Saturday, March 12, 2022

Brave and Presearch absolutely DO censor search results.

So DuckDuckGo has just decided to do this:

Even Google doesn't go that far! They at least give you a few RT articles in foreign languages.


Bing is the same as DDG.

Brave has claimed that they don't censor anything, which is a lie.

In fact, Brave seems to be just using Google's algorithm. What are the chances that two different search engines would independently return the Wikipedia article on Tim Burton as the first hit for christopher walken infogalactic?

Notice that my own blog is fifth result -- not the post where I mention Walken but one where I quote one of Paul's epistles without comment!

Presearch, which also claims not to censor search results, is the same as all the others.

They do at least return the Christopher Walken page on Infogalactic -- though for some reason it ranks lower than "1969 texas longhorn football stats."

Okay, what about Yandex, then? I mean, they're actually Russian, right?

Yeah, well that's a mixed blessing.

To be clear, this is what happens when you run this news search on their English site: it automatically switches you to all Russian.

So . . . any other ideas? Is there any search engine at all that returns uncensored English-language results?

9 comments:

Genie said...

Try Qwant. It's French.

Wm Jas Tychonievich said...

Qwant can’t be accessed from Taiwan for some reason.

Loïc Simond said...

For me, Brave Search properly lists RT articles when I attempt the same research and set the regional filter to "All regions". The links however lead to nothing since the RT website is down (from France).

No Longer Reading said...

Swisscows works. for now

Sasha Melnik said...

Yahoo seems to be giving better search results than google. But for how much longer.

Sasha Melnik said...

I tried Qwant and it's blocking rt.com.

Qwant would rather give us infogalactic.com/info/Christopher_Columbus than the correct url when given "Infogalactic Christopher Walken" But that's probably because one Christopher is only slightly more famous than another, and the algorithm biases the earlier words in the search.

Yahoo at least gives the infogalactic link.

Amusingly they forgot to nail down rt-shop.com over at Google.

I find Google more or less unusable for search search these days.

Wm Jas Tychonievich said...

I get a 403 when I try to access swisscows.

No Longer Reading said...

Strange. Using a VPN and going to a Taiwan server, I get the same thing. Here is a list of other search engines (https://restoreprivacy.com/private-search-engine/).

Ben Pratt said...

When I try that search on startpage, I get an error page accusing me of scraping them.

When I try it in Ecosia, I go through a Cloudflare check and then get actual results.

I had recently discussed with someone which of those two to use in a browser. Now I have an answer.

Rationalized whim

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