So, this is interesting. I wanted to find that essay by @dessalines@lemmy.ml outlining the many issues of Signal and suggested alternatives, but DuckDuckGo had nothing for me. Not on the first page, not on the 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th page.
I thought maybe I just imagined the title, but sure enough, on searching lemmy posts, it was right there. Then I thought “hang on, there’s hardly a mention let alone criticism of signal on any page of those search results!”.
Hmm… the wording might be a bit ambiguous, but let’s compare:
- DuckDuckGo “why not signal” - NOTHING
- Google “why not signal”
- Plenty of results! Dessaline’s essay is first up, followed by a plethora of discussions about the essay on HN, Reddit, lemmys, mastodons, and more. Not evil! …this time.
- DuckDuckGo “why not signal” dessalines
- Okay, so DDG has indexed it just fine. Maybe dessalines is “downranked” à la RT.com?
- DuckDuckGo “why not market socialism”
- Nope, finds one of dessalines’ socialism essays just fine, half way down the page.
All of the following except Gigablast returned a healthy list of results including the original essay:
See other comments though; It’s looking more likely that it’s just bugs in the parsing mixed with an undocumented
notoperator.Still a chance it’s bugs in the (hypothetical) downranking mixed with bugs in the parsing, but nothing conclusively demonstrates that yet.