Gabriel Weinberg, the founder of DuckDuckGo, announces the search engine will ‘down-rank sites associated with Russian disinformation following the invasion of Ukraine.
In his series of tweets, he made it clear that the search engine will only focus on quality information unfolding around the topic.
Weinberg write:
“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.
In addition to down-ranking sites associated with disinformation, we also often place news modules and information boxes at the top of DuckDuckGo search results (where they are seen and clicked the most) to highlight quality information for rapidly unfolding topics.
DuckDuckGo’s mission is to make simple privacy protection accessible to all. Privacy is a human right and transcends politics, which is why about 100 million people around the world use DuckDuckGo. (We don’t have an exact count since we don’t track people.)”
A Twitter user quizzed Weinberg why he decided to do the police job with the search engine. “I get it but I thought the point of DuckDuckGo was to present search results “as is”. Not your role to play thought police.”, he queried.
Weinberg explained stating there are Algorithms set in place to determine search results.
“What exactly is “as is”? Search results aren’t a completely random list of websites. They are created based on a complex set of algorithms weighing 100s of factors.”, Weinberg replied.
Weinberg argued further with another Twitter user who is against his action. The user challenged him saying ‘the whole point of DuckDuckGo is for you NOT to do that.’
Weinberg fired back saying; The whole point of DuckDuckGo is privacy. The whole point of the search engine is to show more relevant content over less relevant content, and that is what we continue to do.
