(DuckDuckGo CEO/Founder) Just seeing this and we're looking into this now. This is not intentional.
Update: Still investigating, but have made some progress -- Determined that on desktop there was a link to Techdirt up continuously via our About module (when you search for "Techdirt"). And now the traditional web link is back up as well (for desktop and mobile): https://duckduckgo.com/?q=techdirt&ia=web.
I thought you barely relied on Bing anymore. At least, that's the claim you've repeatedly made here. This indicates that DDG is little more than a Bing mirror.
I don't believe I have ever made that claim and it isn't true either that we are "little more than a Bing mirror". See other comment on this thread (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36898807) but in short it isn't a binary thing and I think the fallacy people keep making is a modern search engine != web index.
Over the past fifteen years, search has become "universal" with dozens of indexes and modules throughout the page. Also it is important to understand people click/engage with things on the page roughly half as much each position down, so by the time you get to the bottom it is like 100 times less than the top. This means that things on top, increasingly non-web links, have become more and more important.
In this context, as mentioned in the other comment, the largest modules on mobile and desktop we power ourselves, that is, local and knowledge graph. AI will be the same. We do use Bing as the primary source for traditional web links, but not for all and even when we do it sometimes looks different in various ways. In something like this, we can re-insert this link if that is what is needed.
Why is Bing doing this? It feels like we’re burying the lede, a $2 trillion company isn’t showing sites that are critical of it on its supposedly unbiased search engine
Regardless of what their CEO claims here every single time, if Bing cut off their access, DDG would be dead overnight.
All the stuff they claim to do themselves is <1% of whatever value DDG provides. Lucky for them it’s just enough to be able to use terms like “largely” instead of “entirely”, “other sources” instead of “only source”, etc.
Hi Yegg, I'm sorry to bother you about another issue; however, I'm having a similar experience with DuckDuckGo and Bing. I've exchanged dozens of emails with people from Bing's web team without any success.
Long story short - at some people in the past someone proxy-mirrored all content of SaaSHub. You'd open a page like "someshady-proxy-mirror.com/duckduckgo-alternatives", and it will mirror saashub.com/duckduckgo-alternatives. The same happened for all all pages. Soon after that, Bing (and DDG respectively) dropped all SaaSHub links from the index and kept the proxy-mirrored content! WTF.
After a week-or-two of "fighting" I managed to block the proxy-mirrors; however, I never got SaaSHub back in Bing's index.
I'm a single founder and feel helpless with this Bing/DGG issue. Any help would be appreciated. Thanks.
I've had a similar experience, an issue I reported was corrected, but at the same time, they have major problems that have persisted for years but haven't been fixed (the "windows -microsoft" problem) which cause me to G! far more than I'd like.
Since you're here, I have a bug to report :)
I'm in Slovakia. When I look up something that has a related Wikipedia page, the widget cites the English Wikipedia. However, the link leads to the Slovak Wikipedia but to an article that has a name from the English one. Usually things are named differently, so if I click the link, I get a 404.
Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments? You've unfortunately been doing it repeatedly. If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
(We definitely don't want fake/bait stuff here either so I share your feeling on that - this just isn't a good way to express it, at least not on HN.)
I feel like this makes it clear the level of reliance DuckDuckGo has on Bing. I know it's been a bit ambigious the full extent to which they do, and they claim to have their own indexer, but there's no way this is a coincidence. Surely if you have your own indexer you would have seen techdirt before?
At this moment "techdirt" only returns the wikipedia article, twitter, then mostly unrelated mentions of it. Surely DDG would have seen at least their homepage before?
> Most of our search result pages feature one or more Instant Answers. To deliver Instant Answers on specific topics, DuckDuckGo leverages many sources, including specialized sources like Sportradar and crowd-sourced sites like Wikipedia. We also maintain our own crawler (DuckDuckBot) and many indexes to support our results. Of course, we have more traditional links and images in our search results too, which we largely source from Bing. Our focus is synthesizing all these sources to create a superior search experience.
DDG’s business model is largely about privacy and UI rather than attempting to be objectively better than other search engines. Search is not quite 1:1 with Bing, but frankly I hate Bing’s UI not its results.
