Gabriel Weinberg, CEO of the US-based private search engine DuckDuckGo, announced that Russia will censor sites that spread false information about the invasion of Ukraine.
Gabriel Wienberg on Twitter: "Like so many others I am sickened by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the gigantic humanitarian crisis it continues to create. #StandWithUkraine️ At DuckDuckGo, we've been rolling out search updates that down-rank sites associated with Russian disinformation."
DuckDuckGo, which has been in the news with racist choices in recruitment and user privacy issues before, received more backlash after announcing that it would manipulate the results. Most DuckDuckGo users prefer DuckDuckGo for organic results because they are fed up with Google customizing and manipulating search results. I think DuckDuckGo's making such a move makes DuckDuckGo no different from Google.
Why is Manipulation of Search Results a Bad Thing?
Manipulating the search results manipulates users and makes it difficult to access the right information. The user can get information about each view with organic results and reach a conclusion according to his own reasoning ability. But it is completely one-sided in non-organic, manipulated results. It only lets you see what the search engine wants you to see. It controls your thoughts. You are more exposed to lies or propaganda. Spam and repetitive results multiply. Manipulating the results to Russian or other party propaganda may sound like a good reason, but you should decide what is propaganda and what is real information, not the search engine. We cannot give one source the authority to decide what is true and what is propaganda. Today they censor Russian "propaganda", tomorrow your thoughts.
DuckDuckGo Alternatives
Of course, I will not recommend search engines like Google or Bing that are even worse than DuckDuckGo. I will suggest open source and private search engines as an alternative. I will cover all of them more carefully in other articles. For now, these are DuckDuckGo alternatives, open source and private search engines;
SearX/SearXNG (instance) (tüm instances) (SearX source code) (SearXNG source code)
YaCy (instance) (source code)
Artado Search (site) (source code) (TeTeOS.Net Category)