I see moves like this as seriously harmful. By removing popular pirate sites (already shady enough), search engines steer traffic to even worse places: referral spam blogs, mirrors with malware-laden ads, abandoned and spam-filled forums, etc. Boosting these sites directly aids malware campaigns like SocGholish that use poorly secured blogs and forums to spread trojans that are then used to give access to ransomware operators, like WastedLocker (which has no qualms with targeting hospitals). But Hollywood's imaginary lost revenues justify any unintended consequences, right?
> Who remembers when TPB were going to buy Sealand in order to host trackers out of the reach of authorities?
> Isn't Sealand just a couple of underwater charges planted by some clandestine operatives away from not existing?
> I'd love to see the day we're launching missiles at foreign ships over copyright violations.
Speculating about borderline terrorist behavior is fun but it would surprise no one if it actually happened. Copyright is "legitimate" and so such operations would not even be clandestine. The copyright industry has access to actual police forces who respond with extreme violence whenever someone threatens the artificial scarcity of their imaginary property even though the perpretators are not violent themselves.
Harmful for whom? For common folks, who are trying to download a movie but get a virus instead - yes, very harmful. For the parties who have a say about the situation - not really: Google/Bing/DDG lose nothing (given that all search engines behave the same), "copyright holders" win.
This is a part of the effort to decrease visibility of piracy and to drive to the "freak" zone: "piracy is illegal and dangerous, so better go watch some Netflix, kids!".
And it has been successful so far: how many teenagers you know who pirate stuff? A few generations ago it was normal, but now it isn't.
Hey, it just hit me: Is there a search engine (meta or otherwise out there) where I can up/downvote sites (or otherwise customize the rankings)?
Let's say I search for something HTML/JS/CSS related, I would generally want to prioritize MDN over W3Schools, but now I'm at the mercy of whatever the search engine decides is higher relevancy.
I realize dynamic search results could be quite heavy, but it wouldn't necessarily have to be...
Or if I'm just tired of CNN results when searching for news topics I could just downvote them and get other news sites prioritized.
I don't want a search engine to choose these preferences/filters for me, and I don't want "unfiltered" stuff like conspiracy theories in my top hits either just because they're popular.
Unfortunately any such scheme nowadays would be a lucrative target (to say the least) for bots and mechanical Turks. It would basically just become another SEO metric.
Instead you can exclude a specific site using "-site:example.com". This works on at least DDG and Google. Now, if only search engines would let me save those exclusions as preferences (even in a cookie, in case of privacy-focused search engines like DDG) I could blacklist a whole bunch of high-SEO crap sites. That would be a game changer: one black pattern and you're out of my search results.
Haven't tried it, but the architecture of Yacy probably allows it: crawlers everywhere have the index data, and you can define the importance of this or that criteria from your own portal
Is the government so inept that it can’t do it’s policing itself? Why are search companies being forced to police the internet for the police? If there was a business down the street doing illegal gambling, I would not say “hey let’s just stop buses from taking people there.” Hell no. Any decent police would go stop that business from operating, not go to the bus companies taking people there.
"illegal" means different things regionally. One locale's legal content is considered elsewhere in another. We don't all want to be bound by China's laws. And even in America, most laws are at the state level (e.g., ads for marijuana are OK in much of the country, but definitely not for Texas), so we wouldn't even want to resort to "American" standards.
People can run both VPN services and pirate websites which merely index torrents in jurisdictions that wont stop such. Then when bob shares files with sue over their respective torrent clients all their packets travel overseas before reaching each other.
These tools aren't harder for end users to use than netflix or Hulu. VPN services tend to provide a gui app with a big ol button that says connect and a tray icon that turns from red to green.
They pretty much have to be content with trying to keep the bus from going there because its all they have. The smarter plan is still continuing to make Netflix and Steam awesome so people don't want to bother to pirate.
Most likely. It’s also funny to see TorrentFreak write:
> Unlike DuckDuckGo, Bing notes at the bottom of the page that “some results have been removed.”
The reason DuckDuckGo doesn’t display similar notes is likely because they don’t know any sites have been removed (since Bing’s API doesn’t include this info). Copyright holders have no need to contact DDG and other Bing wrappers, they just need to get Microsoft to remove the websites from their API.
Just as Microsoft and Apple would no doubt have even more locked down OSes if there wasn’t a fallback of Linux, so the more competition for people’s attention that is not controlled by large corporations, the less bargaining and coercive power they will have.
The best long term solution to overbearing copyright is to make people not depend on salaries for living.