They don’t claim to be a privacy wrapper for Bing; they claim to be a standalone search engine. But they aren’t. It’s 99% Bing and there’s nothing they can do about the results getting censored at the origin.
A dinky little but long standing staple of it's topic bitchin100.com had the same problem for some years but I guess the community was small enough and traditional enough that not enough people were using anything but google to notice except me.
They eventually got it fixed but only after a few other people finally noticed and the owner contacted someone and then waited a week or so. But it was like that for years. You search a perfectly good search term that should pull up one of the articles on that site first, and all you got are all kinds of other 2nd and 3rd hand references like email archive posts and articles on other sites, but scroll down as many pages as you want and the actual site would never come up on ddg.
Overall search quality has been declining on all search engines. Maybe there's too much spam. Saw an entertaining video about it yesterday that echoes how I feel when I google stuff: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jrFv1O4dbqY. It's so hard to find content written by humans these days. Seems like only the top sites are being indexed.
I'm in the same boat, I feel like my search-fu is being thwarted with the ever growing list of products that coopt existing words rather than coining new terms. We're in this ever expanding word overloading mode and I think the commercial and marketing spaces are now dominating search to drown out the useful hits that would previously rise to the top.
More and more, our search-fu is being actively thwarted. Tools to tailor our search have been steadily taken away: exclusion/inclusion operators, verbatim search ignored, and on and on.
I want. a search engine that remembers my preferences, and I can then click an ignore entire domain option, and never see that domain in search results even again. is there such a thing?
Google's attempt to introduce zero-click results has been nothing short of catastrophic. The sheer volume of bullshit they are spreading rivals anything that ChatGPT could ever hope to generate.
A couple of weeks ago, I was debating with someone about what "LMR" stood for in the context of cable specifications, such as LMR-240, LMR-400 and so on. I thought it meant "Land Mobile Radio" while the other person disagreed that it stood for anything. A Google search on LMR coax cable acronym returned a helpful info blurb stating that LMR stood for "Last Minute Resistance" as a means of fending off sexual assault.
Needless to say there was no way to tell exactly what site Google had copied that definition from, and no useful way to provide feedback to them. Sometimes there's a "Feedback" link, this time there wasn't. Sometimes the feedback link is present but only offers the option of reporting illegal activity. That option wasn't present either.
For whatever reason, Google clearly does not give a flying fuck at a rolling donut about search quality anymore. With the right leadership, Bing could own that entire line of business, in a manner reminiscent of IE's original dominance over Netscape. I'm not holding my breath, but at this point I'm cheering for anyone who can offer Google some competition.
I tried the example you cited. The "blurb" is called a snippet; the snippet comes from the web page itself. One of the pages had that actual text, which is why it appeared. Why it had it on a page that's primarily about coaxial cable isn't clear, but we'll look into how to improve.
As for sending feedback, each link in the results has a little three dot icon next to it that brings up our "About This Results" panel, and you can send feedback that way.
Also, to belatedly introduce myself, I'm the public liaison for search at Google. It's a position we have within the actual search engineering team to help us gather feedback to improve search quality. Feel free for you or anyone comfortable sharing examples of unhelpful results to flag me about it:
I asked ChatGPT 4.0 what LMR meant as applied to coaxial cable. It gave me an excellent response, including that LMR is a trademark of Times Microwave Systems.
I rarely use search engines anymore. I'll bet the same is true for many people.
I don't trust the zero-click results at all any more. I recently had to fill out a form for the DMV that required my county code. To find out, I of course googled it, and wrote down the knowledge box result. This turned out to be the wrong number, and thanks to Google, this happens so frequently the clerk knew where I got it, and knew to check it and fix it.
People are building workarounds in real life due to how bad Google's results have gotten.
Another problem is that Google seems to ignore a significant part of the words you type into the search bar.
If you type 'word1 word2 word3', where word3 is less common than word1 and word2, a lot of the time, it will act as if word3 simply wasn't in the query.
ddg does this too with annoying frequency. Even quoting it does not necessarily guarantee it will appear in the snippet, much less the result.
And when DDG runs out of "web links" it just fills the rest of result pages with local results that are out-of-place and useless. Like, getting "Visit Paris" sites after searching for rare computer parts.
Well, the last few months DDG's search quality started dropping hard for me, some queries that I clearly remember having good results no longer have them today.
