DuckDuckGo Can No Longer Be Trusted

[Jackie Daytona]

I'm sure this will be old news to many of you, but I can no longer trust DuckDuckGo. I've heard for some time that I shouldn't trust them. But I always felt like their search results were quite good. Seems that is no longer the case.

I heard that the U.S. just spent over 1 trillion on it's latest budget. So, I wanted to see what exactly is in it. What precisely is my government spending money on?

So, I turned to DuckDuckGo. Out of the first 80 search results there was only ONE right-leaning news organization. (And three somewhat-neutral sites. Which each appeared once.) Here's a list of left-leaning sites they gave me: (Yes, it was mainly these sites repeating over 80 results.)

• nbcnews.com
  
• washingtonpost.com
  
• nytimes.com
  
• cnn.com
  
• cbsnews.com
  
• bloomberg.com
  
• apnews.com
  
• reuters.com
  
• pbs.org
  
• usatoday.com
  
• npr.org
  
• msn.com
  
• cbsnews.com

All of these might as well merge. Since they all provide an identical perspective. (Well, I suppose npr and pbs could only merge with eachother, but you know what I mean.) It's not as if any of them provide a noticeable difference of information.

Anyway, I can't trust search results that only lean one-way. That's why I don't use Bing or Google. They openly admit that they alter results to try to influence the minds of people that use their services.

Any suggestions for other search engines? Is there a politically neutral one out there somewhere?

(Oh, and if you're wondering how my reading into the budget went? Poorly. Seems neither side wants the public to know where all the money is going.)

[xDDD]

There is no trustworthy search engine OR browser. Sorry OP.

[Morkonan]

Originalmente postado por Jackie Daytona:

I'm sure this will be old news to many of you, but I can no longer trust DuckDuckGo.

What "DuckDuckGo" are you using? The mobile version has, or at least "had," and agreement with Micro$oft for tracking certain ads/features. The PC version does not.

There are only two* search engines... Google and Bing.

Virtually every search engine you know the name of is only an aggregator of Google and Bing results. DuckDuckGo is the best aggregator because it combines both..

There are no independent indexers/search engines worth a crap.

There are some projects, like SearX, which uses independent hosts and indexes, but those are hit-or-miss, really, and are not really robust enough to be of much use. Darkweb is darkweb, so tread carefully there if you go looking.

Added: You want a decent search engine that gives a good robust selection of returns? DuckDuckGo is it unless you want to use Bing or Google. That is the state of affairs of search engines, today. If anyone can provide something just as good, I'd be very happy as long as it also had good privacy protections.

Commercial search sites like Google, Bing, Yahoo, DuckDuckGo, etc, don't really care about promoting some news site over another. They care about money and staying alive, no promoting some inteerpretation of the news.

If you're looking for your favorite biased newsite and don't find it in a generic search, that's likely because few people use it and many probably consider it full of crap.. Also, some sites that style themselves as promoting unbiased news that does what the mainstream news will not... just want you in their echo chamber.

Nobody has any exclusive mastery over "The Truth." You have to take responsibility and learn to consume news with a discriminating mind, even if it turns out that news does not agree with your worldview. If you only look for things that affirm your worldview, you will find them...

*Other "engines" are very rare and few will yield any results worth calling "comprehensive." Swisscows.com and duckduckgo.com are the best in terms of "neutral" just because they focus on more privacy-related features. Swisscows does filter out adult material, though. Do NOT use Startpage/ixquick, either. It's owned by a metadata ad company, so anything you do there is going to be tracked and even if they say your exact IP is masked, your metadata and footprint is not and that's nearly as good for metadata companies who then know your search behavior.

[TwisterCat]

If you say so. I'll avoid 'em, as if I don't anyways. And no, I don't have any recommendations. You'd probably be able to guess what I'd recommend anyways, or you could just ask 4Chan, since they'll give you the same answers.