Because else, all other things like talent being equal, a lot of the best content will be from those that have the income/time (afforded by income)/resources (afforded by income)/practice time (afforded by income)/etc to create it, and thus be given for pay, not with a permissive license.
Especially true for things that have different "production values" that cost money (movies, music, animation, and so on) - might not apply to e.g. poetry or other arts, or, in your example, to someone drawining comics (which can be done on the cheap).
I made an app that lets you compare duck-duck-go results with that of google, side by side [0][1].
One thing I found is how bad ddg is at removing conspiracy theories and other misinformation. Google is, for better or for worse, much more managed. For instance, search "are vaccines dangerous", google replies with .org and .gov sites, while ddg promotes dangersofvaccines.com. Even if you search "dangers of vaccines" in google, it still never produces that site.
>One thing I found is how bad ddg is at removing conspiracy theories and other misinformation.
In all kinds of regimes, from dictatorships to western democracies, all kinds of valid (and sometimes proven in court, or historically, later) stories have been officially called "conspiracy theories" and/or misinformation.
And inversely, in all kinds of regimes, from dictatorships to western democracies, all kinds of bogus state propaganda has been officially called "the truth".
I'd rather not have a search engine decide for me...
Speaking as somebody who goes with mainstream expert opinion by default, I nevertheless think there's enough censorship from the big tech providers, at the very least let's have such "filter out stuff that annoys us" initiatives as optional.
Cool, I’ll see about doing searches with it more often to get a better read on quality differences :)
It’s interesting to me that despite the widespread complaint about the bad quality of DDG (which I, excepting long-tail results, disagree with), at least for my quick checks of "ddg" and "css center text" from your suggestions, I prefer the DDG results in both cases (especially for the css search).
The first page of the US search results: vaccines.gov, chop.edu, cdc.gov, livescience.com, scientificamerican.com, nytimes.com, newsweek.com, healthline.com, who.int, mayoclinic.org. That's a good mix of the official outlets and some popular explanations. Results change of you specify a different region or no region at all. For reference, these are results in Italian, many of them are rebuttals of a minister claiming that vaccines are useless and dangerous: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=vaccini+pericolosi&t=fpas&ia=web
But if you try to search English terms in a non-English region, expect ask kind of SEO garbage.
That's a cool site, you should submit it to "Show HN" if you haven't already :)
Not sure if your site is taking the location into account, but when I do the "are vaccines dangerous" search on the search-compare website, I get .gov and .edu domains as the top 5 hits or so.
It's not a conspiracy theory that people are hurt by vaccines. That's a fact. The question is, are people hurt more by the vaccine or the disease itself. From the evidence I've researched, I think it's the vaccines that are more dangerous.
[+] [-] resfirestar|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] matheusmoreira|5 years ago|reply
In their minds, yes. They're absolutely self-righteous about their data monopoly.
We had a thread about a content decryption key leak some days ago:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25078096
Here's some fun posts...
> Who remembers when TPB were going to buy Sealand in order to host trackers out of the reach of authorities?
> Isn't Sealand just a couple of underwater charges planted by some clandestine operatives away from not existing?
> I'd love to see the day we're launching missiles at foreign ships over copyright violations.
Speculating about borderline terrorist behavior is fun but it would surprise no one if it actually happened. Copyright is "legitimate" and so such operations would not even be clandestine. The copyright industry has access to actual police forces who respond with extreme violence whenever someone threatens the artificial scarcity of their imaginary property even though the perpretators are not violent themselves.
[+] [-] yakireev|5 years ago|reply
This is a part of the effort to decrease visibility of piracy and to drive to the "freak" zone: "piracy is illegal and dangerous, so better go watch some Netflix, kids!".
And it has been successful so far: how many teenagers you know who pirate stuff? A few generations ago it was normal, but now it isn't.
[+] [-] spurgu|5 years ago|reply
Let's say I search for something HTML/JS/CSS related, I would generally want to prioritize MDN over W3Schools, but now I'm at the mercy of whatever the search engine decides is higher relevancy.
I realize dynamic search results could be quite heavy, but it wouldn't necessarily have to be...
Or if I'm just tired of CNN results when searching for news topics I could just downvote them and get other news sites prioritized.
I don't want a search engine to choose these preferences/filters for me, and I don't want "unfiltered" stuff like conspiracy theories in my top hits either just because they're popular.
[+] [-] l0b0|5 years ago|reply
Instead you can exclude a specific site using "-site:example.com". This works on at least DDG and Google. Now, if only search engines would let me save those exclusions as preferences (even in a cookie, in case of privacy-focused search engines like DDG) I could blacklist a whole bunch of high-SEO crap sites. That would be a game changer: one black pattern and you're out of my search results.