It seems there's stuff going on behind the scenes. DDG got taken over by some vested interest, perhaps. Or Bing doing stuff and DDG never branching out of it and just blindly getting results from it.
Either way, it's starting to rival Google in uselessness and I'm likely to stop using it fairly soon.
The thing with search engines is: you try one, scan results for 30 seconds, don't find a useful result, curse under your breath and hastily try another search engine. It's a normal programmer flow, which sadly almost completely eliminates the possibility to provide actionable feedback to the search engine's maintainers.
I gather you're from the DDG team? If so, I'd say that the writing is on the wall that Bing is no longer a good backend for DDG. You guys should start branching out because from where I'm standing, many programmers are 10-15 annoyances away from switching.
Is there anywhere people can report clearly bad results? I don't have any on hand right now either, but I do know I somewhat regularly encounter DDG results that are just "wtf?!"-level, whereas Google does return good results for the same. I'd be more than happy to report these things when I encounter them if that's helpful.
I'm not the OP, but here's a quick list of search items that did not turn up useful results recently off the top of my head:
number of Americans without a credit card
panic nova git automation
microvision (the video game console)
time in chicago (seems to be fixed now)
mozilla open directory (seems to be fixed now)
Now that you've solicited this feedback, I'll make a point of saving futile searches for the next time you pop up on HN.
free for 100 searches.
$5/month for 300 searches
$10/month for 1,000 searches
I'm not at the point where I feel DDG and Bing are so bad I want to start paying to get better search results. I'd be interested to see how many people are there though.
I am not sure I am doing more than ~33 searches a day lately so probably the $10 plan will suit me fine. I think I do something like anywhere from 5 to 20 a day.
But I too started getting disgusted by "everything is a subscription" but I might jump the train if I like Kagi enough.
Because apparently the internet companies can't figure out an ad model that's not extremely toxic and does not trample on every single privacy rule the world has (and the 100x more that the world still doesn't have but should not be broken anyway because they should be a moral / ethical no-brainer but alas, go tell that to the "money above everything" types).
But finally, after decades, all the VCs funding internet companies that planned to capture the market with network effects and then start charging, are showing their true colors. I am glad. It makes them more honest and gives the users better information to act on.
That can't be right, DDG's CEO has assured me that DDG isn't just a dumb proxy to Bing. DDG uses several sources as well as its own index so it cannot suffer from what is being claimed [1][2][3].
- We have on the order of a million lines of search code at this point and have a lot of talented people working them. That code does a myriad of things across many indexes.
- As an example, mobile searches are the largest category of searches, and local searches are the largest category of searches within mobile. We don't get any local search module content from Bing.
- Similarly, on desktop, knowledge graph / Wikipedia-type answers come up the most and we don't get any of that module content from Bing either.
- Bing is our largest source of traditional web links, which have become less and less relevant/engaged with over time as more and more modules are in search results and put on top of traditional links (and people interact with things on top of the search results page about two orders of magnitude vs. things on the bottom).
- When Bing has dropped things out of the traditional web index, we have put them back, and we've been working with them so this happens less and less. In fact, there hasn't been hardly any reports of this in the past month or so, which is why I've asked for other examples in the comments.
As a long time DDG user I think it's cool you're personally engaged here. The disappointing part is it seems like TechDirt has had to resort to customer-service-via-social (Reddit/HN/Twitter) which sucks.
Once this particular issue is sorted out I'd would also be cool to see some sort of post-mortem report. Seeing why this sort of thing happens and a standard process for fixing it would be beneficial to all involved I think. Complex systems are complex and shit happens. But if this happened to a site far smaller than TechDirt (they're not even that big AFAIK) I don't think there would be any avenue to cure the situation for them.
It's great to see you on here answering/responding to all the unfounded rumours on here.
I'd be interested to know because it gets to the heart of the matter and why confusion seems prevalent. If we ignore the modules and local search, what differentiates DDG and Bing when returning bread and butter traditional web links?
I'll note that there is a April 17th update tweet referenced in that thread. That is unrelated and it was about a rumor that DGG was purging certain media sites. Nothing to do about censoring Russian sites. Archive of that: https://archive.ph/I2iUp
It is simply not true that we have intentionally censored anything for political reasons or made ourselves "the arbiters of truth" in general, which people have also accused us/me of doing.
