I noticed this for a longer time but I just thought MSN flooded the web with its shit. It didn’t came to my mind it is actually duckduckgo trying to shove these msn links into my face…
I guess this is similar to google amp links, just stealing the content of other websites.
It annoys me big time, -msn doesn’t seem to help
Ok what the fuck is happening with DuckDuckGo?
I’ve been using it since the beginning of last year, because fuck google, and it’s been steadily degrading in usefulness.
Microsoft
Aren’t they sourcing the search results from Bing?
In eastern US, first time using DDG on this device, it shows normal links (searched “Ukraine drone attack”)
Would be nice if it had a built in calculator and unit converter, that’s a ddg feature I use a lot
Seconded! And unlike DDG (based in the US), Qwant is in the EU
Duck Duck Go was never really good at showing results in my experience. Currently using Ecosia and switching between the Googl and Bing index. I hope they get their own index soon
Bring back Alta Vista!!
Ask Jeeves
Carrier pigeons.
I tried, but he kept saying things like, “my name is not Jeeves” and “I rented this suit for a wedding who are you”.
Things were just simpler in the past :'(
DDG has been shit since 2022
What happened in 2022?
tldr after the beginning of the russian invasion into Ukraine, DuckDuckGo began explicitly down ranking “Russian disinformation”, with the exact definition for “Russian disinformation” not being given https://archive.is/g2eL9 https://archive.is/laxkZ
To be honest, I absolutely agree with them. I read the whole article and I do not see what is wrong with these statements? Russia is flooding the web with disinformation, we need to do something against that. Fuck the conservatives, Fuck Russia in particular, Slava Ukraini!
Weinberg’s tweet announcing the change generated thousands of comments, many of them from conservative-leaning users who were furious that the company they turned to in order to get away from perceived Big Tech censorship was now the one doing the censoring. It didn’t help that the content DuckDuckGo was demoting and calling disinformation was Russian state media, whose side some in the right-wing contingent of DuckDuckGo’s users were firmly on.
DuckDuckGo spokesperson Kamyl Bazbaz told Recode that the decision was simply about doing what a search engine is supposed to do: ensure that users were getting the best results for their searches. “Sites like RT and Sputnik that deliberately put out false information to intentionally mislead people directly cut against that purpose,” Bazbaz said
Russia is flooding the web with disinformation, we need to do something against that
Giving one person the authority to decide what is Russian disinformation and what isn’t is very dangerous. Isn’t the whole reason why we use the fediverse in order to prevent information being filtered through Big Brother/Big Corps, etc.? I think educating the average person that news sites like RT and Sputnik are owned by a foreign state is a better approach.
Fuck the conservatives, Fuck Russia in particular, Slava Ukraini!
This isn’t me arguing in favor of conservatism or Russian imperialism, and you putting this at the end of your comment makes it seem like you don’t want to have an honest conversation. If it was 2001, I feel like you would be arguing in favor of The Patriot Act because Fuck Terrorists, Fuck Osama in particular, Slava US-led Coalition!
Sites like RT and Sputnik that deliberately put out false information to intentionally mislead people directly cut against that purpose
Why don’t we start delisting Fox News and other conservative media while we are at it? Given that shows like Tucker Carlson have been proven in court to be spreading known lies
Isn’t the whole reason why we use the fediverse in order to prevent information being filtered through Big Brother/Big Corps, etc.?
Yeah that’s why reasonable instances defederate from lemmygrad & co.
I think educating the average person that news sites like RT and Sputnik are owned by a foreign state is a better approach.
That’s not how it works. The average person is dumb as fuck and they need to be protected against disinfo. Also RT is not just “owned by a foreign state”, it is 100% state controlled propaganda, that is deliberately spread in the west to influence the public opinion.
Also, as an educated person myself I do not want to skip through 10 websites run by the Kremlin until I find a good result.
Why don’t we start delisting Fox News and other conservative media while we are at it?
I am all in for that! As far as I know Fox is not run by the white house though, but I am not from the US so I am not sure.
As long as there is not a good alternative for corporate search engine as in similar to the fediverse, we have to work with what we have.
DDG targets users based on browser fingerprints.
You must have previously clicked on MSN links
I mean this post is up for more than a day, you could have read some of the other explanations, as yours is pretty poor
DDG is going to shit anyway. Feels like bing 2.0 at this point. The results aren’t what they used to be. I’ve been getting better results from my searxng instance or using like startpage.
Duckduckgo is absolute shit. I’m tired of seeing blogspam AI shit. I’m tired of searching for things like “Trump tariffs 2017” and seeing 50,000 articles about what Trump said yesterday. Search engines are shit. It hurts I had to use Google AI for info on “articulation in architecture” because everything else was useless.
Unless we figure out how to open source, distribute and maintain an indexer, we’re going to suck on the AI tit for the foreseeable future.
All these meta search engines are eventually doomed to be shut down is the tech companies that maintain the handful of actual indexers that exist slowly shut down streams that don’t provide them revenue.
I remember when they switched map links to (ew) Apple Maps. That was a huge downer.
It is probably the most polished map. I would rather use something open source, but it makes sense why they switched.
Absolutely! Especially because the map is always broken on my phone, I want to move the area and end up somewhere hundreds of kilometers away. I guess it’s time for a new search engine…
Duck Duck Go uses Bing so that tracks.
This is the answer. Might be a (new?) part of their agreement
I still like DDG and recommend it. But I also recently switched to Kagi, a paid search engine, and have been quite happy.
Kagi seems kind of expensive. $5 a month is pretty high compared to the costs of other subscriptions and that doesn’t even get you unlimited searches. I am definitely interested in this idea but I can’t see the value being there at the prices offered.
If it was $1 I’d probably subscribe in a heartbeat because it’d be affordable in my country. $5 is not bad but it adds up quickly.
Search something on duckduckgo and then refresh, it will list a different order of results. Very annoying if you check multiple links to not know which ones were in what order.
That’s by design
To what end?
I’m fairly sure So you can’t just game the SEO to always be on top. This way you get more varied spurces for your search. Since people will almost always click the top or second top link.
They should do a better job of pointing it out at the least
DDG has been hot garbage for a while since Bing jacked up their prices.
SAME!
i’ve been using Qwant when i search news
Its like Google’s amp links, it is for for the ad tracking purposes
DDG uses Bing. What did you expect?
This is weird. The links all show other news agencies, and you see the same at the top of the page when you follow the links. Is MSN re-hosting the stories from all these agencies or are the agencies opting in for this?
Nothing like seeing an Associated Press link and having it open on msn.com!! 🤡
It’s a syndication partnership with MSN. Publishers provide their articles to MSN via RSS. It’s increasingly difficult to draw traffic to independent sites, so publishers are all seeking to diversify their traffic sources.
here when i search for something or someone ‘newsworthy’ i get links to other sites ahead of msn, those links do go to the expected sites, and the favicons (that are all msn in the posted image) are also correct. in fact, only one first page out of the five searches i tried even had an msn link at all–at #9.
Not saying this doesn’t suck, but it is also a soft paywall dodge for sites like WaPo.
