1y ago

With all the talk about privacy, people seem to be forgetting that censorship is also a major problem for today's internet.

Many "alternative" search engines are better for privacy, but they are still vulnerable to censorship, because they rely on ggle and mcrosoft's indices for their search results. This isn't a deep-hidden secret either, many of them disclose what search index they use on the "about" page, for example:

There are still search engines that (claim to) maintain their own index. Most surprisingly, brve:

https://brave.com/search-independence/

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If people want to find alternative search engines check out this actively maintained list

Censoring names in a post about censoring is hilarious irony.

I don't trust brave, especially given who the owner is

When I search using DuckDuckGo, I am searching using B*ng? 🤮
- Bin-go: https://www.searchenginemap.com/ same with many others
  
  Unfortunately, this map isn't accurate anymore. For example it says that Startpage only uses Google search results but that's outdated. Now Startpage uses Bing and Google search results. https://www.startpage.com/privacy-please/startpage-articles/enhanced-search-results-on-startpage 'In working with Microsoft, Startpage is now incorporating Microsoft Bing search results and ads within some results pages, using a custom-built private search solution. Google search results will continue to broadly be used, but incorporating additional high-quality sources will have ongoing returns for our users'
- B🤮ng
  
  Hehe Bong
- Yeah, its like a Bing without providing any information besides your search
  
  I'm finding Copilot better than any search and better than buying by itself and world's better than Google search, but it's totally not private... So anything you seem sensitive or private you just can't use it for

I had a high school friend shill me brave because he worked there. Was genuinely into all the tech bro stuff and gold. So much gold. I used it for maybe 2 weeks before I got tired of the crypto. I should thank him though, that pushed me into FOSSland.
- These days crypto is opt in, and you can disable the Brave rewards button if you like:
  https://community.brave.com/t/completely-disable-crypto-wallet-and-brave-rewards-features/214563
  
  Thats nice to know. Their CEO is a massive right-wing dickhead. So it doesnt matter whats optional its not worth it to use in the end.

I use Kagi, and while it does use google index, it also uses many other indexes and its own index. I wonder how this impacts censorship.
https://help.kagi.com/kagi/search-details/search-sources.html
Edit : Not much detail here but they do comment on it here :
https://help.kagi.com/kagi/search-details/search-quality.html
Avoiding Censorship and Bias
We do our best to avoid censorship and bias. Some results from traditional sources will reflect biases, but they’ll be balanced by results from other sources. Also, we have built product features to help with bias reduction. For example, our "World News" Lens includes articles from respectable media outlets across the globe.
One of the signals that does influence our ranking is the presence of ads or trackers. We penalize bloated sites regardless of their agendas.
- I like the idea, but I can't justify $10 a month. Downvote me or whatever, but I'm broke and need to cut as many subscriptions as possible.
  
  make it $1 per month and i'm game, i'm not paying more for a search engine than i do for email holy shit
  
  No, I'm with you. $120 a year is too steep for searching for me. I like what they are trying to do but I don't think the average person will spend that much.

whats the backword R logo?
- Yandex
  
  Why is that their logo? There's no R in Yandex.

29 comments