I realized I previously explained how our news rankings work very poorly on Twitter that got grossly misinterpreted, so I subsequently put out a clarification in this help page with a much clearer (and detailed) explanation of how our news rankings actually work: https://duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/news-ra...
From that page: "When we apply our own ranking signals we do so in a strictly non-political manner, meaning we don’t evaluate or otherwise take into account any potential political bias or leanings of websites in our search result rankings." That is, we did not/do not have a disinformation/"truth" detector, nor did we go looking for any Russian narrative (or any other narrative for that matter). Instead, we just have essentially a spam detector that had detected some spam from Russian state sites. That's it.
It's looking like 2023 is the year that search dies. Between the removal of exclusion operators (hey, we saw you were adding -pinterest to your searches, but we want to make sure you get your pinterest!) and de-indexing of sites, it's looking like it's time for the search wheel to start making its third spin.
Guess I need to start playing more with things like Algolia or Kagi.
Unfortunately, creating a search engine competitive with Google or even Bing is insanely expensive. Not just from the server cost perspective, but also from marketing it and convincing people to switch.
I am now looking into Kagi and I love that it seems like they just picked the era where Google wasn't terrible and are emulating the look and feel of that.
The only problem is the pricing model. I don't do overage fees because they make me anxious. I like knowing there is a concrete ceiling on what something will cost me. 300 a month also feels far too low and $10/mo, whether fair or not, feels far too high for a search engine.
This is why I've been working on a behavioural change: stop using search engines and start going right to the websites I know and trust.
At this point, my searches are tending to start at Wikipedia, enough that I might make it my Firefox search default. If it doesn't directly provide enough information for me, it can at least send me in the right direction.
Kagi is an underrated superpower. It just works. I tried Google again recently, and I was astonished how mediocre the results were. If that's the gold standard for no-cost searching, the internet is in serious trouble.
I've been using Kagi for a little under a year and it is absolutely worth it. DDG gives very inconsistent results and G is just as bad and complete dog shit when the adbloker is off.
Readit News
Update: Still investigating, but have made some progress -- Determined that on desktop there was a link to Techdirt up continuously via our About module (when you search for "Techdirt"). And now the traditional web link is back up as well (for desktop and mobile): https://duckduckgo.com/?q=techdirt&ia=web.
Over the past fifteen years, search has become "universal" with dozens of indexes and modules throughout the page. Also it is important to understand people click/engage with things on the page roughly half as much each position down, so by the time you get to the bottom it is like 100 times less than the top. This means that things on top, increasingly non-web links, have become more and more important.
In this context, as mentioned in the other comment, the largest modules on mobile and desktop we power ourselves, that is, local and knowledge graph. AI will be the same. We do use Bing as the primary source for traditional web links, but not for all and even when we do it sometimes looks different in various ways. In something like this, we can re-insert this link if that is what is needed.
All the stuff they claim to do themselves is <1% of whatever value DDG provides. Lucky for them it’s just enough to be able to use terms like “largely” instead of “entirely”, “other sources” instead of “only source”, etc.
Dead Comment
Long story short - at some people in the past someone proxy-mirrored all content of SaaSHub. You'd open a page like "someshady-proxy-mirror.com/duckduckgo-alternatives", and it will mirror saashub.com/duckduckgo-alternatives. The same happened for all all pages. Soon after that, Bing (and DDG respectively) dropped all SaaSHub links from the index and kept the proxy-mirrored content! WTF.
After a week-or-two of "fighting" I managed to block the proxy-mirrors; however, I never got SaaSHub back in Bing's index.
I'm a single founder and feel helpless with this Bing/DGG issue. Any help would be appreciated. Thanks.
If some tech kerfuffle is happening, there's a good chance someone involved will see it. Its like a wider ranged subreddit, or a more orderly Twitter.
I'd reported a problem with the "lite" interface about two months ago. It was not only acknowledged, but fixed, in just over half an hour:
<https://toot.cat/@dredmorbius/110476717889891339>
Dead Comment
Dead Comment
(We definitely don't want fake/bait stuff here either so I share your feeling on that - this just isn't a good way to express it, at least not on HN.)
