This is something I've thought about a while back. Like Facebook probably has a "maximum number of ads shown to users per post" value. So theoretically, they have a ceiling for how many ads can be bought in a specific time frame before having to increase the ceiling/find new users.
> 4. How You Can Share the Licensed Technology When It Isn’t Part of a Product
> You may only Distribute Licensed Technology (including as modified by you) outside of a Product as expressly permitted by this Section 4.
> a. Sharing of Engine Code
> i. Sharing Engine Code with Another Licensee
You may Distribute Engine Code (including as modified by you) in Source Code or object code to a third party who is separately licensed by us to use the same version of the Engine Code that you are Distributing.
>Any public Distribution of Engine Tools (e.g., intended generally for third parties who are separately licensed by us to use the Engine Code) must take place through a marketplace operated by Epic such as the Unreal Engine Marketplace (e.g., for Distributing a Product’s modding tool or editor to end users) or through a fork of Epic’s GitHub UnrealEngine Network (e.g., for Distributing Source Code).
Yes you can but still need to mention the original licence and copyright notice. But your end product can be proprietary, or released under other license such as the GPLv3.
But you own the modifications of your code so you can still license your derived work as closed as you want as long you as you obey the original MIT license terms which consists only mentionning it and keeping original copyright notice.
That is what all company selling proprietary products that include MIT and BSD licensed codes do. Usually the jist include a file called "third party copyright notice" with the product ad well as an entry in the "about" section of their gui.
It does matter, since the license of the fork you can make has a huge effect on the long-term sustainability of that fork.
If Unreal screws you, then you can fork it to build some features you need for your current project. If Godot screws you, then you can fork it to build some features you need for your current project, cooperate with others on the features they need which also help you, and start a community for Engine-formerly-known-as-Godot-v2 and invest in it as a thriving basis for projects 10 years down the road.
Lemmy is relatively thriving. I doubt this will be the "Great migration", but if Lemmy was able to hold enough users, the next time Reddit makes a big mistake, Lemmy will be a viable alternative by then.
It would be trivial to insert banner ads, or even "native ads" in the response.
LLMs are probably even better suited for monetisation since they have a better understanding of what people want, so a better ad can be shown that is more likely to be clicked.
Do you think people were losing their shit when ChatGPT went into bing simply because web search gets better/easier? No - people were losing their shit because it meant the ads in search are going to be turbo-charged and so that is why the share prices are surging (GOOG up 40% over last 6 months): more ad revenue from "better" ads shown to users.
People still need products to solve problems. When you ask an AI "I have X problem, what products could I use to resolve it?" that is a natural and ethical time to include advertisers into the equation. The LLM can be trained on product specifications, details, and relevant uses, as well as plug in to a review database. Companies can pay to be included in the results of possible solutions and the AI can use the available information to make specific recommendations based on real data.
Hopefully, the future will completely prune intrusive, non-consensual advertising completely and any companies that inject thoughts into our minds will fail.
For some problems. For many more you don't need a "product" at all but advertising still wants to sell you one.
> that is a natural and ethical time to include advertisers into the equation
Not at all. Ads means showing the product of whoever is paying the most or at least preferring paying products over others. Ad-free suggestions means showing the product best suited for the task. If those two match you are defrauding the advertiser by making them pay to show what you would have shown without ads. If they don't match you are degrading the service for the users.
It is simply not true that we have censored anything or made ourselves "the arbiters of truth." I realized I previously explained how our news rankings work very poorly on Twitter but I subsequently put out a clarification in this help page with a much clearer (and detailed) explanation of how our news rankings actually work: https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/ne...
From that page: "When we apply our own ranking signals we do so in a strictly non-political manner, meaning we don’t evaluate or otherwise take into account any potential political bias or leanings of websites in our search result rankings."
That page states: "To identify these rare, extreme cases, we rely on multiple non-governmental and non-political organizations that specialize in objectively assessing journalistic standards."
Is there any transparency (an up-to-date and publicly-accessible list, for example) regarding exactly how many of these "extreme cases" there are, and which specific web sites are involved?
Is there any transparency regarding who exactly these "multiple non-governmental and non-political organizations" are, too?
For each "extreme case", is there any transparency regarding the assessments that were considered?
I abandoned DuckDuckGo during the Tank Man fiasco, but recently started giving it a chance every now and then. The fact that some page loads figuratively take a literal god damn eternity in Firefox on Android (I'm talking double-digit seconds) put the kibosh on that, Google is still instantaneous.
