[kwlug-disc] Now in the market for a new search engine...

[Doug Moen]

I ran my own tests, and today there is no obvious problem with Duck Duck Go censoring sites like youtube-dl and pirate bay. It looks like Bing (one of DDG's sources) is censoring sites like youtube-dl and pirate bay, and DDG is adding these sites back into the search results. I'm going to keep using DDG.

---
A duckduck go search for "youtube dl" now gives "youtube-dl.org" as the first hit (instead of giving the github repo like a few days ago). Whatever the problem was with that is fixed. I think the problem is Bing, see below.

Another claim was they de-indexed pirate bay. Well, it is indexed now. thepiratebay.org is the first hit when I search for 'pirate bay'. I didn't try this three days ago when the issue was raised.

Another claim was that Duck Duck Go used to have a pirate-bay bang operator, but that this was deleted. They don't have a pirate bay bang operator today. I can't confirm if they ever had one.

The twitter thread (DDG) says there are ongoing technical problems with the 'site:' operator. The slashdot story was using the results of site: queries to prove that certain sites were delisted. IDK.

Duck Duck Go has its own web crawler, and they also use Bing results. If I search "youtube-dl" on Bing, the results are like what DDG was returning 3 days ago (github repo first, youtube-dl.org not in first page). Now it's better, so maybe DDG is compensating for a Bing deficiency. Likewise, a Bing search for "pirate bay" does not return "thepiratebay.org" in the first page, but DDG is returning that result today. So if anybody is de-indexing sites that the RIAA doesn't like, it's Bing, not DDG.

Doug Moen.

On Mon, Apr 18, 2022, at 7:07 AM, Znoteer via kwlug-disc wrote:
> On Fri, Apr 15, 2022 at 10:26:18PM -0400, CrankyOldBugger wrote:
>> Just found out that DuckDuckGo is now a lapdog for the copyright industry (
>> https://yro.slashdot.org/story/22/04/15/2057253/duckduckgo-removes-pirate-sites-and-youtube-dl-from-its-search-results
>> )
>> 
>
> It looks like maybe this was all fake news. DDG has not changed 
> anything, if you can believe this fellow:
>
> https://twitter.com/yegg/status/1515635886855233537
>
> -- 
> Znoteer
> znoteer at mailbox.org
>
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