At this moment "techdirt" only returns the wikipedia article, twitter, then mostly unrelated mentions of it. Surely DDG would have seen at least their homepage before?
> Most of our search result pages feature one or more Instant Answers. To deliver Instant Answers on specific topics, DuckDuckGo leverages many sources, including specialized sources like Sportradar and crowd-sourced sites like Wikipedia. We also maintain our own crawler (DuckDuckBot) and many indexes to support our results. Of course, we have more traditional links and images in our search results too, which we largely source from Bing. Our focus is synthesizing all these sources to create a superior search experience.
https://duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/sources...
They eventually got it fixed but only after a few other people finally noticed and the owner contacted someone and then waited a week or so. But it was like that for years. You search a perfectly good search term that should pull up one of the articles on that site first, and all you got are all kinds of other 2nd and 3rd hand references like email archive posts and articles on other sites, but scroll down as many pages as you want and the actual site would never come up on ddg.
That's when I got interested in Kagi.
A couple of weeks ago, I was debating with someone about what "LMR" stood for in the context of cable specifications, such as LMR-240, LMR-400 and so on. I thought it meant "Land Mobile Radio" while the other person disagreed that it stood for anything. A Google search on LMR coax cable acronym returned a helpful info blurb stating that LMR stood for "Last Minute Resistance" as a means of fending off sexual assault.
Needless to say there was no way to tell exactly what site Google had copied that definition from, and no useful way to provide feedback to them. Sometimes there's a "Feedback" link, this time there wasn't. Sometimes the feedback link is present but only offers the option of reporting illegal activity. That option wasn't present either.
For whatever reason, Google clearly does not give a flying fuck at a rolling donut about search quality anymore. With the right leadership, Bing could own that entire line of business, in a manner reminiscent of IE's original dominance over Netscape. I'm not holding my breath, but at this point I'm cheering for anyone who can offer Google some competition.
I tried the example you cited. The "blurb" is called a snippet; the snippet comes from the web page itself. One of the pages had that actual text, which is why it appeared. Why it had it on a page that's primarily about coaxial cable isn't clear, but we'll look into how to improve.
As for sending feedback, each link in the results has a little three dot icon next to it that brings up our "About This Results" panel, and you can send feedback that way.
Also, to belatedly introduce myself, I'm the public liaison for search at Google. It's a position we have within the actual search engineering team to help us gather feedback to improve search quality. Feel free for you or anyone comfortable sharing examples of unhelpful results to flag me about it:
https://twitter.com/searchliaisonhttps://mastodon.social/@searchliaison
I rarely use search engines anymore. I'll bet the same is true for many people.
People are building workarounds in real life due to how bad Google's results have gotten.
Deleted Comment
If you type 'word1 word2 word3', where word3 is less common than word1 and word2, a lot of the time, it will act as if word3 simply wasn't in the query.
And when DDG runs out of "web links" it just fills the rest of result pages with local results that are out-of-place and useless. Like, getting "Visit Paris" sites after searching for rare computer parts.
It seems there's stuff going on behind the scenes. DDG got taken over by some vested interest, perhaps. Or Bing doing stuff and DDG never branching out of it and just blindly getting results from it.
Either way, it's starting to rival Google in uselessness and I'm likely to stop using it fairly soon.
Kagi seems to work pretty well.
The thing with search engines is: you try one, scan results for 30 seconds, don't find a useful result, curse under your breath and hastily try another search engine. It's a normal programmer flow, which sadly almost completely eliminates the possibility to provide actionable feedback to the search engine's maintainers.
I gather you're from the DDG team? If so, I'd say that the writing is on the wall that Bing is no longer a good backend for DDG. You guys should start branching out because from where I'm standing, many programmers are 10-15 annoyances away from switching.
Again, my apologies for not providing examples.
But I have found the LLM powered Bing, using Skype (!!) as the user interface really compelling
I have played around myself with getting LLMs to summerise and evaluate text for me, and it seemed that an automated way would be very cool.
Then Microsoft implemented it.
Wow. It is very very good
So DDG is still good. Very good. And privacy, a very strong selling point
But wading through click bait websites looking for a website that is not just straining for eyeballs: Bing's LLM based machine is a dogsend!
I would pay for a service like that from DDG. I already pay real money for an OpenAI API key.