First off, we do not remove any results ourselves for political purposes and in fact we have been banned in China for many years for that very reason. What you're referring to was a temporary bug in our image search results from Bing that they promptly fixed. If they hadn't fixed it promptly then we would have taken further action. That seems hardly cause to abandon us.
That said, super slow results I can understand :). But they are super fast according to all our metrics, so something else must be going on. There was a bug in DarkReader recently causing our page to be slow that was recently fixed -- not sure if that is related. In any case, if you want to email me (my email is my profile) then we can try to get to the bottom of it.
If Bing censors the results, DDG is automatically going to do it too. I don't think yall have your own web results. You buy it from Microsoft if I'm not wrong. If bing serves ddg censored results how would ddg try to "in-censor" the results??? is it even possible?
We actually always had a bunch of our own stuff, and still do, as well as work with other partners. For example, the number one module on mobile is local, and we don't get any local stuff from Bing at all. Similarly, the number one module desktop is knowledge graph, and we don't get that from Bing at all either. And yes, you can re-insert results if they are indeed censored, but Bing doesn't really intentionally censor anything either as far as we can tell or we'd here a lot more about it. Occasionally something drops out of the index for some kind of bug reason that gets fixed.
Lately the main thing that's been greatly hurting DDG's usability for me is the search results being influenced by geolocation. It's quite frustrating to see completely unrelated search results that just so happen to have my city's name in their title (especially when I searched in a completely different language). Plus I frequently use proxies which makes the entire scheme meaningless either way. At least a way to switch to non-localized results would be nice to have.
(As for my more subjective opinion, a privacy-first search engine looking at your real-world location by default might be making the wrong compromise in the first place.)
Could you make it opt-in? I suppose some people want to go to DDG to find the weather, but I never would. If I want a local business, I open Maps and search. I would never want any location data to influence any of my searches.
as companies go mainstream every company adopts the same methods. As time passes by ddg is starting to feel more like the YBG (Yandex Bing Google) search engines and less like a privacy friendly search engine.
DuckDuckGo censored Russian news sites during the invasion of Ukraine. I can’t say I experienced the censorship, or that I’ve confirmed if Russian websites are still censored, but this is the reason I stopped using DuckDuckGo. Which was quite disappointing, because they had very fast, not annoying search results. But I just can’t use fast and good looking, if I can’t modulate my search filters (have filters that are always on regardless of what I prompt for).
> Last week, Gabriel Weinberg announced that his company would be combating Russian disinformation. “Like so many others I am sickened by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the gigantic humanitarian crisis it continues to create,” he wrote on Twitter. “At DuckDuckGo, we’ve been rolling out search updates that down-rank sites associated with Russian disinformation.” Although the move was more or less in line with how other major online platforms have been responding to the Russian invasion, pushback from DuckDuckGo’s user base has been pronounced. More than 30,000 users on Twitter have responded to Weinberg’s post with largely negative comments about the decision, accusing the company of engaging in censorship and injecting bias into search results. Breitbart ran a piece attacking DuckDuckGo as “Diet Google,” and high-profile libertarian YouTubers have also told their followers to stop using it.
I had poor word choice that got grossly misinterpreted, so I subsequently wrote the help article referenced above (https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/ne...) to give clarity: "we don’t evaluate or otherwise take into account any potential political bias or leanings of websites in our search result rankings."
In reality we never censored anything, nor do we have a disinformation/"truth" detector, nor did we go looking for any Russian narrative (or any other narrative for that matter). Instead, we just have essentially a spam detector that had detected some spam from Russian state sites. That's it.
> we’ve been rolling out search updates that down-rank sites associated with Russian disinformation
> In reality we never censored anything, nor do we have a disinformation/"truth" detector
Sorry, those are conflicting statements.
I cannot determine which of the two statements are true.
I assume filtering search spam is complicated. I can believe the narrative where Russian disinformation actually resulted in what you call more "news spam" (i.e. news sites that have recently gamed their own search rank).
But it genuinely felt like you wanted to affect the war, and your leverage was "suppress Russian lies", which incidentally suppresses everyone's perception of what's going on. Not even Switzerland was neutral in the invasion of Ukraine, so I understand the incentives.
But you can't both support politically motivated filtering and claim to be neutral.
Let's say the real purpose was always to reduce "news spam", and Russia increased their news spam when invading Ukraine. Let's say both DuckDuckGo's search quality and trustworthiness depends on being mostly neutral. Given your feedback in this thread, I'll continue to recommend DuckDuckGo to friends. And I'll continue to use Kagi myself for now. :-)
I am going to call out this lie every time you post it: spam is not a synonym for misinformation. This was a disingenuous lie seven months ago when you copy pasted this response and it is no less different today.
