Yeah they have been for a while now, just google it and you'll get endless reports on the fact.

Hackernews readers are a little dense when it comes to admitting what is really going on. "Smart" people don't like to think they've been tricked, so when it's all there for the public to read on a public forum, we're in denial instead and lie about it.

I want to state up from that I'm not concerned about risks related to covid vaccines or vaccination in general. That's not a motivating factor behind this post.

What I am concerned about is that DuckDuckGo appears to be censoring results when paired with any particular activity. Searching "risk covid booster running" or "risk covid booster baseball" are blocked, but "risk covid booster cloud" returns results like normal.

I appreciate their ostensible valuation of privacy, but if this comes hand in hand with overt censorship it may be time to move on to something new. Any suggestions?

Update:

The original query returns results again, but https://duckduckgo.com/?q=duckduckgo+censoring+risk+covid+bo... has the same original behavior, right down to clicking "images" and back to "all" instead goes to "news."

Oddly enough, that query now returns results.

My brother just reported the same thing. Wonder if this was some weird bug (but in what? Censorship code shouldn't exist in the first place.) or a mistake.