That DDG works today is not the point, it's that they hid the results at any
time that matters. The people at Bing and DDG undid their censorship shortly
after people noticed and wrote about it. What matters is that Microsoft at
the time used their search engine the way they have used all of their
"controlled" press, to promote themselves and hide their competitors. There
have been and continue to be other instances of this in Bing and people who
look will probably find them passed onto DDG.
To understand fully Microsoft's propaganda methods as far as "independent
publishers" go, please see the section, "Controling the Press" from the
following anti-trust document analysis,
http://techrights.org/2009/02/08/microsoft-evilness-galore/
Since then, Microsoft has continuously tried to goof sources of information
like Google and Wikipedia. They are the largest source bogus DMCA takedown
noticies for Google, so it may be that Google results are also going into the
toilet but I have not seen that yet myself, and I'm digressing.
Trusting Microsoft directly or through a proxy like Duck Duck Go is foolish.
Microsoft have a long, court proven, history of censorship and other media
manipulation and DDG is foolish to use them at all. The rest of us should
not trust their secret mixture of Microsoft's malice and valid search
resutls, especially after is has been shown to hide free software results.
If the privacy difference is not real, why favor one over the other?
The goal of reducing Google power should not be achieved by elevating an even
worse monster like Microsoft. Microsoft has done so much to make free
software use difficult or impossible through hardware, software, and retail
manipulation. Recall, the Vista hardware logo requirments, "secure boot" by
uefi, continued promotion of awful file formats, software patents, and so on
and so forth. We need search that's independent of both to really protect
ourselves. Google has not yet done these terrible things to their hardware
or software.
Archive.org does have the article I referenced,
http://web.archive.org/web/20140603235914/http://www.muktware.com/2011/12/duckduckgo-doesn-t-show-leading-open-source-projects,-google-does/2005
The text is much like the article you found but it lacks the endless
animation that consumes so much cpu that my laptop is hot for the first time
ever. I'll quote it so people don't have to look at it or download the video
for themselves, though I encourage both.
"... the primary goal of a search engine is to show relevant results. We are
aware that Microsoft's Bing doesn't show quite a lot of open source projects
on the first page. LibreOffice, the default office suite of all major
GNU/Linux based operating systems is missing from Bing's first page."
"Some readers were pointing at LibreOffice being the second result on DDG,
which is not correct. DDG is not at all showing any results from
LibreOffice.org, similar to Bing. So, DuckDuckGo and Bing users will never
land on Mozilla.org or LibreOffice pages."
The video demonstrates what the article said and both were made by the same
person. Google gave the results at the time, regardless of the use of terms,
Bing/DDG hid them.
