Conspiracy theorists flock to DuckDuckGo to find information banned or buried by Google: report

Conspiracy theorists have embraced an alternative to Google as they seek out information, The New York Timesreported Wednesday.

The newspaper noted Spotify podcast host Joe Rogan discussed his quest for information about coronavirus vaccines. "If I wanted to find specific cases about people who died from vaccine-related injuries, I had to go to DuckDuckGo,” Rogan said. “I wasn’t finding them on Google.”

The newspaper also noted that far-right podcasters Ben Shapiro and Dan Bongino have also praised the search engine alternative.

"Praise for DuckDuckGo has become a popular refrain during the pandemic among right-wing social media influencers and conspiracy theorists who question Covid-19 vaccines and push discredited coronavirus treatments. Some have posted screenshots showing that DuckDuckGo appears to surface more links favorable to their views than Google does," The Timesreported. "The endorsements underscore how right-wing Americans and conspiracy theorists are shifting their online activity in response to greater moderation from tech giants like Google. They have increasingly embraced fledgling and sometimes fringe platforms like the chat app Telegram, the video streamer Rumble and even search engines like DuckDuckGo, seeking conditions that seem more favorable to their conspiracy theories and falsehoods."

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The newspaper reported DuckDuckGo currently has about three percent of the search engine market.

"For a glimpse at what conspiracy theorists encounter when they search online, The New York Times reviewed the top 20 search results on Google, Bing and DuckDuckGo for more than 30 conspiracy theories and right-wing topics," the newspaper reported. "For many terms, Bing and DuckDuckGo surfaced more untrustworthy websites than Google did, when results were compared with website ratings from the Global Disinformation Index, NewsGuard and research published in the journal Science."

The newspaper's investigation confirmed results from other recent studies.

"Those findings matched results from two recentstudies, which concluded that Bing’s algorithm surfaced content more supportive of conspiracy theories than Google did," the newspaper reported. "Other research has also found that Bing’s algorithm surfaces less trustworthy information than Google does when searching for conspiracy theories. One study last year showed that slightly fewer than half of all results on Bing and DuckDuckGo for six popular conspiracy theories mentioned or promoted the ideas. Google fared better, with about a quarter of links mentioning the ideas but nearly none supporting them. Yahoo fared worse than Bing and DuckDuckGo, and the Russian search engine Yandex fared worst among the group."

Read the full report.