Removing misinformation from Russia is a strange one to attack them for... considering the Russian invasion is about as non partisan of an issue (in the US at least) as I have seen in a long time.
Regardless, search engines have to rank content somehow. We need to stop throwing around "politics" when something doesn't fit your particular narrative.
If you agree with the OP maybe read the article that they posted?
This was never a thing that DDG claimed they were for. DDG is about privacy!
If we were talking about nearly any other issue, I might agree with you. But in this particular case, this is not a political issue! This is an invasion. End of story. Any "information" claiming otherwise is propaganda and does not deserve to be spread as truth.
The average user doesn't understand search engines then. It's expected that any search engine will prioritize certain results over others, because that's the entire point of a search engine, it filters and ranks sites.
"Unbiased" is doing a lot of work here. I think DDG's messaging about that could have been better, and they could have better indicated what was going on when they used that language -- but to be clear, there has never in the entire history of DDG as a browser been a period where they didn't rank political content and where certain political sites weren't given higher search rankings over other sites.
There is no betrayal here because this is just how search engines work. There couldn't have been a period where DDG wasn't ranking political sites because the only way for a search engine to avoid ranking political content is to not return political results in the first place (never mind the conversation of what does and doesn't count as "political").
At most what we see here is that DDG was a little too eager to lean into people's misunderstanding about what they meant by the word "neutral", and too slow to correct people who took something away from that phrasing that wasn't true.
I completely fail to understand how we are having this discussion on hacker news of all places.
If you have ever written a line of code you should understand that things have order. If search engines didn't try to organize results the result you are looking for could be on the first page or the 100th.
While I think it's fair to say that most people don't understand that google changes results based on the person. I have to imagine most people at least understand a basic concept that search results are organized in some way. Either by humans or machines (or likely both). That organization is complicated and has a number of factors in play and if done correctly should bubble up what is true.
What is misinformation and who gets to decide? At one point we were told the covid vaccines worked and you wouldn't need to worry about getting covid. If you disagreed it was "disinformation". We now know that that is not true. I'd prefer to use my own brain to decide for myself.
Claiming "politics" as a reason a company should not take a stance on something has turned into a blanket statement used largely for attacks on Human Rights.
We are seeing it here with DDG, Disney, and many others in the last several years.
Regardless, search engines have to rank content somehow. We need to stop throwing around "politics" when something doesn't fit your particular narrative.