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:
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I tried a couple more:
…looks like DDG has an undocumented NOT operator, which for some reason is not deactivated when in a long quote, but is deactivated when the phrase is bracketed in quoted nothings. “” “”
But still doesn’t quite explain how
"why not signal" dessalinesdoes return a result.“regex is hard”, I guess.
Not many results contain signal Search only for dessalines why "signal"?) gives a clue thatnothas a special interpretation and that the parsing algorithm is very confused about what it’s being told to do.Tinfoil hat or Hanlon’s razor? :-P
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