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

[CrankyOldBugger]

Well, it's good to hear that it's not DDG that's the problem here.  I
switched to DDG as part of my attempts to get out from Google's thumb.  I
still think that this issue is worth watching, though, as once again
lawsuits are getting in the way of technology...


On Mon, Apr 18, 2022 at 2:55 PM Doug Moen <doug at moens.org> wrote:

> 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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