Something weird going on at DuckDuck…

Just because you don't like the top result doesn't mean it is irrelevant EDIT: I am in fact an asshole. I see the problem now 😂

True, but I don't think those periodicals would normally (or ever) characterize themselves that way.
You're not an asshole, no worries 🙂
But how about when it is completely wrong?

Media Basis checker:

The Intercept – Bias and Credibility

These media sources are moderately to strongly biased toward liberal causes through story selection and/or political affiliation. They may utilize strong loaded words (wording that attempts to influence an audience by using an appeal to emotion or stereotypes), publish misleading reports, and omit information that may damage liberal causes. Some sources in this category may be untrustworthy. See all Left Bias sources.

Overall, we rate The Intercept progressive Left Biased based on story selection that routinely favors the left. We also rate them as Mostly Factual in reporting rather than High due to previous fabricated work and censorship of writers.

Detailed Report

Bias Rating: LEFT
Factual Reporting: MOSTLY FACTUAL
Country: USA
Press Freedom Rank: MOSTLY FREE
Media Type: Website
Traffic/Popularity: High Traffic
MBFC Credibility Rating: HIGH CREDIBILITY

When the top result is this wrong, there is a problem.

Yeah where are those descriptions coming from? Also mentions “the strike workers’ strike” and repeats “politics” twice

Seems like a poorly trained ML model - crudely speaking, perhaps its training set was tilted towards descriptions of conservative news sites so it learned to insert the word "conservative" when describing a news site.
- I don't want to jump to conclusions, but that does sound like a very possible explanation.
  
  Poo. I was hoping DDG would keep LLM-generated summaries out of their UI.
That makes it sound like an outdated LLM, like GPT-2 or something. You think it is?
- Alas, not smart enough to know 🙁

Im still looking for the weird thing going on at duckduck

I'm on Fennec, searching DuckDuck from the address bar. Here's another one:
- Weird I just searched and got totally different text, can't upload the screens screenshot tho
  
  A Current Affairs subscription is one of the best known ways to improve your life in a hurry. Our print magazine is released six times a year, in a beautiful full-color edition full of elegant design, sophisticated prose, and satirical advertisements. Tell me more How Anti-Homeless Sentiment Made Its Way Into Popular Cartoons Alex Skopic
  
  The Dangerous Populist Science of Yuval Noah

Permanently Deleted

Wasn’t there a funny little zero-day in a widely used Wordpress plugin just last week?
- Do you have the slightest idea how little that narrows it down?
- Permanently Deleted

It showed me the same thing, but after searching again a few times I'm now seeing a summary of the articles on their homepages.

Side note: I've had a weird bug a few times with DDG lately, where it showed me results for current events that were completely unrelated to what I was looking for. I searched for something like "10 inch chef's knife" but the results were as though I had typed "US house of representatives speaker." This has happened maybe three or four times in the last two weeks.

This happened to me earlier but I was searching phrases in German and it was pulling results for the Israel and Hamas war exclusively. Nothing related to my term.

My search was “ Ein schwer zu tötendes Unkraut” which translates roughly to “a difficult weed to kill”.
- I do have an idea how "a difficult to kill, unwanted growth" could be put into relation to a war fueled by hatred.

It did the same for me.

I clicked on the link then went back and the description calling it conservative was gone.

And it came back lol. Wild man.

DDG going hard with horseshoe theory

Even using searxng it comes up with Google & qwant show it as conservative. But allsides has it left leaning bias.

https://www.allsides.com/news-source/intercept

Interesting that allsides has The Atlantic as being on the liberal side of things; Mrs. Hedge describes it as "a make work project for unemployed neocons." David Frum, the "axis of evil" guy, is a regular contributor there .
- Outside the US that term is usually used for market liberalism.
🤔
Same for Media Bias / Fact Check.
https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/the-intercept/

Could not find anything in the source code related to that either so I'm not sure from where that description is pulled from.

https://kagi.com/search?q=the+intercept shows a nice wikipedia description:

https://i.imgur.com/OcVM3c3.png

Are they just using "conservative" as a synonym for something like "political"?

Different results

I'm getting the same results as this person. Not the weird ones like the original post

@hedge because they aren't using the political compass. Two or three political dimensions with only two words describing them leads to meaningless labeling.

That would explain it! I think I remember seeing Jacobin as being the same degree of liberal as The Atlantic, and there's no way that could be right! Oops, I mean "correct." 🙄