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Which search engine is the least censored?

michaelsuede.substack.com

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Re: Which search engine is the least censored?

#31

Post by hunglee2 »

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…

yes great insight! A better word might be 'curated' - we are getting access to preselected set of information from which we can further select

Re: Which search engine is the least censored?

#32

Post by jrmg »

supergirl wrote: post #30
tomerv wrote: post #26

> No search engine, not even the Russian based Yandex, returned an objective article that included the reasons laid out in Putin's invasion speech. [...] The level of disinformation I observed for this test was terrifying. Based on what I saw, I don't believe it is possible for an uninformed person to learn the actual reasons Russia invaded from a web search on any search engine. Really, you consider Putin's stated r…

a search engine is meant for searching text about whatever I ask it. I don’t need it to vet the result based on geopolitics. If I search for “Putin invasion speech” I want articles that show me what Putin said about the invasion ranked by various technical metrics but not by whether the world thinks Putin is a liar and then giving me articles with what others said about Putin’s speech

I do believe that Google’s ‘quality’ of results has been declining in recent years, but:

This article is biased, cherry-picked nonsense. Is anyone actually looking at the results of his example queries and evaluating the quality themselves before responding?

To go with your example: the first three results a Google search returns for me on ‘Putin Invasion Speech’ are two NY Times articles analyzing the speech, and then a full translated transcript from Bloomberg. It’s hardly hidden.

On the author’s own example, “Why did Russia invade Ukraine? 2022”, the first article is from the BBC and tries to lay out the full historical context - and mentions Putin’s speech.

The rest are from mainstream news sources of various descriptions, again laying out historical context.

The author may not _like_ that these are trusted, mainstream, popular sources - but that’s what Google has _always_ strived to return. Pagerank was never an ‘unbiased’ thing that searched solely for page content - and, wow, can you imagine the toxic SEO nightmare we’d be in if it was…

Re: Which search engine is the least censored?

#33

Post by supergirl »

jrmg wrote: post #32
supergirl wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

a search engine is meant for searching text about whatever I ask it. I don’t need it to vet the result based on geopolitics. If I search for “Putin invasion speech” I want articles that show me what Putin said about the invasion ranked by various technical metrics but not by whether the world thinks Putin is a liar and then giving me articles with what others said about Putin’s speech

I do believe that Google’s ‘quality’ of results has been declining in recent years, but: This article is biased, cherry-picked nonsense. Is anyone actually looking at the results of his example queries and evaluating the quality themselves before responding? To go with your example: the first three results a Google search returns for me on ‘Putin Invasion Speech’ are two NY Times articles analyzing the speech, and th…

> The author may not _like_ that these are trusted, mainstream, popular sources

Because that's not what I'm searching for. Even if we all agree all the Russian sites are propaganda, I still want to be able to search through it. It's a political decision by Google to filter out these results. It's not algorithmic because no matter how precise your search query is, you will never get results from certain forbidden domains. Google just directly removed rt.com from results recently, so even if you search for "rt.com" you will not see it. I'm sure they have similar filtering based on certain keywords.

Re: Which search engine is the least censored?

#34

Post by tomerv »

supergirl wrote: post #33
jrmg wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do believe that Google’s ‘quality’ of results has been declining in recent years, but: This article is biased, cherry-picked nonsense. Is anyone actually looking at the results of his example queries and evaluating the quality themselves before responding? To go with your example: the first three results a Google search returns for me on ‘Putin Invasion Speech’ are two NY Times articles analyzing the speech, and th…

> The author may not _like_ that these are trusted, mainstream, popular sources Because that's not what I'm searching for. Even if we all agree all the Russian sites are propaganda, I still want to be able to search through it. It's a political decision by Google to filter out these results. It's not algorithmic because no matter how precise your search query is, you will never get results from certain forbidden doma…

But that wasn't the author's search query, it was "Why did Russia invade Ukraine? 2022" - and Putin's speach is not a good answer to the for that, even ignoring the the inherent bias.

I specifically didn't call out the complaint about missing results when searching for direct quotes from an article (event thought they are also blatant misinformation), because that indeed is an issue. If I search for some pronoun X then I expect to find a known website with the name X. But if I search for a general term, then the only reasonable way to thing that a search engine can return is websites that fit the consensus view around that topic.

Re: Which search engine is the least censored?

#35

Post by voldacar »

personasdfghjkl wrote: post #19

> 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?

How can a search engine know what is true?

Re: Which search engine is the least censored?

#36

Post by IMSAI8080 »

jrmg wrote: post #32
supergirl wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

a search engine is meant for searching text about whatever I ask it. I don’t need it to vet the result based on geopolitics. If I search for “Putin invasion speech” I want articles that show me what Putin said about the invasion ranked by various technical metrics but not by whether the world thinks Putin is a liar and then giving me articles with what others said about Putin’s speech

I do believe that Google’s ‘quality’ of results has been declining in recent years, but: This article is biased, cherry-picked nonsense. Is anyone actually looking at the results of his example queries and evaluating the quality themselves before responding? To go with your example: the first three results a Google search returns for me on ‘Putin Invasion Speech’ are two NY Times articles analyzing the speech, and th…

Yes, I found articles on the first page of DDG results providing Putin's own reasoning in his own words. The author just doesn't like the analysis and commentary surrounding it.

Take a look at who the author of this "comparison" of search engines is. His next post is describing Zelensky as a neo-Nazi. He claims Putin will exit Ukraine once these "Nazis" have been removed. He says he trusts Putin more than Biden and that the US was responsible for the invasion.

Re: Which search engine is the least censored?

#37

Post by ThalesX »

moltke wrote: post #20
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.

I've been doing this for awhile. Most importantly, I do this with my news. If there's a war in Europe, I don't even bother to check the BBC anymore, or German outlets. I try to grok Al Jazeera, India Times, Channel News Asia, see what's common between them.

Re: Which search engine is the least censored?

#38

Post by Biganon »

sundarurfriend wrote: post #14

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 als…

In search engines and in so many other applications, we desperately need a checkbox that says "I know what I'm doing, don't assume anything, give it to me straight". Expert modes, literal modes, they need to be everywhere.

Re: Which search engine is the least censored?

#39

Post by bjourne »

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.

Oddly enough, Yandex pass these tests with flying colors.

Re: Which search engine is the least censored?

#40

Post by yakubin »

sundarurfriend wrote: post #14

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 als…

Using quotes in DDG used to work for me. Unfortunately, for a couple months now it doesn't. The results are garbage. Often they don't even include most of the words I typed, only the first one.
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