<story><title>DuckDuckGo “down-rank sites associated with Russian disinformation”</title><url>https://twitter.com/yegg/status/1501716484761997318</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Imnimo</author><text>Suppose I go off and make a search engine, with my own algorithm for ranking search results.  At first it works great.  And then five years later, I find that, by a quirk in my algorithm, I find that a new site has risen to the top of all my results.  This new site was created as a prank, and it contains authoritative-sounding but incorrect answers to common questions.  The results returned are still &lt;i&gt;relevant&lt;/i&gt; to my users, but they are now factually incorrect.&lt;p&gt;Should I simply accept that this site is the correct top result for my users&amp;#x27; queries, since it has been ranked by my unbiased algorithm?  Or should I decide to put my finger on the scale, and redesign my algorithm (possibly by simply reweighting results from this particular site) to change the rankings?&lt;p&gt;Does the answer change if the site is not a prank site, but is propoganda?  Or an earnest-but-incorrect flat earther?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>lynndotpy</author><text>I think the role of a search engine is to index the page, and to help users find what they&amp;#x27;re looking for. It&amp;#x27;s a difficult task that requires somehow quantifying relevance of answers for a given text string.&lt;p&gt;Whatever quantification is used is an implicit kind of &amp;#x27;censorship&amp;#x27;, and the &amp;#x27;relevance&amp;#x27; of results for a given string is inherently a value-judgement. That&amp;#x27;s where the value of a search engine comes from. We choose search engines based off how good its value judgements are.&lt;p&gt;So, I wish DDG released more details here, because this announcement otherwise just sounds like standard practice. Abusing &amp;quot;quirks in the algorithm&amp;quot; is just called SEO, and it&amp;#x27;s been a cat-and-mouse battle between search-engines and abuse. Without details, it&amp;#x27;s harder to interpret this move generously.</text></comment>
<story><title>DuckDuckGo “down-rank sites associated with Russian disinformation”</title><url>https://twitter.com/yegg/status/1501716484761997318</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Imnimo</author><text>Suppose I go off and make a search engine, with my own algorithm for ranking search results.  At first it works great.  And then five years later, I find that, by a quirk in my algorithm, I find that a new site has risen to the top of all my results.  This new site was created as a prank, and it contains authoritative-sounding but incorrect answers to common questions.  The results returned are still &lt;i&gt;relevant&lt;/i&gt; to my users, but they are now factually incorrect.&lt;p&gt;Should I simply accept that this site is the correct top result for my users&amp;#x27; queries, since it has been ranked by my unbiased algorithm?  Or should I decide to put my finger on the scale, and redesign my algorithm (possibly by simply reweighting results from this particular site) to change the rankings?&lt;p&gt;Does the answer change if the site is not a prank site, but is propoganda?  Or an earnest-but-incorrect flat earther?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>kkjjkgjjgg</author><text>I&amp;#x27;d say a good search engine should try to deliver the results the user is looking for. Simple as that. It probably can never be perfect, as the search engine can only guess what the user is looking for. But it can try to do its best.&lt;p&gt;There is no rule that it should rank sites by page rank or number of keywords or whatever.&lt;p&gt;If I don&amp;#x27;t want to see &amp;quot;Russian Disinformation&amp;quot;, I probably won&amp;#x27;t search for it to begin with. On the other hand, maybe I want to see what all the fuss is about - then why should the search engine stand in my way?</text></comment>