DuckDuckGo, a well-liked privacy-focused search engine, was lately referred to as out in media studies for tampering with search outcomes and purging impartial media sources. This week, DuckDuckGo CEO Gabriel Weinberg took to Twitter to refute the allegations. He stated the claims the search engine purges impartial media retailers are utterly made up, and went on to element how the search engine exhibits outcomes, and doable explanation 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 web site YouTube-DL.

Let’s begin with the allegations. Back in March, impartial 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 basically following the identical practices of its illustrious counterpart regardless of them being in opposition to its founding rules.

Last week, standard torrent-tracking web site TorrentFreak reported that DuckDuckGo was eradicating pirate websites akin to The Pirate Bay, 1337x, and Fmovies from its search outcomes, in addition to open-source YouTube ripping websites akin 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 stated he hoped to filter out some “misconceptions”, and referred to as the allegations that the corporate is purging impartial media sources from its search outcomes “completely made up.” He stated 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 stated. 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 stated, “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 location:operator search question format, they could 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’d be capable of discover the outcomes. In a separate affirmation to TorrentFreak, the corporate admitted that some outcomes had been being eliminated as a result of Bing knowledge it was utilizing. The report famous that DuckDuckGo seemed to be arduous 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 instructed 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 impartial for the reason that firm’s inception in 2008. Weinberg additionally asserted DuckDuckGo would not observe person search historical past, thus the query of creating modifications to look outcomes primarily based on search historical past is invalid.