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:

  • Sanctus@lemmy.worldEnglish
    983·
    10 months ago

    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.

      • Sanctus@lemmy.worldEnglish
        1084·
        10 months ago

        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.

        • PatMustard@feddit.ukEnglish
          423·
          10 months ago

          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.

          • Sanctus@lemmy.worldEnglish
            244·
            10 months ago

            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.

            • PatMustard@feddit.ukEnglish
              48·
              10 months ago

              I hope you thoroughly review the board of executives of every company that provides every product you use

              • Sanctus@lemmy.worldEnglish
                6·
                10 months ago

                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.

                • PatMustard@feddit.ukEnglish
                  34·
                  10 months ago

                  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?

      • renzev@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
        16·
        10 months ago

        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.

  • Funderpants
    614·
    10 months ago

    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.

    • balderdash@lemmy.zip
      931·
      10 months ago

      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.

      • li10@lemmy.ml
        562·
        10 months ago

        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.

      • the_weez@midwest.social
        40·
        10 months ago

        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.

        • BolexForSoup@kbin.social
          1·
          10 months ago

          People spend thousands of dollars a year on coffee which they use less frequently. If you can afford it it absolutely is worth it.

          • Vex_Detrause
            1·
            10 months ago

            I think we got spoiled with Google which is their goal. Undercut competitions then when there’s no competition then enshitificate.

          • the_weez@midwest.social
            0·
            10 months ago

            I absolutely do not spend more than $999.99 a year on coffee and I drink it every day. I’m sure some people do.

            Both of those things are outside of my budget.

            • BolexForSoup@kbin.social
              1·
              10 months ago

              I don’t know how many qualifiers I need in order to avoid responses like this but I feel like it was pretty clear.

              I get a good deal doesn’t make something affordable. The point of my comment is that plenty of people - not necessarily you - can afford to pay for it and it is well worth it at $120/yr.

      • Norgur@kbin.social
        162·
        10 months ago

        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.

        • BolexForSoup@kbin.social
          1·
          10 months ago

          Why not? It’s a tool you sometimes use dozens of time in a single day.

          I mean this is the entire problem. You were used to free searches, we all were. But It wasn’t free. We are dealing with the repercussions now. So now you can pay to have a search engine that doesn’t give you those repercussions if you value it. If you don’t then of course $120 a year doesn’t make sense. That means you keep using Google search, or a free competitor like DDG. But to complain about the quality dropping and disregard for privacy or whatever bone you have to pick with Google and then be unwilling to spend $.30 USD a day on a concrete solution? I’m not sure what you want here.

      • Funderpants
        10·
        10 months ago

        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.

      • Funderpants
        242·
        10 months ago

        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.

      • mac@infosec.pub
        92·
        10 months ago

        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.

      • M137@lemmy.world
        2·
        10 months ago

        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.

        • hardaysknight@lemmy.worldEnglish
          1·
          10 months ago

          That’s possible, but when every comment mentioning it has a 1000 word count, it screams advertisement to me.

      • Funderpants
        182·
        10 months ago

        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.

        • NuXCOM_90Percent@lemmy.zip
          133·
          10 months ago

          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…

              • PopOfAfrica@lemmy.world
                6·
                10 months ago

                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.

                • NuXCOM_90Percent@lemmy.zip
                  102·
                  10 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.

      • Funderpants
        3·
        10 months ago

        Similar yes. Kagi has more features and no ads (because paid) but yes, it’s a similar idea.

      • douglasg14b@lemmy.world
        2·
        10 months ago

        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.

    • douglasg14b@lemmy.world
      361·
      10 months ago

      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

      • markon@lemmy.world
        37·
        10 months ago

        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@lemmy.worldEnglish
          291·
          10 months ago

          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!

    • MeanEYE@lemmy.world
      22·
      10 months ago

      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.

      • NewDay@lemmy.worldEnglish
        1·
        7 months ago

        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’

      • deus@lemmy.world
        32·
        10 months ago

        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.

        • HakFoo@lemmy.sdf.org
          19·
          10 months ago

          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.

          • Allero@lemmy.today
            5·
            10 months ago

            And then Yandex turned into local-scale Google, but even more sinister. Baidu, for all I know, is a similar story.

        • Allero@lemmy.today
          5·
          10 months ago

          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.

  • fin@sh.itjust.works
    382·
    10 months ago

    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]

    • hexortor@lemmy.zip
      17·
      10 months ago

      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]?”.

      • Mojeek Search Engine@lemmy.ml
        3·
        10 months ago

        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.

      • WeirdGoesPro@lemmy.dbzer0.com
        11·
        10 months ago

        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

  • LarmyOfLone@lemm.ee
    15·
    10 months ago

    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!

            • HEXN3T@lemmy.blahaj.zone
              6·
              10 months ago

              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.

      • Jknaraa@lemmy.ml
        2·
        10 months ago

        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.

      • YⓄ乙 @aussie.zoneEnglish
        45·
        10 months ago

        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 ?

        • retro@infosec.pub
          6·
          10 months ago

          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.