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Which search engine is the least censored?

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Re: Which search engine is the least censored?

#11

Post by marcusverus »

bjourne wrote: post #8
celdon25 wrote: post #2

Personally, I don't think this was a complete/valid test - Yandex could be censoring other things. The input test data primarily covered things that would fit a specific narrative, not one for the 'other side'. Has anyone done a more complete test?

Can you give examples of queries for the "other side"? I'd like to test them out.

Zelensky is a hero -- should return five results in which the author considers Zelensky to be a hero.

Russia thousands arrested -- should return five results about arrests at recent war protests in Russia

Russian casualties in ukraine -- should return five results listing figures in the thousands.

Re: Which search engine is the least censored?

#12

Post by kordlessagain »

marcusverus wrote: post #11
bjourne wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you give examples of queries for the "other side"? I'd like to test them out.

Zelensky is a hero -- should return five results in which the author considers Zelensky to be a hero. Russia thousands arrested -- should return five results about arrests at recent war protests in Russia Russian casualties in ukraine -- should return five results listing figures in the thousands.

This is why the index shouldn't be full of crap. A smaller collection, curated by the user, is where it's at.

Maybe you should do a pull request!

Re: Which search engine is the least censored?

#13

Post by robbedpeter »

kordlessagain wrote: post #12
marcusverus wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Zelensky is a hero -- should return five results in which the author considers Zelensky to be a hero. Russia thousands arrested -- should return five results about arrests at recent war protests in Russia Russian casualties in ukraine -- should return five results listing figures in the thousands.

This is why the index shouldn't be full of crap. A smaller collection, curated by the user, is where it's at. Maybe you should do a pull request!

This is a little silly when you consider volume. A search engine should crawl millions of pages and sites, and over time develop quality indicators so the crap can be filtered out. Anything that works equivalently to Google's algorithm will suffer from the same crap infection as Google results, and to a lesser degree any of the other top 20 engines and meta-search tools.

Something like ublock lists and p2p sharing in closed communities could provide semantic indexing and gradual manual curation, so with a few thousand people you might get novelty + quality in an engine. If you stick to a small, curated list of sites, you won't get site level novelty, and quality will eventually suffer relative to searches that scan over new things.

Even then, consider reddit - build a reddit search that's as good as Google. That updates once an hour.

Sharing bookmarks isn't feasible when you want the functionality of a general purpose search engine.

Re: Which search engine is the least censored?

#14

Post by sundarurfriend »

This is interesting because I tried Yandex for the first time after this DDG debacle, and I found it solved a major problem I have with every other popular search engine - Yandex respected my actual query and gave me the correct results every time, instead of trying to mind read me and mangle the results like the other ones. Google always does it, DDG started doing it some time ago, and unfortunately Brave search also seems to do it.

I understand there's probably a reason others do it - maybe that that's what's needed to serve a general audience, they're optimising the results for my 70 yr old dad and 10 yr old niece. But that does mean that using them is a frustrating experience for me half of the time, of quoting everything and micromanaging the query terms so that they understand that I do mean this specific thing rather than this overgeneralised idea they seem to parse from it. Yandex was a breath of fresh air in that respect.

Re: Which search engine is the least censored?

#15

Post by s1artibartfast »

jrm4 wrote: post #7

But this gets me thinking. "Censored" is definitely the wrong word here; it implies that there is some objective pool of information that we could all be getting to if it weren't for the search engines getting it wrong, and that's just not it. It's definitely much closer to -- imagine 5 hypothetical bookstores owned by different people. Each has to make decisions on what to choose to carry based on their business int…

I think there are pretty clear examples of censorship that would cross the line.

The most widely recognized example is when major search engines delisted pictures and results for the Tiananmen Square massacre last year.

The bookstore analogy would be if you came in and asked for a book on the massacre, and the owner said "sorry, I don't know what you are talking about" when they have a whole shelf in stock.

Re: Which search engine is the least censored?

#17

Post by anothernewdude »

celdon25 wrote: post #2

Personally, I don't think this was a complete/valid test - Yandex could be censoring other things. The input test data primarily covered things that would fit a specific narrative, not one for the 'other side'. Has anyone done a more complete test?

I expect any search engine worth using to filter out spam and low effort crap. Yandex does neither.

Re: Which search engine is the least censored?

#18

Post by tehaugmenter »

I figure to be a more complete test you'd have to include Baidu the Chinese search engine, which is in no doubt censored. Or old school engines like ask.com, and Yahoo even though they serve Bing results to my understanding it would be nice to include them. Either way, good showcase, great example queries. Although I do think some should be catering the MSM narrative to see if the results give contrary results included.

Re: Which search engine is the least censored?

#19

Post by personasdfghjkl »

> Results for "evidence of election fraud 2020" - at least 5 results showing major election fraud took place.

Shouldn't an "objective" search engine return results that are true (that there was no systemic election fraud) instead of results that fit his personal biases?

Re: Which search engine is the least censored?

#20

Post by moltke »

tehaugmenter wrote: post #18

I figure to be a more complete test you'd have to include Baidu the Chinese search engine, which is in no doubt censored. Or old school engines like ask.com, and Yahoo even though they serve Bing results to my understanding it would be nice to include them. Either way, good showcase, great example queries. Although I do think some should be catering the MSM narrative to see if the results give contrary results includ…

I think in the future people will just resort to checking yandex/baidu/duckduckgo every time they think the results might be censored. The opposing regimes are likely to censor complimentary parts of the web.
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