Last week DuckDuckGo CEO Gabriel Weinberg admitted to manipulating search results. I knew they have been going down hill but I was kind of shocked they came right out and admitted this.
On March 9th the CEO posted this on Twitter.
I think we can all agree that what Russia is doing to Ukraine is bad but we don’t want or need some big tech company deciding what I can and can’t see. Who gets to decide what is disinformation and what is not?
If they are willing to manipulate search results here then were else are they willing to do it? We are capable of thinking for ourselves and making our own decisions.
Duckduckgo Censorship – The Fallout
Following that post there was a large number of tweets of disapproval and I would imagine they lost a big part of there user base.
The main reason I found out was because my post called Has DuckDuckGo Gone Woke started to blow up. So I started looking around for DuckDuckGo news.
I would be interested to see the usage numbers for DuckDuckGo and other search engines like Brave for the last two weeks. But I have no clue if that kind of information is available to the public.
Brave Search CEO Responds to Questions About DuckDuckGo
Brendan Eich the CEO of Brave and Brave Search responded to questions on Twitter about what Gabriel Weinberg said.
I really liked his response and I bet a lot of other people did too.
Brave Search is what I’ll recommend to you now.
I wasn’t using DuckDuckGo much after I found out some of the shady things they were doing. But I don’t foresee myself using them at all now after I found out they are in censorship business. Now I’m recommending Searx and Brave Search. Brave Search is probably more user friendly but both have been working well for me over the last year.
Update – 4-18-2022
Over the weekend it looked like they also started to censor file sharing sites as well. But I’m hearing some people say this was a mistake due to using the Bing index. I can’t say one way or another at this point.
What about you?
Did you stop using DuckDuckGo after this news?
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