yes, we’ve gotta act against the false information from western news agencies also (I live in Germany, and therefore I know a pretty good example of this with “BILD”), but the criticism of DuckDuckGo’s actions and calling it censorship is, from my opinion, absolutely wrong, because we’ve gotta protect people from disinformation and stop the Russian war of information.
Once again, the problem here is: disinformation according to whom? Themselves? The US government? NATO?
Maybe propublica? I think there are areas of gray and there are areas that are clear, and we can respect the former and take action on the latter without putting on joker makeup and descending into sophomoric relativism about the fundamental impossibility of ever knowing “the truth.”
You guys are overreacting. DDG said they would only down-rank sites associated with Russian disinformation. It’s normal for search engines to downrank low-quality sites such as SEO spam.
Why was the well documented Western disinformation not ranked down, or why is Fox News the second result when “ukraine” is searched?
here’s a list of public searx & SearXNG instances
If anyone has good experiences with any of them, definitely share!
SearX instances mysteriously do not have Yandex as an option, even though before this it used to be on most.
I looked through the git, it was removed here: https://github.com/searx/searx/pull/2566
It appears that Yandex would respond to requests with a captcha and they were unable to fix it, so they removed it.
That sounds correct. Yandex is a lot stricter now.
I’m probably going to still use DuckDuckGo for now but this is such a stupid unnecessary move. Seeing some russian “disinformation” wasn’t going to suddenly turn me into a Putin stan.
Yandex looks incredibly based right now, unironically. They are an insanely amazing search engine provider.
Based on what?
Based on quality of search results. No US-EU search engine has that level of quality, neither on textual nor reverse image results.
Yandex is not only a WEF member, but they also have an agreement with Uandex to allow Yndex browser to use Microsoft Suite - so i distrust it. Seeing that Microsoft has a contract with Ukraine gov’t, I suspect if Yandex isn’t filtering results yet, they will soon. The Hated One replied to me that Yandex (email or browser, idk) is worse than Google because Russian laws differ from those in the US.
WEF angle does not look too helpful, now that Russia is double sanctioned compared to Iran.
