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:

All of the following except Gigablast returned a healthy list of results including the original essay:

  • Dessalines@lemmy.ml
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    3 years ago

    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.

    • toneverends@lemmy.ml
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      3 years ago

      See other comments though; It’s looking more likely that it’s just bugs in the parsing mixed with an undocumented not operator.

      Still a chance it’s bugs in the (hypothetical) downranking mixed with bugs in the parsing, but nothing conclusively demonstrates that yet.