#DuckDuckGone: DuckDuckGo sabotages self in one tweet
Popular search engine DuckDuckGo seems to have committed self-sabotage after its CEO and Founder Gabriel Weinberg tweeted last week that the company would be down-ranking sites “associated with Russian disinformation".
DuckDuckGo has spent 14 years building a reputation of privacy. In recent years, many have turned to the search engine as an alternative to Google, which manipulates search results to fit its progressive woke agenda.
The search engine, which boasts 100 million users, gained extreme popularity in the COVID era as Big Tech started to crack down on what they call “medical misinformation”. This means that sites like Google restrict a lot of information that run contrary to the mainstream narrative, no matter how science based.
Popular figures like Joe Rogan have praised DuckDuckGo for being a more neutral source of information.
“If I wanted to find specific cases about people who died from vaccine-related injuries, I had to go to DuckDuckGo,” Rogan said in a podcast episode last year. “I wasn’t finding them on Google.”
But now, DuckDuckGo is scuttling its main attraction in favor of taking a stand on foreign policy.
"Like so many others I am sickened by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the gigantic humanitarian crisis it continues to create,” wrote Weinberg in a tweet on Thursday. “#StandWithUkraine️. At DuckDuckGo, we've been rolling out search updates that down-rank sites associated with Russian disinformation.”
Weinberg then said that not only would the company be restricting certain information, but it would also be promoting other information that they consider “quality”.
“In addition to down-ranking sites associated with disinformation, we also often place news modules and information boxes at the top of DuckDuckGo search results (where they are seen and clicked the most) to highlight quality information for rapidly unfolding topics,” continued Weinberg.
The tweet sparked an immediate backlash from disappointed DuckDuckGo users.
“DuckDuckGo destroys their only value proposition with a single tweet,” wrote journalist Tim Pool.
“DuckDuckGo ruins the reason for DuckDuckGo to exist,” tweeted another user. “The CEO of DuckDuckGo just decided to start manipulating results for political reasons, just like Google does.”
“The whole point of DuckDuckGo is for you to NOT do that,” said Jason Hayward in reply to Weinberg’s tweet.
Users also began announcing that they are switching to Brave, another search engine that offers privacy and neutrality in addition to other perks such as cryptocurrency integration.
“I just deleted my #DuckDuckGo app and I'm getting myself set up properly on #Brave,” wrote one user. “I've been using it for a while now but I'm 100% all in now. I refuse to support sensorship [sic].”
“DuckDuckGo's value was in being the unbiased search engine, for when we wanted to see what Google wasn't showing us,” tweeted another. “If they don't have that, they're just worse Google. Guess I'll be switching to Brave #DuckDuckGone.”
In 2018, Weinberg boasted about being the anti-Google.
“[W]hen you search, you expect unbiased results, but that’s not what you get on Google,” he wrote in a Quora post. “On Google, you get results tailored to what they think you’re likely to click on, based on the data profile they’ve built on you over time.”
Last month, Frontline News reported that Google had notified America's Frontline Doctors that the search engine would be down-ranking the site. Google's reason for the decision was that it challenges the COVID narrative, even though America's Frontline Doctors promotes evidence-based medical science with the consensus of hundreds of the world's top physicians.
“Your site appears to violate our medical content policy and contains content primarily aimed at providing medical advice, diagnosis or treatment for commercial purposes," read the notification from Google. “Nor do we allow content from any site that contradicts or runs contrary to scientific or medical consensus and evidence based best practices.”
