No it doesn't. Here's the comment in full:

** We actually do not intentionally censor any news results, meaning media outlets are not being removed or their stories displayed so far down in the results they are effectively removed. That is, unless legally prohibited, you should find all media outlets in our results, and they should generally show on top if you search for them by name or domain name. If you are seeing otherwise, please let me know and we will investigate.

A search engine's primary job is to rank results, trying to put results that most quickly and accurately answer the query on top. We do this ranking in a strictly non-partisan manner. Ranking for news-related searches is particularly difficult because for most news stories there are often hundreds of media outlets covering the same story, many with similar relevancy in terms of keyword matching and popularity. As such, we look to another ranking factor to ensure just the top of the results aren't taken by obviously very low-quality news results so that users have more sources of relevant, high-quality news results to compare and choose between.

The non-partisan factor we've found to help accomplish this is a rare, but well-documented history of a site's complete lack of news reporting standards, such as 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, or misleading readers about who owns, funds, and authors stories for the site. And since we do not censor sites, even state-sponsored media in countries with very limited press freedom, these sites will still show up in results, and even on top like when you search for them directly. **

With that context, RT is a media outlet with "very limited press freedom" where journalists must censor their articles or else face jail time, or worse. And RT still shows up in our results, and on top if you search for it directly, e.g., https://duckduckgo.com/?q=rt+ukraine&ia=web

The concern comes down to how that evaluation of a website is made. It’s the same way people can’t really accept fact checkers because “who fact checks the fact checkers?” With the news ranking it is who evaluates the evaluators. Without an option for users to switch off the part of the algorithm that includes evaluating for journalistic truth (as I will summarize those non partisan factor’s goal) people will always feel like the possibility of manipulation will always be there.

> And RT still shows up in our results, and on top if you search for it directly, e.g

Strange, but RT does not show up in DDG for me. Not by using your link, not even by searching "Russia Today" on it. The first results I get are Al Jazeera or Fox News. No Russia Today at all. How's that?

If you are in the EU, distributing RT (and Sputnik News) is banned in the EU, e.g., see https://www.protocol.com/bulletins/eu-sanctions-google-searc...

I'm in the EU, yes, but I don't understand that either. Because there are search engines, freely available in the EU, that didn't honour that questionable request about banning websites.

So, for me, DDG is hiding some results while other search engines that I can use in the EU, do not.

What EU-based search engines are you referring to?

I was not talking about EU-based search engines, I was talking about search engines not applying censorship that I can use from the EU. And as far as I know, DDG is not EU-based either.

Brave Search, just to give one example.

If that's the case, why would you accede to the EU's demands? Would you geoblock search results in China if the CCP deemed certain content or content providers illegal?

We are banned in China and have no assets there.

You're splitting hairs when you say down ranking is not censorship - you know full well the impact to a websites traffic once it gets out of the top 3 results let along the 1st page of results.

The fact you started censoring "Russian media outlets" right after the start of the war shows the political nature of your decision, those "limited press freedoms" weren't a concern until Mar 22.

Do you publish the decision making process for how the "non-partisan" decisions on censorship are made - or is this another blackbox? I'm sure Dailymail, New York Post and Al Jazeera are all down-ranked too, considering they meet your "non-partisan factors" right?