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:
- DuckDuckGo “why not signal” - NOTHING
- Google “why not signal”
- Plenty of results! Dessaline’s essay is first up, followed by a plethora of discussions about the essay on HN, Reddit, lemmys, mastodons, and more. Not evil! …this time.
- DuckDuckGo “why not signal” dessalines
- Okay, so DDG has indexed it just fine. Maybe dessalines is “downranked” à la RT.com?
- DuckDuckGo “why not market socialism”
- Nope, finds one of dessalines’ socialism essays just fine, half way down the page.
All of the following except Gigablast returned a healthy list of results including the original essay:
The main issue is that DDG is so bad that you can’t tell if it’s just downranking because they didn’t like the topic or if it’s just DDG being the utter shite that DDG is.
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.
Extremely surprised to see Bing show it, since DDG apparently gets their search results from there
DDG has been increasingly home growing their search algorithm.
DDG was the only ones you could count on to make Bing worse than it is.
Don’t ask me why but try
""why not signal""with two quotation marks at the beginning and the endI tried a couple more:
- DDG why not signal (no quotes) = same result as original.
- DDG why “not” signal = gives the essay as the first result and a bunch of other signal-related results.
…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" dessalinesdoes return a result.“regex is hard”, I guess.
- 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 thatnothas a special interpretation and that the parsing algorithm is very confused about what it’s being told to do.
- No good results. The hint (
Tinfoil hat or Hanlon’s razor? :-P
- DDG: why not signal dessalines
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 hamburgreturns results which are not related to hamburg. And two quotes will ignore the not operator
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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.
Same, using Firefox with DGG as default search engine
Works for me, tho. HTML ddg put dessalines essay on first result
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…
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I know. It was more of a recommendation as a daily search engine.
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.
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. 🤷
It’s the first result if you use double quotes instead of singles, i.e.
"".
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.
See other comments though; It’s looking more likely that it’s just bugs in the parsing mixed with an undocumented
notoperator.Still a chance it’s bugs in the (hypothetical) downranking mixed with bugs in the parsing, but nothing conclusively demonstrates that yet.
I don’t see it when I search for
Why not signalbut I see it if I searchWhy not signal lemmydeleted by creator
Catering to their right wing user base, maybe?
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Internet. Sanitised for your protection. ™
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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…
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What part of that article is tinfoil hat?
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When you dont have any arguments, just call it conspiracy theory. No one can disagree with that!
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