The upshot: NYT says that Duck Duck Go is now the favored search engine of right-wing conspiracy theorists.
“If I wanted to find specific cases about people who died from vaccine-related injuries, I had to go to DuckDuckGo,” Mr. [Joe] Rogan said, referring to the small privacy-focused search engine. “I wasn’t finding them on Google.”
Praise for DuckDuckGo has become a popular refrain during the pandemic among right-wing social media influencers and conspiracy theorists who question Covid-19 vaccines and push discredited coronavirus treatments. Some have posted screenshots showing that DuckDuckGo appears to surface more links favorable to their views than Google does.
The article has a little semi-interactive feature demonstrating the various results on three search engines when searching for conspiracy-related topics.
“Google is actively suppressing search results that don’t acquiesce to traditional viewpoints of the left,” Mr. [Ben] Shapiro claimed last March. “I recommend you install DuckDuckGo on your computer, rather than Google, to combat all this.”
I installed it as my default for the privacy feature, but it sucks as a search engine. Quite often I just have to navigate to Google if I actually want to find information.
I vaguely remember a month or so ago, I was arguing with someone on this board about what percentage of people talking about X (I no longer remember the value of X) were RW conspiracy nuts. We discovered that, at least for that particular X, DDG search did indeed pull up a significantly higher proportion of moonbat sites than Google did.
Yes, this is my experience as well. I’ve gotten into the habit of using DDG if the information I’m searching for is personal to me (“what is this thing on my leg?”) but using Google when I don’t care that the world knows I’m doing a search on giraffes or something.
When searching for an exact quote of anything, in quote marks, DDG very often turns up a blank while Google finds it handily.
As the NYT article points out, Duck Duck Go’s uses Bing’s search algorithm. It’s privacy settings are great, but the search results itself are inferior to Google’s, IMO.
I just did searches for “Covid vaccine injuries” on both DDG and Google.
Of the first 12 results on DDG, five were antivax-oriented from fringe sources like covidvaccineinjuriesdotcom (an anonymously-hosted site with provocative headlines like “Father of 2 and 6 year old Dropped Dead In Front Of His Kids”) and the Gospel News Network (I don’t know about you, but it sounds like a primo health news source to me).
Of the first 25 search results on Google, only one gave strong antivax vibes (the rest were almost entirely sober mainstream articles detailing extent and significance of Covid-19 vaccine-related side effects and injuries.
My impression has been that Google makes it a lot easier to find reputable info as compared to conspiracy dreck. I’ve yet to be convinced that’s a bad thing.
If I abandon Duck Duck Go due to some political bullshit, it won’t be a sad farewell. I like their (claims of) privacy, but hell, how do I really know? But I’ve searched for similar terms with them and with Google, and the DDG results are more like clickbait than genuine helpful information.
A sincere question: If Duck Duck Go is the “search engine that doesn’t track” me, then why does it place cookies/cache/whatever in my web browser (Safari)?
DDG definitely remembers some things temporarily, like what you just typed in for a search string. Not sure what else, tho. I’ve found its inability to remember things to be a hindrance, but I figured it was the price to pay for relative anonymity.
Responding to the OP:
I still use–and get decent results–out of DDG. However, if they start returning “fascist” results, I’ll have to review my dedication to DDG.
The real answer is simply have both DDG and Google in your repertoire of available search engines. I use DDG by default most of the time – but yes, I’ve always noticed that the hits it returns can be a bit idiosyncratic. If I don’t see what I think I’m looking for, then I use google.
DDG doesn’t place cookies by default, but it will if you change a setting. It has to place a cookie in that case, because how else would it know to load the settings you want? So you probably at some point changed a setting, such as “Infinite Scroll,” or the “Safe Search” level or the date range for results or whatever.
I misread the thread, thank god. Only a search engine. I was afraid my kindergarten class would have to give up duck, duck, goose. That would be tragic.
This is why we can’t have nice things.