This was a comment that I thought I'd make into its own post.
I've been hearing accusations that DDG is cucked.
It's worth remembering that the original search algorithm is 'page rank' which categorizes sites as 'important' and therefore deserving of a top spot in results if lots of other sites link to it. It might be unbiased in theory, but if people keep citing Snopes in their articles, it will skew left naturally. This also means that fact-checkers may be able to endure simply because they serve as an easy-to-cite resource, artificially boosting their popularity for people to lazy to do actual research.
It's worth asking whether or not you want an unbiased search engine or one that shows you want it to. IMO bias is only a problem when what I want to see should show up, but doesn't because of manipulation beyond the page-rank algorithm the way Google does.
Simply put, there is no cure for people too lazy to do their own research, so lefty fact-checkers prosper. Maybe rebrand some right-wing sites as fact-checkers to redpill the normies?
Google has tons of blacklists for sites that are simply not allowed to show up in Google search results. For the most part, this is to mark a dividing line between the 'deep web' and the normal internet. There's lots of sketchy sites that will never appear on Google.
I've rarely seen instances of sites that won't show up even if you look for them by name and know they exist though. I suspect Google uses deranking to demote websites that don't by default use HTTPS and things like that.