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

submitted 4 months ago by renzev@lemmy.world to c/memes@lemmy.world

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Many "alternative" search engines are better for privacy, but they are still vulnerable to censorship, because they rely on g**gle and m*crosoft'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, br*ve:

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

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[-] iAmTheTot@kbin.social 258 points 4 months ago

Censoring names in a post about censoring is hilarious irony.

[-] NuXCOM_90Percent@lemmy.zip 75 points 4 months ago

That crap always reminds me of late 90s GameFAQs where people would think that spelling it "sh!t" wouldn't get their comment deleted

[-] ImplyingImplications@lemmy.ca 31 points 4 months ago

I remember a page where people could post gossip about other people, but you weren't allowed to cuss, so people wrote things like:

Becky Jones from Jamesdale High is a total sloot. She fricked a bunch of guys and even gave them bjobs and handj's

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[-] edgemaster72@lemmy.world 34 points 4 months ago

I especially like censoring Brave but then providing a link with the name

[-] mac@infosec.pub 12 points 4 months ago

I imagine it's to not provide SEO for the companies

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[-] Sanctus@lemmy.world 95 points 4 months ago

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.

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[-] FunderPants@lemmy.ca 55 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

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.

[-] balderdash9@lemmy.zip 92 points 4 months ago

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.

[-] li10@lemmy.ml 54 points 4 months ago

That’s fair.

You could argue that it’s worth the money to get better results and avoid Google, but with so many companies trying to take $10 a month you have to draw the line somewhere.

[-] jodanlime@midwest.social 40 points 4 months ago

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.

[-] Norgur@kbin.social 14 points 4 months ago

Why downvote? That's a fair point. There is a free tier with a few free searches per year (2000 or something). You could sign up and use this budget whenever your search engine of choice fails you.

[-] qaz@lemmy.world 10 points 4 months ago

The free tier is 100 searches one time only.

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[-] Swedneck@discuss.tchncs.de 13 points 4 months ago

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

[-] FunderPants@lemmy.ca 10 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

Yea, I just think I either pay for something like Kagi, or I am subject to something like Google. I'm not sure there is a third way that pays for the servers and talent needed to deliver search results, but my imagination might just be limited.

[-] hardaysknight@lemmy.world 28 points 4 months ago

I swear to God you people must work for Kagi.

[-] FunderPants@lemmy.ca 22 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

Lol, I know how you feel. Not long ago there was suddenly a bunch of chatter about it on Lemmy and I was thinking the same thing, that it had to be marketing. But I'm a curious sort and I was so sick of bad google results so I tried it.

Now that I have used Kagi I'm convinced it was organic chatter. I really do like it, I think it's better, and if they offered money for posts I'd take that money because I'm paying $10 a month for a search engine, lol.

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[-] Fudoshin@feddit.uk 9 points 4 months ago

As sure as flies on shit! Any time search engines are mentioned there will be people in the comments writing about Kagi.

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[-] Fades@lemmy.world 54 points 4 months ago

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

[-] douglasg14b@lemmy.world 35 points 4 months ago

I've been spelling this for years...

Why would you trust a browser whose business model is based on user activity tracking.

Who before they were even remotely popular or profitable had one of the largest ad campaigns I've ever seen for a tech product. Who's funding that and where is their value proposition coming from for that funding?

Hell no I'm not going to trust it

[-] andrewth09@lemmy.world 49 points 4 months ago

When I search using DuckDuckGo, I am searching using B*ng? 🤮

[-] angrymouse@lemmy.world 34 points 4 months ago

Yeah, its like a Bing without providing any information besides your search

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[-] MeanEYE@lemmy.world 21 points 4 months ago

In part, yes. Here's a document explaining it all. In short, they use many different source, of which Bing is one. However when they query for data on those services, there's no personally identifiable information shared, so they can't create profiles about you.

[-] renzev@lemmy.world 20 points 4 months ago

B🤮ng

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[-] MxRemy@lemmy.one 38 points 4 months ago

What's the backwards R one?

[-] lemmydoit@lemy.lol 38 points 4 months ago

Yandex, a Russian search engine

[-] deus@lemmy.world 32 points 4 months ago

I don't know how safe it is to use but man, their reverse image search has always impressed me. Miles better than Google's or Tineye's.

[-] HakFoo@lemmy.sdf.org 19 points 4 months ago

I always figured the markets that Google didn't penetrate successfully (Russia with Yandex, China with Baidu, maybe Korea and Japan) probably ended up with their own circle of innovation just because there wasn't a huge dominant player sucking all the talent and money out of the room. Thry might have gotten an edge through noncompetitive regulatory policy, but that bought them thr time to build domething more duited to local needs.

Back when it was socially permissible to acknowledge Russia did anything well, Yandex was doing some fairly innovative stuff.

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[-] fin@sh.itjust.works 36 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

Still Privacy >> Censorship. If the search engine is privacy-friendly then we can talk about censorship. No brave bullshit

And this should be discussed on !privacy@lemmy.ml

[-] starman@programming.dev 15 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

https://stract.com/

I found it today on HN

[-] hexortor@lemmy.zip 17 points 4 months ago

Very interesting. Too bad it gives really bad results.

Searching for "pokemon" doesn't show in the first page of results

the official website
the wikipedia page

Instead it shows a bunch of random websites that mention the term including this wepage straight out of the year 2000: http://dvdmg.com/pokemon.shtml

As a second search I tried searching for "best fallout for mods" and its first result was some unrelated meta topic (discussing ai generated content) which happened to use the expression "is this the fallout of [action/event]?".

[-] Anticorp@lemmy.world 8 points 4 months ago

That Pokemon page is awesome though. Man, I miss the old Internet!

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[-] LarmyOfLone@lemm.ee 15 points 4 months ago

Worse are subtle manipulations imho. There are scientific experiments showing that changing the order of search results can alter how people vote. How much outside of the spectrum suppressed because it doesn't sell as well? Who knows!