After hearing the unfortunate news that DuckDuckGo had deranked The Gateway Pundit from its search results, and announcing that it was going to start censoring “Russian disinformation”, I decided to test some alternative search engines to see how they compared against Google and Bing results.
VERY USEFUL AND IMPORTANT. Thank you! I've always felt that censorship is far worse than disinformation. If there was no censorship but lots of disinformation (ie... not eg... the government and mainstream media), there are enough great people like you and other writers on Substack and alternate media who manage to dig out the real information, and the rest of us readers can make our own assessments. I've been amazed and disappointed that this point hasn't been a visible topic of discussion, even by anti-narrative folks, along with analysis of search engines, such as what you've done, though preferably in greater depth. Thank you!
Is there a way to make Yandex usable, I am just getting 90% Russian language results. Which not only are useless to me, but makes me wonder how English language words results in .ru sites being most relevant without them soft censoring pretty much everything outside of Russia.
You have to include "&lang=en" at the end of your query. If you follow my instructions for Brave you can see it's included. You can also manually select the advanced search button next to the search bar and chose "English" only results.
Have you tried either? All my searches on .com return primarily Russian language results. It looks like they have a quota, the searches I did return 2-3 highly relevant good results and then a bunch of Russian results.
Its a bit different and still an alpha version but it is the best search engine I have tried so far.
I tried your test searches and got 8 out of 10, sort of. Some of the results were from Yandex and Brave, so it must include them. It doesn't include as many results but the matches are good. They say they are against filter bubbles.
Searching for gateway did not return Gateway Pundit. It did find Project Veritas though. I feel these are super absolute minimums an engine needs to pass.
Also did you enable/disable personalized results and/or start with a fresh browser session or private / ingocnito browsing window? That can make a difference in rankings. Some search engines like Bing will always personalize, even without an account or done anonymously. So with Bing, you either have to start with a private browser (no previous search cookies) or you have to go to settings > search history and clear all
If you think about it, it only matters if you are a blank slate user. For example, if Bing knows you are a conservative/libertarian or whatever, and they serve you content based on that assumption, as long as they are giving you uncensored content, does it matter?
This is bad in the sense that it creates groupthink bubbles, like democrats never seeing any search results that go against their preconceived narratives, but for the consumer who just cares about getting results that matter to them, it's actually beneficial.
Given a choice between between very random but unbiased results (Mojeek is probably the best at this) vs more relevant results, yes I agree that giving what the user wants if you can infer it is more useful.
BTW on this topic Brave Search is beta testing a feature called goggles where you can customize your own search results from different sources instead of the defaults they use.
I have to experiment with it some more. Sometimes it seems useful, at other times not so much.
Just regarding the term gateway, so I just tried it there on Brave and it's interesting that their autocomplete algorithm suggests "gateway pundit" as one of the top autocomplete terms as you're typting. Otherwise with just "gateway" there's lots of random results but The Gateway Pundit is present as the last hit on the first page, for me at least.
Anyways, I'm currently juggling between multiple search engines right now. it's kinda a pain but something that I'll probably live with. Also using Yandex for some search, though not primary for me. However I really like their reverse image search, which is also great at finding similar images. Yandex's image OCR tool is also great: https://translate.yandex.com/ocr
Mar 13, 2022·edited Mar 13, 2022Liked by Michael Suede
This is very useful, thank you. You should consider do a more indepth test if possible in the future to verify these preliminary results. In particular, running some search queries we know would be embarrassing to the Russian authorities or their allies. For example, do they censor T. square stuff to appease china.
Also, I would of preferred if you listed your biases. Did you use Yandex prior to these tests and want it to win, or did this test convince you to switch over to it?
have you used https://presearch.org/ ?
next time I do an updated comparison, I'll add them, along with swisscows.
VERY USEFUL AND IMPORTANT. Thank you! I've always felt that censorship is far worse than disinformation. If there was no censorship but lots of disinformation (ie... not eg... the government and mainstream media), there are enough great people like you and other writers on Substack and alternate media who manage to dig out the real information, and the rest of us readers can make our own assessments. I've been amazed and disappointed that this point hasn't been a visible topic of discussion, even by anti-narrative folks, along with analysis of search engines, such as what you've done, though preferably in greater depth. Thank you!
I am working on building a search engine. Searche.org.
try my queries and let me know how the results go! Are you using an API or do you have your own crawlers?
Right back up now!!!
