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:
- https://duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/sources/
- https://support.startpage.com/hc/en-us/articles/5138782571796-Why-isn-t-a-particular-site-appearing-in-the-results
- https://www.ecosia.org/privacy
There are still search engines that (claim to) maintain their own index. Most surprisingly, br*ve:
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
Do you happen to have Becky’s phone number?
Well, they were correct more often than wrong.
I especially like censoring Brave but then providing a link with the name
I imagine it’s to not provide SEO for the companies
I think it might just be a joke
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.
Brendan Eichmann
Brendan Eich
Looks like Brendan Eichmann is a wrestling coach from Minnesota
It was a joke. I was comparing him to a nazi.
Come on.
Well, looks like it flew right over my head
You shouldn’t base your browser usage on whether or not the boss is a bigot. How many CEOs of big tech companies do you think are lovely people? There are plenty of real reasons not to use Brave, the founder being a knob is just the icing on the cake.
No, you absolutely should. Don’t use products that enrich pieces of shit. Thats how we got here in the first place by giving the sociopaths the money.
I hope you thoroughly review the board of executives of every company that provides every product you use
Way ahead of you, pal. Its public information even! Just look up the company name and type “board of executives”. If it is indeed incorporated, it will be public. LLCs are the true tricksters.
Buying food must be exhausting. We know Nestlé is bad, but how do you manage to check the parent company of every single food item and go through all the execs’ behaviours to know if they meet your moral standards?
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.
The free tier is 100 searches one time only.
Really? Dangit, I’m misremembering stuff then it seems. Sorry.
Your partly right, when I just started using Kagi it was a certain number of free searches per month.
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.
I thought this was a possibility at first, then I used it. The lad time is basically instant, the results are always good and it has a bunch of features with AI etc.
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.
That’s possible, but when every comment mentioning it has a 1000 word count, it screams advertisement to me.
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.
Yeah. I hope that they provide a way to exclude Brave from the search engines (not optimistic considering the libertarian tech bro tantrum the lead dev threw but…).
But I think the advantage is really the personalized results over anything else. Sometimes you get some REAL fucked up SEO-heavy results. So you just block that site. And then everything works.
It DOES make me more than a bit concerned over how much data they have on me (especially as you need to use an access token to use it in an incognito window… where you are searching for the sketchiest shit) but… google already has that so…
They claim that no information on searches is a saved to an individual for now.
Companies claim a lot of things. Let’s see how the first legal issue plays out
I will say part of the reason I find them more trustworthy is that their business model hinges on some sort of ounce of privacy. Google’s hinges on exactly the opposite.
I strongly encourage reading up on the various VPNs and the like that charge people while still monitoring and tracking everything they do.
Ok that sounds neat thx
Paid startpage, basically?
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
LLM powered search is so great, if it can’t find the information you’re looking for it will just make up random bullshit for you! And all it costs is Microsoft looming over your shoulder to datamine and sell everything you ever do!
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
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’
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.
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.
And then Yandex turned into local-scale Google, but even more sinister. Baidu, for all I know, is a similar story.
Yandex is op if you want to finding movies “legally” for streaming
Essentially Yandex is as much of a Big Tech junk as Google. Same tracking, aggressive advertising and a huge userbase to draw everything from. Besides, unlike Google, Yandex has penetrated way more services and aims to form a life ecosystem, from search and mail to music, taxi (also bought Russian branch of Uber), to marketplace, tickets, online movies, everything. And of course it tracks you around the Web.
So essentially it’s a huge Big Brother, just a lil more friendly to some use cases (like search for pirated media) due to lackluster Russian regulations.
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 [email protected]
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
-
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!
whats the backword R logo?
Yandex
Best reverse image search there is yo
Why is that their logo? There’s no R in Yandex.
Яндекс
Thanks!
Let me break this down:
Я: “Ya” sound
н: “N” sound
д: “D” sound
е: “Eh” sound
к: “K” sound
с: “S” sound, or “C” sound as in “citrus”
Other fun facts:
- There aren’t usually separate letters for capitals and lower case, only being written either full or half size.
- Cyrillic isn’t hugely or vastly different from Greek. The л (L) is often written like lambda (Λ), and п (P) is very much like pi (Π). Other similar letters include Д (Delta), Р (Rho), Ф (Phi) and Г (Gamma), in no particular order.
- Водка (Vodka, almost trivial) literally means “heavy water”. Water is «Вода». Possibly the most important word in all of the Motherland.
- Like virtually all major Eastern languages (and most languages in general), Cyrillic is pretty phonetically consistent. Letters basically never make multiple sounds, unless accents and such are used.
- ВORДТ (The show), which doesn’t even fit in English OR Russian, is transliterated to “VORDT”, which I find kinda funny.
I don’t actually know Russian, or any Cyrillic language. You’re welcome. Bonus dog for engagement.
There is if you use the Cyrillic alphabet because Yandex is Russian
Cyrillic
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?
@[email protected]we’re gettin’ censored here 🫠
don’t you worry. imma make a meme specially highlighting you :p
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 ?
Generally no, but if your hitting a dead end looking for things on Google/Bing based engines, it doesn’t hurt giving Yandex a shot.
I’ve recently started using it and the top results tend to be exactly what I’m looking for
trees > censorship on the internet
What about Qwant
