If capitalism caused censorship you would expect the least capitalist places to have the least censorship but the opposite is true.
Additionally, we don't live in a stationary society, so, whatever capitalism did or did not cause in the past might not apply as-is today.
But in my experience Yandex just isn't as good at searching things in English, as DDG/Bing. At least, I always preferred them for most use-cases except from some really specific ones. So it's a pity that this thing with DDG happened. I guess, I'll still continue to use it for now, because I don't want to hurt my productivity other that thing (and switching to a search engine I would have to adapt to most certainly would do that). But we'll see.
At least TPB adds value to peoples lives.
This isn't a rhetorical question of course. There are major arguments for both. But I think a pretty good chunk of DDG users were more often after the library index than what ideally would be a librarian recommendation, but in reality is more like a stereotypical used car salesman style recommendation.
Besides, if someone accidentally searches for shite, he can revise his search terms. Just like how you might reword something if a listener was confused.
This "curation" just doesn't need to exist. But that's a moral argument and those applying censorship aren't moral, so won't be partial to it.
For example, someone close to me expressed support for the "Proud Boys." This person in particular has been duped by evangelical movements in the past that all have one curious detail in common: they prohibit masturbation. Half to make fun of him, half to help him, I wanted to share a link with him to the Proud Boy's official website because he wouldn't believe me when I said they ban jackin' it. Facebook Messenger (in private DMs) refused to send a message including the link. "Send failed. Operation could not be completed." I tried an archive.org archive of it, same thing.
Both youtube-dl and the pirate bay are available on google.
I wonder what Yandex is like these days…
There was some drama in 2010 over ED being censored in Australia, but it looks like Google has since quietly delisted it completely.
The entire job of a search engine is to curate results from a vast internet and boil it down to what is probably interesting for you. You also don't want all kind of "shock sites" on top if you search for "gun homicide" or "ISIS beheadings". Most likely you want some background information on these things, not "shock sites". That's the service Google and such provide.
I commented because learning of such special-casing of a site by Google [a] was quite memorable for me at the time; since I also see plenty of other threads around us debating search engine curation, what follows is
I came across some Reddit threads from a certain time in 2014 which noted that the top Google results for some subjects were ED pages that mentioned them. Perhaps ED's downranking was in response to that. Whatever the cause, this is actually a more severe downranking than that famously applied to thepiratebay.org [b]; for example, the query thepiratebay org foo returns only results from the actual site, [c] but the same query for ED returns no results from ED. [d]
I did find two more cases where Google does return a (single) page from ED. The sole query without any operators that does so is encyclopediadramatica online (and its punctuation/whitespace-equivalent variants), for which the Main Page is the first result and the only ED result. [e]
The other case is when searching for a phrase within quotes that occurs nowhere else in Google's index other than on ED. For example, the expected only result of the query "Encyclopedia Dramatica help pages" is the ED page containing that text. [f]
So, to be more precise, ED is severely downranked rather than delisted, albeit with the result that no one can find it on Google without already knowing its URL (or a hapax legomenon quoted from its pages).
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[a][b][c][d][e][f] If I may use a simplistic model of Google that determines a score for each potential search result (i.e., 'distinct' crawled URL) by starting with the same initial score for all results and applying a sequence of steps to each result that each change its score, the following is a speculative explanation for all these behaviours:
- Following the meat of the algorithm is the downrank-specific-sites step, which decreases the score of each page of a downranked site by some amount (affects both TPB and ED: TPB scores are decreased moderately to implement [b]; ED scores are decreased massively, explaining [a]).
- Then comes the query-contains-site-URL step, which greatly increases the scores of all pages of that site (TPB results are now higher than non-TPB results, explaining [c]; ED scores were decreased so much that they are still lower than all other results, explaining [d]).
- Then comes the query-is-site-URL-exactly step, which makes the score for that site's base URL (which in the case of ED redirects to the Main Page) higher than any other score (explaining [e]).
- Search operators are last, and thus the highest-priority (explaining [f] and the site: operator).
These steps have held up in general where applicable for all the queries that I've tried.
1. They will eventually require payment.
2. The service provides a lot of customisation options. Up and down ranking domains, for example, and setting up special filters. This kind of customisation can be built over many years and should carry with the user between browsers and devices.
Personally, I'm less worried about privacy and more about receiving accurate and unbiased search results. Of course, you can always use a VPN and use a burner email when you create the account.