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Issue 632 • 25 May – 7 June 2022Back in March, DuckDuckGo was criticised
by some users for ‘down-ranking’ websites
that published disinformation about
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The search
engine was accused of straying from its
promise to provide only “unbiased results”.
DuckDuckGo’s CEO and founder, Gabriel
Weinberg, responded to the backlash by
stating that: “We are not ‘purging’ any
media outlets from results. Anyone can
verify this by searching for an outlet and
see it come up in results” (www.snipca.
com/41867). He also said that the nature
of sites disseminating state-sponsored
Russian content made them “inherentlymore spammy relative to independent
media outlets”, which is why DuckDuckGo
down-ranked – but didn’t remove – them.
It’s possible that the decision to down-
rank these sites was actually made by
Microsoft, which announced in February
(www.snipca.com/41869) that Bing
(which DuckDuckGo uses for results)
would only return links from Kremlin-
backed news sources RT and Sputnik
“when a user clearly intends to navigate to
those pages”.
So, no, DuckDuckGo isn’t censoring
search results, but is classifying sites that
onion address (www.snipca.com/41877) spread disinformation as ‘low quality’.
or select the DuckDuckGoOnion option
below the address bar when you type a
search query. To always use the onion
version, go to Settings, then Search and
select DuckDuckGoOnion as your
Default Search Engine (see screenshot
above). Be aware that, because of the
roundabout way Tor works, DuckDuckGo’s
onion site is slower than its standard one.
Switch off Brave Search’s
local results
By default, Brave Search displays
‘anonymous’ local results for your
searches so that if, for example, you
search for Covid testing near me, it will
show a map of nearby test centres, above
a list of relevant web pages. Brave says
Is DuckDuckGo censoring search results?
that it uses your IP address to provide this
information, but “without sharing that IP
address and without storing it”. If that
doesn’t reassure you, and you’d rather be
completely anonymous than reveal your
(approximate) location, you can disable
the feature. To do so, click the
map-marker icon that appears in the
top-right corner of your search results
then switch off ‘Anonymous local results’
(see screenshot below left). Alternatively,
click the Settings cog, select ‘Show more’
and disable it there. You can turn the
option back on when you need to find
something in your area. Another option
is to simply click ‘Revert to global’ above
to hide localised results.Remove clutter from
Startpage
Although Startpage doesn’t
target you with ads, it shows
promotional messages on its
homepage and next to search
results (currently pushing its
Privacy Protection extension).
You can remove these
annoyances by clicking the
‘Hide promotional messaging’
link in the bottom-right
corner of the homepage, but
they’ll appear again nexttime you visit.
To permanently banish promotional
messages from Startpage, click the menu
button in the top-right corner and choose
Settings, then Appearance. Switch off the
‘Promotional messaging’ option (see
screenshot above) to give Startpage a
much cleaner look.
The Appearance options also let you
disable Instant Answers to stop Startpage
showing widgets next to search results.
These display Wikipedia summaries,
news, weather, maps and other content
relevant to your search, but are a Google-
style feature we can personally do
without.DuckDuckGo has an extra-private ‘onion’
version you can only use in Tor Browser
You can easily switch Brave Search’s anonymous local search
results off or on
Clean up Startpage by disabling promotional
messages and Instant AnswersSearch
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