Tag: search engines

Brave Search and Presearch say they don’t censor search results

After DuckDuckGo announced that it would be abandoning its years-long commitment to “unbiased” search results by down-ranking “Russian disinformation,” two alternative search engines, Brave Search and Presearch, have committed to not censoring their search results.

Brendan Eich, the CEO of Brave Software (the company behind the privacy-focused Brave browser, Brave Search, and other products), told journalist and producer Naomi Brockwell that Brave Search doesn’t censor its results and detailed how Brave Search is expanding its own search index.

Currently, over 90% of Brave Search’s queries are provided by its independent search index which was built from scratch. Eich noted that Brave Search currently relies on Bing for the less than 10% of queries where it doesn’t have good results and acknowledged that this fallback “could be censored.”

“We’ll get to full independence,” Eich added. “Fallback necessary rn, but fades.”

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Google is the search engine that censors the most “conspiracy theories”

The idea that Google was actively and manually censoring its search engine results was something that was itself once classed as conspiracy.

But new research has shown that Google does in fact manually manipulate its search results for content, more than rivals such as DuckDuckGo, Bing, and even Russia’s Yandex.

In fact, Russia’s Yandex is the search engine that has censored some “conspiracy theories” the least, according to new research.

On Wednesday, researchers from the University of Zurich published a study claiming that Yandex promotes “conspiracy theories” more than any other search engine. The research involved the top five search engines; Google, Yahoo, Bing, DuckDuckGo, and Yandex.

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12 best private search engines to use

Do you think searching on Google merely in incognito mode actually keeps your searches private? Not really. No matter which search engines you use, your searches are never private unless you seek more secure alternatives.

When someone refers to search engines, you can safely assume they are talking about Google. As of June 2021 statistics, it attracts 95.08% of mobile search traffic worldwide. While the laptop/desktop share of Google stands at a slightly lower number being 87.32%, it is still the leading search engine there, too.

According to the industry estimates by the Internet Live Stats, Google handles almost 3.5 billion searches a day on average. And the number of people using the search giant daily comes to more or less 1.7 billion.

These stats show how dominant Google is in the market. Also, this hints at the potential treasure trove of data Google holds because, as you’d already know, it tracks your searches.

But that doesn’t make it the only search engine responsible for breaching users’ privacy. Rather, the relatively less popular tools like Yahoo, Bing, and others also practice the same money-making strategy, i.e., monetizing users’ data.

Precisely, all the top search engines like Google serve as data compilation tools for advertising companies helping them go on you with targeted ads.

Therefore, unless you use a secure search engine, your information ends up in the hand of a third party, and you (the user) becomes the product.

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Google is giving data to police based on search keywords, court docs show

There are few things as revealing as a person’s search history, and police typically need a warrant on a known suspect to demand that sensitive information. But a recently unsealed court document found that investigators can request such data in reverse order by asking Google to disclose everyone who searched a keyword rather than for information on a known suspect.

In August, police arrested Michael Williams, an associate of singer and accused sex offender R. Kelly, for allegedly setting fire to a witness’ car in Florida. Investigators linked Williams to the arson, as well as witness tampering, after sending a search warrant to Google that requested information on “users who had searched the address of the residence close in time to the arson.”  

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