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Comment by thweriu2343 | Hacker News Reader

DDG removes quite a few "dangerous" pages too. You need to use Yandex these days to get stuff the "ministry of truth" deems to sensitive.

I'm sure the irony is lost on the Freedom-Democracy-landers.

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You can't find many things that Russian government deems inappropriate in Yandex. Yandex, Google and Bing(DDG is basically Bing proxy) just have different sets of biases.

It is time to go back to meta search engines I guess

What about startpage?

Startpage is a Google proxy. The Pirate Bay is filtered out there as well.

Owned by an Ad company these days. But yes they do promise "We'll never do evil". They belong in the grey area. But at least they haven't been caught with their hands in the cookie-jar multiple times like Brave so they got that going for them. I'd stay clear.

I don't think meta has a search engine yet, though.

slow clap

I don't see how this is something to be applauded. The company is successfully worming it's way into common vernacular. Meta, Apple, Block, etc. Pretty soon you won't be able to speak a sentence without invoking 6 different brands' free advertising.

They are applauding the pun, not the company the pun refers to.

Nah, Yahoo style pages with links

My monitor's pretty hi-res and big.

How about a 3-column search that's Google, DDG (so, Bing), and Yandex, with a single search field for all three? Bonus points for syncing it up so if I click, say, the "Images" tab on one of them, it switches the others over, too.

Kinda like how Allsides functions for news/political bias.

https://www.allsides.com/unbiased-balanced-news

Would be great to have a search frontend that aggregates results from both then.

Brave have their own search engine that uses an independent built-from-scratch index. [0]

[0] https://search.brave.com/

> You can't find many things that Russian government deems inappropriate in Yandex

What are those things that Yandex can't find? It seems to me it shows pretty relevant results for "putin's golden toilet" [1], "putin's blasting houses" with US State Department / Soros funded web-site as one of the top results [2]. A query with "navalny's statement" shows both his twitter and his web-site on the first page.

When comparing to google, "gab" in yandex shows the web-site's link as the first result. Google doesn't show it at all, there is only CNN, wikipedia, some woke dictionaries all telling you gab is not something you should search.

So, who's got totalitarian system with censorship after all?

[1]: https://yandex.com/search/?text=%D0%B7%D0%BE%D0%BB%D0%BE%D1%...

[2]: https://yandex.ru/search/?text=%D0%BF%D1%83%D1%82%D0%B8%D0%B...

[3]: https://yandex.ru/search/?text=%D0%B7%D0%B0%D1%8F%D0%B2%D0%B...

I googled gab and it was the first result. Did your machine get pwned?

Where are you from? I checked from American IP and it's indeed the first result. Not the case with Asian IP.

Gab.com is first from Asian IP, but locale should be hl=en.

When I search for Gab on Google, it comes up as the first result.

What does "us election fraud" shows, any web-sites that are not in line with "the correct" narrative? For me google shows one side, yandex both of them.

Now, "голосование на пеньках" (voting on stomps) is a mockery of Putin's constitution referendum by opposition. When searching this phrase in Google the front page is again Putin controlled media: tass, rbc, kommersant, rg.

Yandex apart from the aforementioned web-sites has US State Department / Soros funded meduza and svoboda.org, liberal (in American sense) tjournal, Deutsche Welle.

It seems Yandex gives preference to the most relevant sites when Google decides what's good ("credible") for you.

[1]: https://yandex.ru/search/?text=%D0%B3%D0%BE%D0%BB%D0%BE%D1%8...

> when Google decides what's good ("credible") for you.

One of the problems is that black hat SEOs (among other people) have huge economic incentives to spread misinformation, including about the election. This is of course, an eternal cat and mouse game. This is not new, I remember when gmail started filtering chain letter scams more than a decade ago.

Good for them. The thing is I want a search engine, not a catalogue of web-sites approved by the ministry of truth.

I'm just checking a claim I thought was implausible and also easily verifiable.

It'd be weird for Google to bury bad think only for non-American IP addresses but allow it for Americans if it was on some woke crusade for the benefit of the US government. Now, I'm not sure why it's removed from your results, but my point is that what you cited as a piece of evidence for malign intent on Google's part isn't actually supporting evidence.

> my point is that what you cited as a piece of evidence for malign intent on Google's part isn't actually supporting evidence

It's worth noticing that it's pointless to censor requests like "gab.com" anyway (though that happened in my case). A person typing them already knows what they want. Now, try "right wing social media", "free speech media", "social media without censorship", etc. For me it doesn't show anything relevant but the links to the "correct" think tanks. Does this fact prove the malign intent of Google? No, but it's still there and you know it (except they consider this a virtue).

They are mandated to remove everything that Roskomnadzor blocks from search results. That happened to Smart Voting in September, for example. And it's extremely easy for them to block any website they want.

Thanks God neither Google nor Apple complied because "it's extremely [difficult] for them to" do so. Oh, wait, they did comply, too. Different jurisdiction, no HQs in Russia and yet both succumbed to the authoritarian regime. Not a good argument in the context of comparing the two search engines.

At least it's a different set of biases from the usual ones in the us. It's more obvious what's missing.

I noticed that with DDG recently. Tried searching for fmovies (pirate streaming stie), DDG yields nothing now when it previously had the results I wanted. Same results searching for iteroni.

I compared it with brave search and the latter remains unfiltered for the time being.

Are you expecting to see https://fmovies.kim ? That's what I get at the top of my results: https://imgur.com/yW893ld

Interesting. The past few days when I searched I got none of the hits, but yes along those lines.

Today I see this:

DDG: https://imgur.com/a/CfDXfoq Brave Search (for comparison): https://imgur.com/a/vvEfaMF

Honestly DuckDuckGo doesn't censor anything. It just uses the bing index with a few custom results. I have been unable to find an example for which DDG and bing would produce different results though.

And the fact that the our societies have been rushing towards totalitarianism doesn't make Putin Mr. Nice Guy all of a sudden. It is not that simple.

DDG pretty much just whitelabels Bing.

I would personally not use any information source which could potentially be under the control of either the Russian or Chinese government. Both governments are tightly controlled by strongmen who spread disinformation and propaganda (information warfare).

If Trump runs and is re-elected, the American companies like Google will be under the control of his government. He has a lot of anger about being deplatformed, and they will be brought to obey his bidding as a priority and fairly quickly, since this time around it's personal instead of being some boring piece of paperwork.

In that scenario, ironically, the Russians might end up being more free.

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