Fed Up With Google, Conspiracy Theorists Turn to DuckDuckGo

[douglas9]

On an episode of Joe Rogan’s popular podcast last year, he turned to a topic that has gripped right-wing communities and other Americans who feel skeptical about the pandemic: search engines.

“If I wanted to find specific cases about people who died from vaccine-related injuries, I had to go to DuckDuckGo,” Mr. Rogan said, referring to the small privacy-focused search engine. “I wasn’t finding them on Google.”

Praise for DuckDuckGo has become a popular refrain during the pandemic among right-wing social media influencers and conspiracy theorists who question Covid-19 vaccines and push discredited coronavirus treatments. Some have posted screenshots showing that DuckDuckGo appears to surface more links favorable to their views than Google does.

In addition to Mr. Rogan, who has recently been at the center of an outcry about misinformation on his podcast, the search engine has received ringing endorsements from some of the world’s most-downloaded conservative podcasters, including Ben Shapiro and Dan Bongino.


https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/23/technology/duckduckgo-conspiracy-theories.html

[underpants]

1. They advertise a lot on right wing radio

During drive time too.

I “tested” it and I can misspell something different ways and I still get the target in the first few options.

[Scrivener7]

2. I've used DuckDuckGo for years. It doesn't do anything right wing when I use it.

[canetoad]

4. Yeah, same here

I like it.

[Casady1]

3. I sold enterprise search

and understand the algorithms. The way google works is the most popular results( in hits or times that result was viewed) comes up first. It is not based on metadata. We actually tried to sell our technology to Google in 2007 and ironically 5 years later Google used us for their litigation. They said to us metadata shmetdata. There was a google box they sold for a short time to corporations. It failed miserably.

People do pay to get their site on top. One hint that you should know about Google. The more you define what you want to see in your results in the search box the better it works. You might have to put in a sentence. Also, some of your best info is on page 3 and 4 of the results.