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:

            • HEXN3T@lemmy.blahaj.zone
              1·
              8 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.

  • Sanctus@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    8 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.

  • Funderpants @lemmy.ca
    0·
    8 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
      2·
      8 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.

      • the_weez@midwest.social
        1·
        8 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.