Then use a different search engine.

To call what DDG is doing (or what a newspaper does when it chooses not to print your foaming, incoherent editor to the letter -- as is, you know, it's right) "censorship" is just silly.

It's a search engine's job to rank results; there is no other way to do it: only one link can be in position #1, only one link can be in position #2, etc.

Or in other words: "editorial guidance" is pretty much the entirety of a search engine's job: you give it a large set of documents (the internet), some user input (what you typed in the search box), and it ranks – or "editorializes" – the set of documents to something useful for you.

And at the same time you also have to account for SEO haxx0rs and outright malicious actors who will try to phish your CC details.

Do you want some crackpot website if you search for "Barrack Obama" which claims that he is literally the anti-Christ to be at #1? Or even on the first page at all? Or rolexxxx.com if you search for "buy rolex"? Or bank-of-amerrrica.ru if you search for "Bank of America"? Probably not. A naïve ranking algorithm will end up with that.

There is no perfect way to do this; it's a hard problem. Platitudes like this make it sound easy, but it's not.

There is a massive difference between ranking stuff based on relevance and not getting RT articles when... searching for RT. (They rolled back the block pretty quickly, so they seem to agree with that too)

You are basically arguing for a slippery slope argument. Because they already need some editorial control to filter spam and obviously irrelevant material does not mean that every type of filtering/block listing is ok.

I personally totally get how it can be offputting to people if a search engine starts hiding websites while openly saying that they do it for a political reason. Downranking would be fine, but blocking a news source (as bad as RT is at being that) that isn't spammy or playing with SEO is just different.

Yes, I know, everything is political and all. But that's the point! Blocking RT was obviously more so about politics than filtering fake news or trash results.

It pretty much was just about fake news and trash results, actually. RT really is pure garbage, by its very intent and purpose.

I do agree that blocking RT outright was overreach and somewhat silly. However, I imagine it comes more from a gut feeling of disgust and "this is bullshit" then than some ultraelitist, "gotta protect the unwashed masses from harmful ideas that may bring the global order into question" motive that people in this thread seem to want DDG to have.

Yes, but they could've just blacklisted or downranked it based on already existing rules about fake news. But they instead went ahead and basically created a rule for Russian content specifically.

I don't even doubt DDGs intentions, but that's the thing... in most cases, people who want to suppress or filter out speech/news/etc usually have good intentions because as you said they genuinely think it is harmful content. That's the whole issue! And it's why it's usually such a thorny debate.

All of the examples you mentioned involved irrelevant search results (as in, I have never met a soul who wants spam & scams), whereas GP is implying he wants relevant ones.

To flip your example, if I wanted to search for "Barack Obama Anti-Christ," I'd want to get those results back, and not have DDG or whatever other authority decide categorically that I shouldn't see them.

"Editorial guidance" is a wide spectrum from favoring what the editor thinks is most relevant for the reader to the editor actively censoring content the reader wants to see for external reasons. To be charitable, I read GP as objecting to the latter and not the former.

I don't think what you want exists or has ever existed. A search engine that does not exercise judgement about relevance and quality will just return noise.