Why I won't be dumping DuckDuckGo over Ukraine

The CEO of web search engine DuckDuckGo made headlines this week, by suggesting that the site would start down-ranking sites that actively spread "disinformation" about the situation in Ukraine. The announcement was met with outrage, much of which was said to come from "far right" sources.

I don't think you need to subscribe to a right-wing ideology to find the idea of a web search service indulging in censorship a little discomforting. I'm far from being an anti-establishment thinker myself, and a person of middle-of-the-road political views. Still, I find the DuckDuckGo decision a little worrisome.

DDG and right-wing conspiracists

It isn't entirely clear to me why DDG ever became the favoured search engine for right-wing conspiracists. Partly, I suppose, it's because the more mainstream search services (Google, Bing) are thought to be subtly promoting an establishment, pro-globalization message. More pragmatically, though, conspiracists tend to think that their habits are being tracked by agents of the state, for nefarious purposes. There's no doubt that users' habits are being tracked by Google, et al.: the companies are perfectly open about this. Whether users are tracked by "big government", however, is far more speculative.

Whatever the reasons, DDG does have a reputation for being favoured by right-wing conspiracists, and it does seem to be the more conspiracy-minded individuals who have been most outspoken in criticism of the recent announcement.

Search engines as censors

DDG claims that it is not "censoring" content -- if you search long enough, they say, even low-ranked pages will turn up. However, sites that are ranked so low as to require extended searching are effectively censored, even if this is unintentional.

It's a mistake, though, to think that any mainstream search engine is non-ranking. Such a search would be unusable, because there are so many useless websites around. By "useless" I mean that they contain little that is of interest to most people, or that useful content is hugely outweighed by advertising or click-bait. There are probably millions of websites in the world whose text contains the words "Ukraine" and "conflict" (including this one now). If a user enters a search for these terms, the search results could simply be returned in random order; but would that be helpful to the user? Probably not -- we use a search engine because we don't want to look through millions of hits. We generally need the search engine to order them in some way.

DuckDuckGo has always down-rated what it thinks of as non-useful web sites. There are various ways to measure usefulness, of course. Google's "page rank" algorithm uses factors like the number of links to a page, to determine its usefulness in a somewhat neutral way. Such an algorithm stands or falls, of course, on whether "number of links" really is a measure of usefulness. The Google algorithm tends to favour large, corporate sites, simply because they are widely linked. This results in anomalies where sites that receive many visitors can be ranked lower than sites that receive few, simply on the basis of corporate linking policies. Google's "censor" is, therefore, pro-corporation rather than pro-individual.

Some of Google's other ranking criteria are equally questionable. For example, Google openly down-ranks sites that do not offer HTTPS (encrypted) communication. This is so even for sites that do not receive, or handle, any private data. Again, this favours business sites -- which usually have a need for privacy -- over academic and informational ones.

It is not clear to me what specific processes DDG uses, to decide which sites are of higher quality. Strangely, DDG seems to be even less transparent about this than Google is.

Is misinformation a measure of "search quality"?

We've established, I think, that all web search engines apply some ranking criteria, which will favour some sites over others, and that we need them to do so. DDG says that down-ranking sites that contain "misinformation" is simply a way to provide better-quality search results. It's no different, they say, than down-ranking sites that contain nothing but click-bait.

This is a disingenuous argument. While factors like the number of links and number of page visits can be assessed objectively, "disinformation" can not. Nor, really, can factual accuracy -- there are just too many epistemological subtleties. Rene Descartes claimed centuries ago that the only fact of which any of us can be absolutely certain is that we are conscious. Every other sense impression could be introduced into our minds by an "evil demon". This remains true today: we receive a constant stream of information, and much of it is untrustworthy. The so-called "Mandela effect" demonstrates how large numbers of people can believe something that they could easily find to be false, if they took the trouble to check. If we humans cannot determine objectively what is "true", what chance does a search engine have?

But putting epistemology aside...

We would be paralysed as a species if there was truly no such thing as an "objective reality" that most of us could agree on, most of the time. Despite the problems of defining what true knowledge really amounts to, we do somehow manage to stumble through, sometimes achieving admirable things. While it may indeed by true that we cannot know anything for certain beyond Descartes' cogito, ergo sum, many things are sufficiently close to certain that, for all practical intents and purposes, they can be treated as such. I can't prove that the moon isn't made of green cheese, but it isn't something I worry about. I can't prove that the situation in Ukraine was caused by the unprovoked aggression of a Russian egomaniac, but I'm as certain as I need to be, and so is almost everybody else that isn't subject to a constant stream of propaganda.

So, while DDG may be acting beyond it's remit by choosing to favour a particular position on Ukraine, I really can't bring myself to condemn them for that. That, however, is not the reason I won't be dumping DDG.

DDG's value proposition is personal privacy, not accuracy

I've been using DDG for as long as it has existed. I have encouraged other people to do the same. The search results I get from Google are, to me, nearly always more immediately useful than those I get from DDG, but I still use DDG.

I use it because DDG emphasises personal privacy. The service does not record user interactions, or store them. It has nothing to sell to advertisers that is specific to me. If I search DDG for "latex" (the typesetting program), I don't see advertisements for condoms for the next three weeks. I have no real secrets -- I don't need them -- but it seems very important to me that people who really do need privacy (journalists, victims of abuse...) can get it.

Most mainstream search engines are destroyers of privacy, and are part of a wider privacy-destroying business culture. I don't use DDG because its search results are less "biased" or more accurate than anybody else's, because I've never had any reason to think they were. I use it because the notion of personal privacy is, I think, one that society ought to respect.

So, by all means, complain about DDG's stance on Ukraine. If, that is, your conscience will allow you to do so. But don't stop supporting the only reliable search engine in the world that is run by people who respect personal privacy.