Search engines turn searches into money. Some do this by selling ads, some by selling your data. Unless you’re paying for it you’re bound with their database as the product and are mostly irrelevant to them besides spending more time there. They have an incentive to delay you finding what you want.
Which search engine is the least censored?
41–50 of 50 posts
Re: Which search engine is the least censored?
#42> 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?
An objective search engine should return the results that are most relevant to your query without attempting to be the arbiter of "truth". An objective search engine doesn't try to weigh in on disputed events like the existence of systemic election fraud (which has been a regular occurrence in every election since before any one of us was born, despite the exhortations of the DC blob and legacy media outlets). For ex…
DDG for me is a mixed bag on that query, some links on how it’s been debunked but more than half promoting the report…
It I mean it would be nice if it surfaced whatever actual report you’re talking about, but maybe it’s just not the best query for that? I’m sure I could find it by clicking through any of the links
Re: Which search engine is the least censored?
#43I suggest anyone who read this post to scroll down the webpage, and once past the comment section - see the first article that was previously posted by the author, titled "Why did Russia attack Ukraine...".
Reading that post should tell you how smoothly you're being manipulated.
Re: Which search engine is the least censored?
#44> 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…
Actually, if you open the post and scroll down enough to see one of the other posts published by the author (look for the post titled "Why did Russia attack Ukraine..."), then you would realize that the entire website has piles of misinformation.
Re: Which search engine is the least censored?
#45I’ve found in the past that Yandex’s reverse image search is vastly better than Google’s. I am almost always able to find things with Yandex that I cannot with Google.
Re: Which search engine is the least censored?
#46Is deranking considered censorship? On what basis does RT need to be the top result?
Now of course I know its been purposely deranked. But couldn’t google claim its not censored if it exists but buried in results?
I want to know what legal basis we have for asserting certain sites must have the highest rank on google for certain searches. I’m assuming there isn’t one.
Re: Which search engine is the least censored?
#47Search engines turn searches into money. Some do this by selling ads, some by selling your data. Unless you’re paying for it you’re bound with their database as the product and are mostly irrelevant to them besides spending more time there. They have an incentive to delay you finding what you want.
Yet here we are with no usable alternatives because competitors get crushed
Re: Which search engine is the least censored?
#48Earlier 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…
A Google search for “rt.com”, or ”Russia Today”, returns rt.com as the first result for me. On the google.com home page, starting to type ‘rt’ will have rt.com as the first autocomplete suggestion.
Did you try this out?
Re: Which search engine is the least censored?
#49This 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.
Google has sort of added this - but they hide it so well I didn't even know it existed until a few weeks back.
If you do a search, click tools, click the "more" dropdown, and choose "Verbatim" then the results are actually pretty close to "don't fucking try to read my mind".
They claim the following about Verbatim (although this info is from 2011, and it may be different now)
----
This verbatim search removes personalized, corrected, suggested, related, and non-inclusive results.
On the verbatim page, users will see only results that:
Include all their search terms.
Match their exact spelling.
Use the same tense (e.g., “is” and “was” will be seen as distinct).
Use the same verb form (e.g., “swimming” and “swim” will be seen as distinct).
Use the same plural vs singular form (e.g., “hat” and “hats” will be seen as distinct).
Re: Which search engine is the least censored?
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Google has sort of added this - but they hide it so well I didn't even know it existed until a few weeks back. If you do a search, click tools, click the "more" dropdown, and choose "Verbatim" then the results are actually pretty close to "don't fucking try to read my mind". They claim the following about Verbatim (although this info is from 2011, and it may be different now) ---- This verbatim search removes persona…
> click tools, click the "more" dropdown
It's under Tools -> "All results" dropdown for me.
I tried to see if it was possible to bookmark to get a verbatim search directly, and while I couldn't decipher the obfuscated query they seem to be using these days, the overall query length was much shorter than with the original non-verbatim search. I wonder if that has anything to do with the:
> This verbatim search removes personalized, corrected, suggested, related, and non-inclusive results.
claim. The original search had a very long 64 bit encoded parameter, which perhaps had some context information - it seems plausible it had some typing history information (perhaps taken from their Google Docs code), maybe how fast I typed (for error probability), some kind of personally identifying ID about my current session perhaps. Looking at these query strings and how opaque they are, feels a bit creepy that all this information is being sent from my computer without my knowledge or significant control. Makes me glad I rarely use Google these days.