DuckDuckGo CEO Refutes Search Result Tampering Allegations Amid Uproar

DuckDuckGo, a well-liked privacy-focused search engine, was not too long ago referred to as out in media experiences for tampering with search outcomes and purging unbiased media sources. This week, DuckDuckGo CEO Gabriel Weinberg took to Twitter to refute the allegations. He mentioned the claims the search engine purges unbiased media retailers are utterly made up, and went on to element how the search engine exhibits outcomes, and doable the reason why sure outcomes did not instantly present up. The clarification comes days after DuckDuckGo was reported to have eliminated outcomes of piracy websites like The Pirate Bay and Fmovies, in addition to open-source website YouTube-DL.

Let’s begin with the allegations. Back in March, unbiased media outlet News Punch claimed that DuckDuckGo was purging different such retailers from its search outcomes, and referred to as the privacy-focussed search engine ‘Google Lite’, saying that it was primarily following the identical practices of its illustrious counterpart regardless of them being towards its founding ideas.

Last week, in style torrent-tracking website TorrentFreak reported that DuckDuckGo was eradicating pirate websites corresponding to The Pirate Bay, 1337x, and Fmovies from its search outcomes, in addition to open-source YouTube ripping websites corresponding to YouTube-dl and YTMP3.com.

Now, let’s come to DuckDuckGo CEO Gabriel Weinberg’s clarifications over these allegations. In a tweet from earlier this week, Weinberg mentioned he hoped to filter out some “misconceptions”, and referred to as the allegations that the corporate is purging unbiased media sources from its search outcomes “completely made up.” He mentioned that any person will be capable of discover these retailers in DuckDuckGo search outcomes by trying to find the precise outlet. He clarified that search rating and censorship weren’t the identical factor, and the corporate does downrank sources of spam and misinformation.

“We are not ranking based on any political agenda or my (or anyone else’s) personal political opinions. We are also not assessing any individual news stories,” Weinberg mentioned. As for the report that piracy websites are lacking from DuckDuckGo search outcomes, one thing that different serps like Google and Microsoft’s Bing admit to doing primarily based on copyright strikes, Weinberg mentioned, “Similarly, we are not “purging” YouTube-dl or The Pirate Bay and they both have actually been continuously available in our results if you search for them by name (which most people do). Our site: operator (which hardly anyone uses) is having issues which we are looking into.”

Essentially, Weinberg claimed that if customers tried to look with the positioning:operator search question format, they might not see any outcomes, as a result of a problem with such queries on the DuckDuckGo search engine. If customers looked for the area title itself, they might be capable of discover the outcomes. In a separate affirmation to TorrentFreak, the corporate admitted that some outcomes have been being eliminated as a result of Bing information it was utilizing. The report famous that DuckDuckGo gave the impression to be exhausting at work behind the scenes restoring websites named by TorrentFreak that Bing had eliminated. “Since these occurrences originated on Bing, they were passed down to our results, as well as other Bing syndication partners,” DuckDuckGo Senior Communications Manager Allison Goodman informed TorrentFreak.

While serps like Google and Bing have been reported to change their search outcomes, the DuckDuckGo CEO disassociated his firm from Google by clarifying that it has been unbiased for the reason that firm’s inception in 2008. Weinberg additionally asserted DuckDuckGo would not monitor person search historical past, thus the query of constructing adjustments to look outcomes primarily based on search historical past is invalid.