Relevance and truth are two different things. It is not your job to be making calls on the second one, and I find your willful conflation of these concepts, and continuing attempts to deflect from the fact that you have done so to be a bit gross.
I never said they are synonyms. What I am saying is we are acting on spam and not misinformation. We do not have a misinformation/disinformation/truth/lie detector or whatever you want to call it. We do not evaluate individual stories or narratives for truth and never have. We are not an "arbiter of truth" in any way. We did not go looking for anything Russian or for any other country in particular. We did not go looking for any narrative at all. And highest level as I quoted from the News Rankings page, "we don’t evaluate or otherwise take into account any potential political bias or leanings of websites in our search result rankings."
We do not have a misinformation/disinformation/truth/lie detector or whatever you want to call it. We do not evaluate individual stories or narratives for truth and never have.
No, going by your own website, you outsource that judgment call to an unnamed and unaccountable list of third parties that apply unnamed and unauditable "objective" "journalistic standards" (which are not things that exist), which will then result in entire sites showing lower in the rankings an unspecified amount with no notification to the user that you have done this.
If this was actually about spam, there would be no need to bring "journalistic standards" into the equation. Spam is spam regardless of who it comes from. There would be no need to be so coy about all of this.
It is about spam. There are actually many flavors of spam and they each need their own spam detector. For example parked domain spam vs. adult content spam vs. copycat site spam vs. content-farm spam vs. news spam.
This is about news spam. The referenced organizations are evaluating a supposed news site's process on how they go about making news ("journalistic standards") and in particular what we care about is whether there really is any process/standard at all. That is, we're only looking for the very few sites that everyone agrees has no news process and is just a site purporting to be a news site but isn't in reality. From the page: "a well-documented history of a site’s extremely low journalistic standards, correlated with: routinely using spam or clickbait to artificially inflate traffic, consistently publishing stories without citing sources, censoring stories due to operating with very limited press freedom, and misleading readers about who owns, funds, and authors stories for the site." Spamming search engines to game rankings is the primary criteria here.
However, we note that "Many sites may occasionally do one or more of these things, but we take action very rarely, only in the most extreme cases." We're talking tiny amounts of domains here because "we must see at least three of these organizations independently assess a site as having extremely low journalistic standards and also see that none of these organizations have assessed the same site as having even somewhat robust journalistic standards." That means if the site has any pulse of a real news site then it doesn't get counted as spam.
And it also says for these spam sites: "We trust that users can find the right information for themselves, so even in these rare cases we do not remove these sites from our search results page. Additionally, impacted sites are not moved so far down in the results that they are effectively removed."
If this is truly a site by site blacklist, and it is truly this small, and truly limited to only the most extreme cases, you realize that even the slightest crumb of transparency would invalidate most of the complaints, right? This is why you are getting dragged repeatedly, all of the possible reasons for being this cagey about this reflect terribly on DDG. Your FAQ page is loaded with what Wikipedia would call "weasel words".
- Why can you not publish who these organizations are and what the "objective" standards they all use are?
- Why can you not notify users when they have entered a query that has results subjected to this rank modification? (And/or give them the ability to reverse it?)
- Why can you not just publish the naughty list?
- Why can you not publish anything objectively verifiable about this entire process?
That page is being transparent about how exactly it works, which is why I wrote it. I'm sorry you don't like the words I chose, but they were not chosen to "weasel" out of anything, but to be accurate, which is why I keep quoting them. We can consider more transparency for sure, and duly noted.
I can't find anything except some half-assed clickbait from the New York Times last year. First they paint DuckDuckGo as the favored search engine for the far-right, then say far right people are furious that it's censoring Russian propaganda
I guess that reading between the lines, it could be inferred that some wrongthink is being censored, but I couldn't find any actual info
They ended their partnership with Yandex, a Russian search engine, over the war. They also started downplaying Russian search results as a method of preventing misinformation. This led to a bit of controversy because it makes one question, if they are willing to censor over one political issue, what else are they censoring?
To be clear, we do not censor. Per the help article referenced above (https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/ne...): "we don’t evaluate or otherwise take into account any potential political bias or leanings of websites in our search result rankings."
Tried some free SEO audits, and they website is getting scores in the 80s. But what is really making me optimistic is me testing it for myself. Googling Laravel (in our language) for example, the website is the first result, above Laravel's official website and Wikipedia. And in the first page for "Godot", "How to learn programming", "Cloud Computing", "Vue JS", and more.
I will start my new business as a subdomain, leaving (and adding) to the existing articles.
