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/

101 comments

Censoring names in a post about censoring is hilarious irony.
- That crap always reminds me of late 90s GameFAQs where people would think that spelling it "sh!t" wouldn't get their comment deleted
  
  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
  
  Well, they were correct more often than wrong.
- I especially like censoring Brave but then providing a link with the name
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.
  
  opt in
  Unfortunately there is still one thing that you have to opt out of manually, and that is monetized new tab pages. It's not strictly crypto-related, and it's only like three clicks to opt-out, but can be slightly annoying if your workflow relies heavily on browser profiles like mine. Still a great browser tho.
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.
  
  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.
  
  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.
  
  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.
  
  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
  
  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.
- I swear to God you people must work for Kagi.
  
  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.
  
  Or people just like it? This isn't hard to understand and has always been a thing. When people find something they really like they will tell other people about it.
- As sure as flies on shit! Any time search engines are mentioned there will be people in the comments writing about Kagi.
- How does it compare to DuckDuckGo?
  
  With Kagi I get what I want and sort through way less to no junk. With their lenses I can push reliable sources up and other sources down. I really like it.
- Paid startpage, basically?
  https://www.startpage.com/en/about-us
  
  Similar yes. Kagi has more features and no ads (because paid) but yes, it's a similar idea.
  
  That and kagi does its own indexing unlike startpage, as well as its own page and data analysis for enriched queries and research.
  IMHO they add enough of their own value that you're not going to get elsewhere that it's worth paying for.
I don't trust brave, especially given who the owner is
- 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
When I search using DuckDuckGo, I am searching using B*ng? 🤮
- 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
- 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.
- B🤮ng
  
  Hehe Bong
- Bin-go: https://www.searchenginemap.com/ same with many others
What's the backwards R one?
- Yandex, a Russian search engine
  
  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.
  
  for context, the reverse r is pronounced "ya" and is a cyrillic character.
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
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!
https://stract.com/
I found it today on HN
- 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]?".
  
  That Pokemon page is awesome though. Man, I miss the old Internet!
  
  if you look at the repo they give thanks to:
  "The commoncrawl organization for crawling the web and making the dataset readily available. Even though we have our own crawler now, commoncrawl has been a huge help in the early stages of development."
  There is nothing I can find which says how much of the index is CC and how much is their own; if there's a decent amount of CC, this is originally for researchers etc. it's not the best resource in the world for a search index: https://commoncrawl.org/
  That being said, as an independent search engine, it's always good to see people take on the massive task of actually building an index, not becoming a proxy.
  
  I searched for Aleister Crowley and learned all about how he’s the secret daddy of Barbara Bush and her satanic siblings. Seems legit. /s
whats the backword R logo?
- Yandex
  
  Best reverse image search there is yo
  
  Why is that their logo? There's no R in Yandex.
  
  Damn, that's my go-to and I didn't even recognize it's logo. Shows up as a Y on the site for me.
If people want to find alternative search engines check out this actively maintained list
where mojeek?
@Mojeek@lemmy.ml
- we're gettin' censored here 🫠
  
  don't you worry. imma make a meme specially highlighting you :p
Which search engine.is R?/
- Yandex, cyrillic logo
  
  Wow I checked Yandex and its pretty neat. Also its Russian so your search data might be safe from US and its big tech. Would you recommend using it ?
What about Qwant
trees > censorship on the internet
These are private companies that are govern and controlled by commercial incentives. And are in their all right to do so. The users are always free to change service.
But as always, conviniance beats everything. Most people don't care or are not ready to go back. E.g. use mp3s and manually upload files to choosen device or if even supported. aux contact that was removed. Music and movie resolution loss due to streaming most people don't care.. They are frustrated when the airpod doesn't work with Android device accept the situation and go along with their lives. Most western people download their games and do not think for a second that all games are useless when an new device is announced and the company can resell same game again even thought if thought from design to be back compatible.
Censorship are applicable for governments enforcing laws and regulations that impact what you are allowed to do or say which in many parts of the world unconstitutional. If people even put an ounce of energy to complain on their governmentns that they do on companies we would live in a better world.
Google, Microsoft, Brave.
- This is about search engines not web browsers. Firefox doesn't have a search engine
  
  I was more of thinking privacy. If it is causing issues, I can remove the comment.

101 comments