this post was submitted on 04 Feb 2024
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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:

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[–] [email protected] 55 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (26 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 7 months ago (1 children)

How does it compare to DuckDuckGo?

[–] [email protected] 14 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 7 months ago (1 children)

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...

[–] [email protected] 7 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (1 children)

They claim that no information on searches is a saved to an individual for now.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Companies claim a lot of things. Let's see how the first legal issue plays out

[–] [email protected] 6 points 7 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 7 months ago

I strongly encourage reading up on the various VPNs and the like that charge people while still monitoring and tracking everything they do.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago

Ok that sounds neat thx

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