DuckDuckGo

A search engine that claims not to track its users

 https://duckduckgo.com  

Owners: Duck Duck Go, Inc.
Constitutes: search engine,  official opposition narrative?

DuckDuckGo is a search engine, utilizing Microsoft Bing along with their own personal modifications. It emphasizes that it doesn't track users, but was exposed as collecting data from its Android app. The company came under increased scrutiny from 2020 on, as it began to form alliances with big media companies. CEO Gabriel Weinberg commented that: "I want to be clear that we did not and have not collected any personal information here." As of 2021, it holds a less than 1% world market share.

Official narrative

Old estranged brother of Wikispooks, Wikipedia says: "DuckDuckGo (also abbreviated as DDG) is an internet search engine that emphasizes protecting searchers' privacy and avoiding the filter bubble of personalized search results. DuckDuckGo distinguishes itself from other search engines by not profiling its users and by showing all users the same search results for a given search term." The site makes money by serving ads from the Yahoo-Bing search alliance network and through affiliate relationships with Amazon and eBay. Nothing wrong here.

Functions

DDG is often placed in the top 5 of most popular SEs in the world, and most of its users are drawn to the promises of privacy, thereby attracting a lot of "conspiracy theorists" according to former employees. It enjoys systematically positive coverage in the corporate media whenever alternatives for Google and Facebook are requested.

Concerns

Internet-watchdog site Techrights placed a protruding list of historical incidents that happened at DDG. These include:

• Gabriel Weinberg has a history of privacy abuse, starting with his founding of Names DB, an early similar version of Facebook that was heavily focused on registering friends onto the site against theirs will in 2006.
• DDG’s app was revealed in 2018 to be sending every website name a person visits to DDG servers, "for the purpose of identification by pictured icons of the website".
• DDG collecting users’ operating systems and everything they highlight in the search results.
• DDG is accused of fingerprinting users’ browsers by utilizing a script that can be easily targeted.

Connections

DDG is partnered with big-tech companies such as CloudFlare (who blocks Tor users and provide a significantly weak architectural website defense system acknowledged by TOR and dozens of web-designers), Amazon (who have dozens if not hundreds of privacy violations and are active lobbyists against anti-surveillance bills) and Yahoo (known for also handling deleted e-mails back to the intelligence agencies and voice-printing their users through Verizon).

Algorithm

Just like other big engines like Google, DDG's uses another legacy search engine - in this case Microsoft Bing - and their own mods with a web-crawler, but some of the crawler's sources and API (how the algorithm works) are partly hidden from the public, which is an accepted part of Google's works, but not expected from a search engine like DDG.

Subject-specific De-ranking?

As of January 2018, a page from ISGP was the #8 hit on DuckDuckGo for the search term "Dutroux Affair". Several other search engines such as Yahoo, Bing, Yandex and Gigablast also included it in their top 10. By contrast, neither Google not StartPage returned any hits from the ISGP site in the top 100.

7th floor group

Wikispooks was #30 hit for the search term "7th floor group" at DuckDuckGo, which listed it at #30, in January 2018. This is an interesting contrast with Ask.com, Bing, Ecosia, Google, Yahoo and Yahoo), Why DDG had such a low ranking at the time for the 7FG (when it gets its results from Bing) is unclear but suspicious, as it implies their own algorithm had something to do with it as DDG doesn't de-rank results based on servers (like google does), location or google account using the search term.

This was apparently reversed in 2021 for undisclosed reasons, placing Wikispooks over popular forums such as Reddit and a long discussion between Wikipedia editors declaring the article "not notable enough", Wikipedia "not being a newspaper" (although they a current events page) and "a fringe theory" (the sources being, FBI's own documents reported by media such as CNBC), another eerie example of strange censorship on Wikipedia.

Many thanks to our Patrons who cover ~2/3 of our hosting bill. Please join them if you can.