The first mistake was trusting a search engine with a duck as the mascot

[xDDD]

Originalmente postado por TwisterCat:

If you say so. I'll avoid 'em, as if I don't anyways. And no, I don't have any recommendations. You'd probably be able to guess what I'd recommend anyways, or you could just ask 4Chan, since they'll give you the same answers.

The first mistake was trusting a search engine with a duck as the mascot

What the duck did you just ducking say about me, you little mallard? I'll have you know I graduated top of my class in the Navy Poultry, and I've been involved in numerous secret raids on the park pond, and I have over 300 confirmed quacks. I am trained in poultry warfare and I'm the top swimmer in the entire US armed flocks. You are nothing to me but just another breadcrumb. I will wipe you the duck out with precision the likes of which has never been seen before on this Earth, mark my ducking words. You think you can get away with saying that ♥♥♥♥ to me over the Internet? Think again, quacker. As we speak I am contacting my secret network of geese across the USA and your IP is being traced right now so you better prepare for the storm, maggot. The storm that wipes out the pathetic little thing you call your life. You're ducking quacked, kid. I can be anywhere, anytime, and I can quack at you in over seven hundred ways, and that's just with my bare bill. Not only am I extensively trained in unarmed combat, but I have access to the entire arsenal of the Canadian Geese Corps and I will use it to its full extent to wipe your miserable tail off the face of the continent, you little ♥♥♥♥. If only you could have known what unholy retribution your little "clever" comment was about to bring down upon you, maybe you would have held your ducking tongue. But you couldn't, you didn't, and now you're paying the price, you goosed*mn idiot. I will sh*t fury all over you and you will drown in it. You're ducking quacked, kiddo.

[Dom]

Just because a search engine does not recommend far-right disinformation sources that no one reads doesn't mean it's biased. In fact, recommending them would be bias because their traffic is so irrelevant that nothing would justify them appearing on the first page.

[TwisterCat]

Originalmente postado por xDDD:

You're ducking quacked, kiddo.

That's foie gras, bruh. But unfortunately for ya, while you were practicing the duck filibuster, I was practicing the blade (the kitchen knife). Ducks are food, not friends.

Perhaps more importantly, ducks are biased, because they're ducks... obviously. Ducks also know nothing about privacy, by nature. Ducks don't have caves, they live out in the open, for all to see.

Why do you think the duck wears a green bow tie? Because the duck supports the Green Party, of course.

A duck is inferior to a frog. A frog is stoic, it blends in, and it has good tongue.

[Duck Twacy]

You never could trust DuckDuckGo. I used it to look up news and political matters overseas, and I got ads on my net feed regarding those topics.

[DarkCrystalMethod]

Here's a crazy idea... ask chatGPT where you would find budget information for whatever institution you're asking about. Skip search engines entirely when you know there's a public release somewhere but can't seem to find it on the institution's website(s).

[Swarmfly]

Eschew search engines, just type in a site address and hope for the best.

[xDDD]

Originalmente postado por DarkCrystalMethod:

Here's a crazy idea... ask chatGPT where you would find budget information for whatever institution you're asking about. Skip search engines entirely when you know there's a public release somewhere but can't seem to find it on the institution's website(s).

ChatGPT, and most other large AIs, are just as biased as the search engines though. Didn't you see the disaster that was Google Gemini?

[Birds]

aw yeah let's all sit in the data circle!

duck duck duck duck duck...you, go, your data gets sold.

and don't come back.

[Uncle Sam]

Given that advertisers money 1st and foremost, search engines are not to be blindly trusted. However Brave search is okayish and SearX can be highly customizable + is FOSS! Which is nice.

[Birds]

Originalmente postado por Uncle Sam:

Given that advertisers money 1st and foremost, search engines are not to be blindly trusted. However Brave search is okayish and SearX can be highly customizable + is FOSS! Which is nice.

duk dcuk dkuc, guus! yay FOSS goos!

[Ulfrinn]

Duckduckgo has always piggy backed on I think the Bing search engine.

[Ganger]

First mistake is trusting anyone... simple as that.