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 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:

Kodama,

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.

FractalsInfinite,

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

Prandom_returns,

Google, Microsoft, Brave.

Fades,

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

douglasg14b,
@douglasg14b@lemmy.world avatar

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

lemmesay,
@lemmesay@discuss.tchncs.de avatar

where mojeek?
@Mojeek

Mojeek,
@Mojeek@lemmy.ml avatar

we’re gettin’ censored here 🫠

lemmesay,
@lemmesay@discuss.tchncs.de avatar

don’t you worry. imma make a meme specially highlighting you :p

Caboose12000,

whats the backword R logo?

menny,

Yandex

Jknaraa,

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.

Anticorp,

Why is that their logo? There’s no R in Yandex.

Chestnut,

There is if you use the Cyrillic alphabet because Yandex is Russian

lledrtx,

Cyrillic

HEXN3T,
@HEXN3T@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

Яндекс

Anticorp,

Thanks!

HEXN3T,
@HEXN3T@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

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:

  1. There aren’t usually separate letters for capitals and lower case, only being written either full or half size.
  2. 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.
  3. Водка (Vodka, almost trivial) literally means “heavy water”. Water is «Вода». Possibly the most important word in all of the Motherland.
  4. 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.
  5. 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.

https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/pictrs/image/b283aee4-fe5d-4e12-866c-39db6b78b7b0.jpeg

EdibleFriend,
@EdibleFriend@lemmy.world avatar

Best reverse image search there is yo

LarmyOfLone,

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!

yoz,

Which search engine.is R?/

Sensationalglyph,

Yandex, cyrillic logo

yoz,

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 ?

HerbalGamer,
@HerbalGamer@sh.itjust.works avatar

I’ve recently started using it and the top results tend to be exactly what I’m looking for

retro,

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.

starman,
@starman@programming.dev avatar

stract.com

I found it today on HN

hexortor,

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: 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,

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

WeirdGoesPro,
@WeirdGoesPro@lemmy.dbzer0.com avatar

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

Mojeek,
@Mojeek@lemmy.ml avatar

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: 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.

pewgar_seemsimandroid,

trees > censorship on the internet

fin,

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

andrewth09,

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

angrymouse,

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

markon,

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

Doug7070,
@Doug7070@lemmy.world avatar

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!

renzev,

B🤮ng

HEXN3T,
@HEXN3T@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

Hehe Bong

Mojeek,
@Mojeek@lemmy.ml avatar

Bin-go: www.searchenginemap.com same with many others

NewDay,
@NewDay@lemmy.world avatar

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. startpage.com/…/enhanced-search-results-on-startp…‘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’

MeanEYE,
@MeanEYE@lemmy.world avatar

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.

byroon,

What about Qwant

iAmTheTot,
iAmTheTot avatar

Censoring names in a post about censoring is hilarious irony.

NuXCOM_90Percent,

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,

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

Anticorp,

Do you happen to have Becky’s phone number?

marcos,

Well, they were correct more often than wrong.

edgemaster72,
@edgemaster72@lemmy.world avatar

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

mac,
@mac@infosec.pub avatar

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

PatMustard,

I think it might just be a joke

SoupBrick,

deleted_by_author

    •
    Drinvictus,

    This is about search engines not web browsers. Firefox doesn’t have a search engine

    SoupBrick,

    I was more of thinking privacy. If it is causing issues, I can remove the comment.

    stockRot,

    OP: a lot of people talk about privacy at the expense of censorship

    You: let’s talk about privacy and completely ignore censorship

    Truly incredible discussion, here

    SoupBrick,

    Point taken.

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