[+] [-] rakoo|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] freediver|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] smaryjerry|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] CWuestefeld|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] michaelmrose|5 years ago|reply
These tools aren't harder for end users to use than netflix or Hulu. VPN services tend to provide a gui app with a big ol button that says connect and a tray icon that turns from red to green.
They pretty much have to be content with trying to keep the bus from going there because its all they have. The smarter plan is still continuing to make Netflix and Steam awesome so people don't want to bother to pirate.
[+] [-] wmf|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] snarfy|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] abc-xyz|5 years ago|reply
> Unlike DuckDuckGo, Bing notes at the bottom of the page that “some results have been removed.”
The reason DuckDuckGo doesn’t display similar notes is likely because they don’t know any sites have been removed (since Bing’s API doesn’t include this info). Copyright holders have no need to contact DDG and other Bing wrappers, they just need to get Microsoft to remove the websites from their API.
[+] [-] s9w|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ximeng|5 years ago|reply
E.g. David Revoy creates art using open source software: https://www.davidrevoy.com/
Just as Microsoft and Apple would no doubt have even more locked down OSes if there wasn’t a fallback of Linux, so the more competition for people’s attention that is not controlled by large corporations, the less bargaining and coercive power they will have.
[+] [-] coldtea|5 years ago|reply
Because else, all other things like talent being equal, a lot of the best content will be from those that have the income/time (afforded by income)/resources (afforded by income)/practice time (afforded by income)/etc to create it, and thus be given for pay, not with a permissive license.
Especially true for things that have different "production values" that cost money (movies, music, animation, and so on) - might not apply to e.g. poetry or other arts, or, in your example, to someone drawining comics (which can be done on the cheap).
[+] [-] thotsBgone|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mci|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ffpip|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] BlueTemplar|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wmf|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gnufx|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 18af219e|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bko|5 years ago|reply
One thing I found is how bad ddg is at removing conspiracy theories and other misinformation. Google is, for better or for worse, much more managed. For instance, search "are vaccines dangerous", google replies with .org and .gov sites, while ddg promotes dangersofvaccines.com. Even if you search "dangers of vaccines" in google, it still never produces that site.
[0] https://search-compare.netlify.app/
[1] https://github.com/breeko/search-compare
[+] [-] miked85|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] coldtea|5 years ago|reply
In all kinds of regimes, from dictatorships to western democracies, all kinds of valid (and sometimes proven in court, or historically, later) stories have been officially called "conspiracy theories" and/or misinformation.
And inversely, in all kinds of regimes, from dictatorships to western democracies, all kinds of bogus state propaganda has been officially called "the truth".
I'd rather not have a search engine decide for me...
[+] [-] mellosouls|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] textgel|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Semaphor|5 years ago|reply
It’s interesting to me that despite the widespread complaint about the bad quality of DDG (which I, excepting long-tail results, disagree with), at least for my quick checks of "ddg" and "css center text" from your suggestions, I prefer the DDG results in both cases (especially for the css search).
[+] [-] srg0|5 years ago|reply
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=are+vaccines+dangerous&t=fpas&ia=w...
The first page of the US search results: vaccines.gov, chop.edu, cdc.gov, livescience.com, scientificamerican.com, nytimes.com, newsweek.com, healthline.com, who.int, mayoclinic.org. That's a good mix of the official outlets and some popular explanations. Results change of you specify a different region or no region at all. For reference, these are results in Italian, many of them are rebuttals of a minister claiming that vaccines are useless and dangerous: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=vaccini+pericolosi&t=fpas&ia=web
But if you try to search English terms in a non-English region, expect ask kind of SEO garbage.
[+] [-] abc-xyz|5 years ago|reply
You should probably blame Microsoft for that. I mean DDG is just a Bing API wrapper.
[+] [-] diggan|5 years ago|reply
Not sure if your site is taking the location into account, but when I do the "are vaccines dangerous" search on the search-compare website, I get .gov and .edu domains as the top 5 hits or so.
[+] [-] aezakmi|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] disown|5 years ago|reply
Can't be any worse than google since they give preferential treatment to conspiracy theorists like CNN, MBNBC, Foxnews, etc.
> For instance, search "are vaccines dangerous", google replies with .org and .gov sites
So google should just push government and special interest groups funded by the wealthy?
> Even if you search "dangers of vaccines" in google, it still never produces that site.
You make it sound like that's a good thing...
Holy christ man. You are right, let google just show government sites. Big Brother knows best.
[+] [-] ghthor|5 years ago|reply