So, this is interesting. I wanted to find that essay by @[email protected] 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:

• Qwant “why not signal”
• Bing “why not signal”
• Brave “why not signal”
• Gigablast “why not signal”
• Mojeek “why not signal”
• Startpage “why not signal”
• Yandex “why not signal”
• Paulgo (searxng) “why not signal”