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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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…
Paid startpage, basically?
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.
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’
