I was messing around with duck.ai because it doesn't need an account and I like to see how censored western AIs are. Specifically around the Iran war.

I was going to ask it to read Aljazeera to get their coverage of the war and then compare what it summarizes to the same thing from other news sites. To see if it changes what it says based on which news org I have it pull the info from. But then I ran into an interesting hiccup.

I tried this with multiple models and as soon as you specify to search for Aljazeera + specific news event it will get a 404 error. And the same for CNN.

I thought this might be the sites themselves blocking AI crawlers. So I tried it in deepseek. It had no issue pulling both Aljazeera and CNN. I also researched exa (the search plugin AIs use) and it does advertise a feature where you can block certain URLs from showing up.

It does seem possible to force it to see them. I was able to get it to access Aljazeera.com on the backend and read from their own documents to find articles but in the websearch tool itself there is no result coming up from either CNN or Aljazeera. Which is odd right?

I did some research. I thought maybe it had something to do with the Zionists. This smells of them. And the founder of duckduckgo does have ties to the founder of an "Israeli" tech firm (they seem to be cousins) and even said in 2013, I think, that he wanted to visit "Israel" in an interview he did with the Times of "Israel". So this might explain the Aljazeera part. It is banned in "Israel" after all. But why CNN? That's an American company. It tends to follow the state departments messaging.

I tried some more sites. Trying to think of any that might be getting blocked on purpose.

RT - not working Aljazeera - not working CNN - not working NBC - working ABC - working FOX - working QQ news - working CGTN - not working

After trying these I tried AP next. Then it told me "duckduckgo is temporarily unavailable". I refreshed. Same thing. It was acting like the site was not working. Until i changed my IP and deleted browser data. Then suddenly it worked again. Interesting huh? And AP is also not working btw.

So it blocks certain news sites, and if you keep trying to access them too often it blocks you from using the service by pretending to be offline I guess?

Would love to see if anyone can replicate this behavior. If you do it be careful not to let it trick you. What it will do is you'll ask for coverage from a specific site and it will find that site has nothing (404 error) and then it'll just make things up from other sites, and act like it did what you asked. You have to specifically tell it not to include results from any website other than the one you requested. And watch the thinking so you can see as it tries the searches and they fail.