Sell me yours. I would much rather pay my money to you
I've too noticed result quality in the main search engines I use (DDG, Brave, Phind) go way down in recent times, I wonder what happened...
This also happens to me and I have found reports on Reddit of it happening to many others.
Sometimes, I cannot even find the original result that I had clicked on, when I return to the search results page.
This drives me crazy.
free for 100 searches. $5/month for 300 searches $10/month for 1,000 searches
I'm not at the point where I feel DDG and Bing are so bad I want to start paying to get better search results. I'd be interested to see how many people are there though.
But I too started getting disgusted by "everything is a subscription" but I might jump the train if I like Kagi enough.
Because apparently the internet companies can't figure out an ad model that's not extremely toxic and does not trample on every single privacy rule the world has (and the 100x more that the world still doesn't have but should not be broken anyway because they should be a moral / ethical no-brainer but alas, go tell that to the "money above everything" types).
But finally, after decades, all the VCs funding internet companies that planned to capture the market with network effects and then start charging, are showing their true colors. I am glad. It makes them more honest and gives the users better information to act on.
1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32360874
2. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36149682
3. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31492631
- We have on the order of a million lines of search code at this point and have a lot of talented people working them. That code does a myriad of things across many indexes.
- As an example, mobile searches are the largest category of searches, and local searches are the largest category of searches within mobile. We don't get any local search module content from Bing.
- Similarly, on desktop, knowledge graph / Wikipedia-type answers come up the most and we don't get any of that module content from Bing either.
- Bing is our largest source of traditional web links, which have become less and less relevant/engaged with over time as more and more modules are in search results and put on top of traditional links (and people interact with things on top of the search results page about two orders of magnitude vs. things on the bottom).
- When Bing has dropped things out of the traditional web index, we have put them back, and we've been working with them so this happens less and less. In fact, there hasn't been hardly any reports of this in the past month or so, which is why I've asked for other examples in the comments.
Once this particular issue is sorted out I'd would also be cool to see some sort of post-mortem report. Seeing why this sort of thing happens and a standard process for fixing it would be beneficial to all involved I think. Complex systems are complex and shit happens. But if this happened to a site far smaller than TechDirt (they're not even that big AFAIK) I don't think there would be any avenue to cure the situation for them.
/2¢
I'd be interested to know because it gets to the heart of the matter and why confusion seems prevalent. If we ignore the modules and local search, what differentiates DDG and Bing when returning bread and butter traditional web links?
> At DuckDuckGo, we've been rolling out search updates that down-rank sites associated with Russian disinformation.
- Gabriel Weinberg via Twitter, March 10, 2022. Archived: https://archive.is/SLGYb
I'll note that there is a April 17th update tweet referenced in that thread. That is unrelated and it was about a rumor that DGG was purging certain media sites. Nothing to do about censoring Russian sites. Archive of that: https://archive.ph/I2iUp
I realized I previously explained how our news rankings work very poorly on Twitter that got grossly misinterpreted, so I subsequently put out a clarification in this help page with a much clearer (and detailed) explanation of how our news rankings actually work: https://duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/news-ra...
From that page: "When we apply our own ranking signals we do so in a strictly non-political manner, meaning we don’t evaluate or otherwise take into account any potential political bias or leanings of websites in our search result rankings." That is, we did not/do not have a disinformation/"truth" detector, nor did we go looking for any Russian narrative (or any other narrative for that matter). Instead, we just have essentially a spam detector that had detected some spam from Russian state sites. That's it.
https://daverupert.com/2023/01/shadow-banned-by-duckduckgo-a...
https://www.jessesquires.com/blog/2022/03/25/my-website-disa...
https://lapcatsoftware.com/articles/bing.html
Guess I need to start playing more with things like Algolia or Kagi.
Techdirt has been an upstanding place for journalism forever, and getting censored this way is ridiculous.
The only problem is the pricing model. I don't do overage fees because they make me anxious. I like knowing there is a concrete ceiling on what something will cost me. 300 a month also feels far too low and $10/mo, whether fair or not, feels far too high for a search engine.
This is why I've been working on a behavioural change: stop using search engines and start going right to the websites I know and trust.
Deleted Comment
This is completely unfounded. Please provide any evidence that this is intentional or related to censorship.