While I agree with your basic points, I don’t like the idea that a web site can be labelled or dismissed as “a disinformation web site”. Perhaps “controversial” would be a better label, although better applied to a page than a whole web site.
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I am not against vaccination, but your example could be qualified as propaganda.
According to the data from Stanford university (Ioannidis), the risk of an unvaccinated, healthy individual, age group <=39, to die from covid (delta) is about 0.08%. The relative factor you mentioned is correct - but the absolute risk reduction to die from covid in the given case would be something like 0.06% - not so impressive, although it is factor 6. Even if the death rate was 1% in the given group, factor 6 in reduction is not impressive as an absolute number. That does not mean it is ineffective, but small numbers, which absolute numbers in this field often are, are not perceived as impressive which is why relative factors are used for marketing. But relative factors themselves distort the perception of reality. Reporting relative risk reduction could be seen as propaganda and intentional manipulation of perception, and then should be censored? Now, one could argue Stanford has the wrong numbers by showing other numbers and so on and so forth, and we could censor Stanford.
Again, I am not taking a position regarding vaccinations here. Many topics are just really complicated.
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I just wanted to show that all my points are better than just removing it completely like DDG does. If “controversial” is better? I don’t know (sounds like a legit opinion, even if they’re speaking about facts). But I guess that’s another discussion and something I personally don’t really care about.
@t0m: Even if that’s true what you say, you forget that vaccination also safes other people and also safes against long Covid (at least reducing chance and strength) and so on. The topic is far more complex than a x > y dead relation.
Except that’s not what they do, they downrank the result but it’s still a result, just further down the list. It’s not even publicly tagged as being misinformation or otherwise, just moved lower in the list.
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Moving down is very similar to removing.
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As I suggested 80 posts ago, it depends on how much further. Give it a rank of 72 and you might as well remove it because only a tiny, tiny fraction of users will ever see it. Give it a rank of 3 (behind a couple of “mainstream” web sites) and you have a point.
Without transparency we have no idea of which example rank above is more representative of their intentions.
Be honest, when you do a search, how many pages of 10 results do you look at? 1, or 2 if nothing from the first 10 results jumps out at you?
Me personally, it depends on what I’m searching for. There are many searches where I go through all of the results, but also many where I only look at the first result because I am able to get the answer I need filtered to the top by the search engine.
It really depends.
Between the options of having contested information moved down a list vs behind a toggle (as several people have suggested in different ways) vs mixed in I’d rather have it moved to the bottom.
Way to move the goalposts. Saying one thing definitively then being called out and saying well they’re similar…
They are different and would have to be addressed differently. If removed, you, the user, can’t do anything (except go to another service or build your own). If moved, you, the user, can look where they were moved to.
You know that there are sometimes million of results? Good luck to find something behind first 100 results. Lets make an example. The first 3 results of a search request is mainstream - doesn’t matter if they filtered disinformation or not. The next 8 are less relevant, but not what you are looking for. Most of the other results from number 12 to 3212 are less relevant to your request than number 3213, which maybe contains disinformation. How much of irrelevant pages would you look until you gave up your request? And result 3213 is not even bad if you take in mind that many requests have millions of results…
Theoretically you can find, what’s just moved down and not completely removed. But in real it makes no difference as soon as result is moved far enough. And how much pages of results will be viewed by an average user? 5? 2? Normally not even the first half page. So the question is, how far will DDG move things down?
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It would seem that there are competing priorities that everyone will need to consider with a search engine. By my estimation, leading FOSS concerns are:
a - Privacy from trackers
b - Lack of censorship
Let’s set aside how a search engine is supposed to pay for electricity, developer payroll, etc for now and ask, what is more important if one finds one competes with the other? DDG, for example, really promotes a and kind of promotes b. But a is their core value proposition.
So then they reveal that they will back off on b for a bit but haven’t really moved on a. So now we move away from DDG because they no longer FULLY embrace b? I practically guarantee that most, if not all, of the alternatives out there will not be as strong on a as DDG. But that’s reactionary politics for ya.
Me? I don’t really care for DDG. I prefer Qwant. I just would argue for deep breathes and perhaps thinking rationally about what we really value out of a search engine. While I lean very heavily against censorship, I understand that freedom of some forms is naturally self-destructing if left unmanaged. Just like free markets. So sometimes censorship is a necessary “evil”.
Think on it.
Here’s a perverse solution to that: You the user set a limit on the number of results that you will accept and any downranked results that would appear outside that limit due to downranking must be promoted to occupy the last places in the list of results. 
What makes you thinking DDG is strongest on a compared to others like MetaGer?
@Ick Of course the topic is far more complex, which was what I was trying to illustrate. Especially regarding complex topics, censorship is not the way to go. Facebook even censored the British Medical Journal (!) because of the covid research they published contradicted what facebook wanted to be true. This certainly is not the display of democratic principles. Democracy is about allowing different points of views, even if you do not like them, and even if you think they are wrong.
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I don’t think LibreWolf has these issues being Firefox based. After a basic and general watered down means of myself researching browsers and privacy, there are three browsers today that seem to offer some protection from organized and institutionalized privacy invasion: Brave, LibreWolf, and TOR.
That said, I would never use TOR … unless I had a throwaway and had to use it for darknet access. would be pre PSP / ME era.
From what I can tell, there is only one browser to rule them all: LibreWolf
Yea, good point. I am suspicious of meta-search engines due to other forms of tracking. But I failed to properly account for MetaGer. And the Germans are really strong on privacy and open source. So I stand corrected.
Germans are not that strong on privacy in general. But we have a strong civil society with NGOs and registered associations that are focused on privacy, open source, public open data and security. Our government on the other side is trying to force data as resource for police and economy. 
At least our old one, the new government haven’t tried much yet, so I cannot tell about.
A good example is our Corona-tracing-app. The first one open source, secure and privacy focused (thanks to NGOs that forced government to do so) and another one (Luca-app) a year later made by private company - insecure with privacy issues (but got forced to be open source thanks to NGOs again) - got also pushed and payed by many state governments (with no need).
Sorry for that off-topic, but I think it’s important to know what kind of Germans are strong at privacy and open source and who’s may not.
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Thank you for the correction. My perception of German culture and values is informed by what is reported on here. So of course, it will have inaccuracies. So I appreciate it. 
I am using Mojeek (https://www.mojeek.com/) as my main search engine. It’s privacy-friendly, not state run, not Big Tech, and not using anybody else’s index- they build their own search index. And they just recently made it easy to compare the search results I get from them with several other search engines by adding buttons at the bottom of the search results to resubmit the search to Bing, Brave, Ecosia, DDG, Gigablast, Google, Startpage, and Yandex. What’s not to like? (And no I don’t work for them, either… ) (And the list is configurable.)
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Mojeek looks like the best alternative for me from all the ones suggested in this thread. Thanks for the heads up!
Thank you @amarok. searX source code is available to look at here : https://github.com/searx/searx
I have not reviewed it yet, but plan to. Thier documentation page : https://searx.github.io/searx/ states “metasearch engine which aggregates results from more than 70 search services.” There are 72 diff instances running in diff countries : https://searx.space/
So…not sure yet if they are ranking based on commonality across 70 search engines that each use diff ranking algorithms ? (I suspect thats it, but not confirmed yet) Thanks again !
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I would imagine they use different algorithms. People in different parts of the world tend to search for different things.