So, this is interesting. I wanted to find that essay by @dessalines@lemmy.ml outlining the many issues of Signal and suggested alternatives, but DuckDuckGo had nothing for me. Not on the first page, not on the 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th page.

I thought maybe I just imagined the title, but sure enough, on searching lemmy posts, it was right there. Then I thought “hang on, there’s hardly a mention let alone criticism of signal on any page of those search results!”.

Hmm… the wording might be a bit ambiguous, but let’s compare:

All of the following except Gigablast returned a healthy list of results including the original essay:

    • DoghouseCharlie@lemmygrad.ml
      2·
      3 years ago

      Apparently it takes results from Bing and Yahoo so no wonder it sucks. Funny, I was looking at the Wiki page and it says “DuckDuckGo does not show search results from content farms”. That’s gonna be a big X to doubt from me.

  • OsrsNeedsF2P
    122·
    3 years ago

    Extremely surprised to see Bing show it, since DDG apparently gets their search results from there

  • beta_tester
    9·
    3 years ago

    Don’t ask me why but try ""why not signal"" with two quotation marks at the beginning and the end

    • rcbrkOP
      7·
      3 years ago

      I tried a couple more:

      …looks like DDG has an undocumented NOT operator, which for some reason is not deactivated when in a long quote, but is deactivated when the phrase is bracketed in quoted nothings. “” “”

      But still doesn’t quite explain how "why not signal" dessalines does return a result.

      “regex is hard”, I guess.

      • rcbrkOP
        11·
        3 years ago
        • DDG: why not signal dessalines
          • Good results.
        • DDG: dessalines why not signal
          • No good results. The hint (Not many results contain signal Search only for dessalines why "signal"?) gives a clue that not has a special interpretation and that the parsing algorithm is very confused about what it’s being told to do.

        Tinfoil hat or Hanlon’s razor? :-P

      • beta_tester
        6·
        3 years ago

        Wow! You are on to something. I triedit with a couple of search strings and it looks like the not operator is working, e.g. reeperbahn not hamburg returns results which are not related to hamburg. And two quotes will ignore the not operator

  • Moro@mastodon.uno
    8·
    3 years ago

    @rcbrk Yes, there’s something wrong. I’ve been using ddg for years but lately more and more often I have to use something else to find what I’m looking for.

  • Black Xanthus@lemmy.world
    8·
    1 year ago

    I thought I’d test this. I got the essay as the 4th result, the top 3 are about mobile phone signal, with the essay coming in as 4th.

    I use Vivaldi on Android. DDG has my location set to the UK.

  • DessalinesA
    82·
    3 years ago

    Thanks for doing this work! I just tested it now, and same results: ddg doesn’t show my page while google does.

    My only guess is that ddg is completely removing pages that have links to sites they have on political blocklist.

    • toneverends
      9·
      3 years ago

      See other comments though; It’s looking more likely that it’s just bugs in the parsing mixed with an undocumented not operator.

      Still a chance it’s bugs in the (hypothetical) downranking mixed with bugs in the parsing, but nothing conclusively demonstrates that yet.

  • Jama
    6·
    3 years ago

    Works for me, tho. HTML ddg put dessalines essay on first result

  • Faresh
    82·
    3 years ago

    Yeah, DDG search results have left me disappointed in the recent months. Have you tried Searx?

    Edit: Why do I have this stupid habit of diagonally reading posts…

      • Faresh
        3·
        3 years ago

        I know. It was more of a recommendation as a daily search engine.

  • AgreeableLandscape
    6·
    3 years ago

    Interesting. I got curious as to whether it was actually delisted or just that DuckDuckGo was bad at ranking results, so I tried searching a quote from the article:

    Signal became one of the first platforms to develop and use an end-to-end-encryption (E2EE) system and open standard, which many other platforms adopted or modified for their own use.

    https://archive.ph/lKfIu

    And it did show Dess’s page as the first result at the time of posting this.

    Though, this doesn’t conclusively exonerate DDG, it’s still entirely possible that they really are intentionally ranking it down which is why it didn’t show up with a more general search term, or maybe it truly is just a bad relevancy-finding algorithm, but I guess it does prove that at least they haven’t removed it entirely. 🤷

    • beta_tester
      6·
      3 years ago

      It’s the first result if you use double quotes instead of singles, i.e. "".

  • const_void
    510·
    3 years ago

    Catering to their right wing user base, maybe?

    • rcbrkOP
      71·
      3 years ago

      Internet. Sanitised for your protection. ™

        • linzilla
          01·
          3 years ago

          the article needs update as part of the software of Signal’s servers became closed-source in December 2021 and the founder stepped down as CEO of the company he built in January 2022…

        • guojing
          83·
          3 years ago

          When you dont have any arguments, just call it conspiracy theory. No one can disagree with that!