I had my own crawler, but my server shut down :(.
My Database is still being updated!
Great job!
Another search engine: yessle.com is fine! But actually I have indexed more than him at Searche.org. I asked him.
Is there a way to make Yandex usable, I am just getting 90% Russian language results. Which not only are useless to me, but makes me wonder how English language words results in .ru sites being most relevant without them soft censoring pretty much everything outside of Russia.
You have to include "&lang=en" at the end of your query. If you follow my instructions for Brave you can see it's included. You can also manually select the advanced search button next to the search bar and chose "English" only results.
yandex.com not yandex.ru, I think there's a difference.
Have you tried either? All my searches on .com return primarily Russian language results. It looks like they have a quota, the searches I did return 2-3 highly relevant good results and then a bunch of Russian results.
This is the first review that I seen of which search engines include alternative or censored results. Saw on saidit. Thanks to you friend!
Try out this new one as well > https://andisearch.com
Its a bit different and still an alpha version but it is the best search engine I have tried so far.
I tried your test searches and got 8 out of 10, sort of. Some of the results were from Yandex and Brave, so it must include them. It doesn't include as many results but the matches are good. They say they are against filter bubbles.
Searching for gateway did not return Gateway Pundit. It did find Project Veritas though. I feel these are super absolute minimums an engine needs to pass.
Agreed about Yandex. Try also swisscows.com - private, but rearranges bing mostly. Definitely better than Startpage or Brave.
Thanks so much for doing this! I'll check out what else you're posting. And bye bye Duck, hello Yandex.
"Open source" is the real antidote for info-control.The internet should be FREE and provide unlimited access to research, data, and the real news.
I know results will vary but man so far going thru it Brave for me is doing massively better
Very similar to the test done by Allan Stevo. Thanks
Please provide a link, I'd like to see his results.
Can send you the report from him if you wish. Send me a mail to sunfacejack@protonmail.com. its a PDF report.
Man, you did some real work here.. really appreciate it.
U didn't try JoshWho Search. It puts the others all to shame
Thanks, please post link to engine.
Also did you enable/disable personalized results and/or start with a fresh browser session or private / ingocnito browsing window? That can make a difference in rankings. Some search engines like Bing will always personalize, even without an account or done anonymously. So with Bing, you either have to start with a private browser (no previous search cookies) or you have to go to settings > search history and clear all
If you think about it, it only matters if you are a blank slate user. For example, if Bing knows you are a conservative/libertarian or whatever, and they serve you content based on that assumption, as long as they are giving you uncensored content, does it matter?
This is bad in the sense that it creates groupthink bubbles, like democrats never seeing any search results that go against their preconceived narratives, but for the consumer who just cares about getting results that matter to them, it's actually beneficial.
Given a choice between between very random but unbiased results (Mojeek is probably the best at this) vs more relevant results, yes I agree that giving what the user wants if you can infer it is more useful.
BTW on this topic Brave Search is beta testing a feature called goggles where you can customize your own search results from different sources instead of the defaults they use.
It's one of the choices in the top tab. https://search.brave.com/help/goggles
I have to experiment with it some more. Sometimes it seems useful, at other times not so much.
Just regarding the term gateway, so I just tried it there on Brave and it's interesting that their autocomplete algorithm suggests "gateway pundit" as one of the top autocomplete terms as you're typting. Otherwise with just "gateway" there's lots of random results but The Gateway Pundit is present as the last hit on the first page, for me at least.
Anyways, I'm currently juggling between multiple search engines right now. it's kinda a pain but something that I'll probably live with. Also using Yandex for some search, though not primary for me. However I really like their reverse image search, which is also great at finding similar images. Yandex's image OCR tool is also great: https://translate.yandex.com/ocr
In Yandex, this personalization setting is under: Settings > Show sites that you frequently visit (on by default)
"Your favorite sites will appear first in the list of search hints along with an icon and a short description to make them more noticeable. "
.. which will obviously bias the rankings if you've been using it for some time
I don't login, so this would only apply to logged-in users. All the tests were done without me logging in.
This is very useful, thank you. You should consider do a more indepth test if possible in the future to verify these preliminary results. In particular, running some search queries we know would be embarrassing to the Russian authorities or their allies. For example, do they censor T. square stuff to appease china.
Also, I would of preferred if you listed your biases. Did you use Yandex prior to these tests and want it to win, or did this test convince you to switch over to it?