Talk:DuckDuckGo
De-ranking/Compromised by fact-checkers
DuckDuckGo takes from the database of Google when I remember correctly. If I search for wikispooks on Google now, the first result is wikispooks.com and the 2nd is the insider article. It could be that this connection with mediabias is not the making of the DuckDuckGo. Right now 7th floor group has become the top result. Other results also indicate that wikispooks hasn't necessarily been de ranked. -- Sunvalley (talk) 21:58, 15 March 2021 (UTC)
- Well, the header in the article has a question mark, so we didn't declare it de-ranking, it was just a suspicion. (I've some other points but we should e-mail about that if this trend continues) I've altered the article with your new observation though. Thx for the heads up. --Jun (talk) 22:31, 15 March 2021 (UTC)
- Sorry, I was not precise enough. There are two things: "de-ranking" and "Compromised by fact-checkers". Both means tampering with the results in some way. As for the example: "7th floor group", it could mean that it took some time to come through, as for: "Compromised by fact-checkers", it seems to me that DuckDuckGo is producing what Google may have put out as a result before the Insider article came out. One would have to know the technical details, or have more observations, so it is just an idea, but right now my hunch goes that way.
- Current Google example 1
- Current Google example 2
- Current example for Off Guardian on Google where "mediabiasfactcheck" still #4
- -- Sunvalley (talk) 11:18, 16 March 2021 (UTC
- DDG's uses bing and their own mods with a web-crawler https://help.duckduckgo.com/results/sources/?redir=1, but some of the crawler's sources and API (how the algorithm works) is partly hidden from the public. So why DDG had such a low ranking (when it gets its results from bing) for the 7FG is unclear but suspicious, as it implies their own algorithm had smth to do with it as DDG doesn't de-rank results based on servers (like google does), location or google account using the search term. So the google theory doesn't stand here. Regarding offguardian, I'm not sure, interestingly, outside of the US all those face-checkers aren't on the first pages of the results (and StopFake is only known around Russia, so why is that placed so high). Even in the UK. That also raises questions. --Jun (talk) 16:09, 16 March 2021 (UTC)
Alright, thanks for pointing that out, now I get it. But leaving the curious example with the 7FG aside, Bing right now does have "mediabiasfactcheck" in the upper region of the searches, both for Off-guardian and Wikispooks, which could still mean that the DDG output comes from the results of the underlying search engine:
- here it is not: current Bing example for Off Guardian 1
- however via Asian proxy it does show: current Bing example for Off Guardian 2
- Current Bing example for Wikispooks -> #1 "wikispooks", #2 "wikispooks about", #3 "mediabiasfactcheck"
