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With all the talk about privacy, people seem to be forgetting that censorship is also a major problem for today's internet.
(lemmy.world)
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:
- https://duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/sources/
- https://support.startpage.com/hc/en-us/articles/5138782571796-Why-isn-t-a-particular-site-appearing-in-the-results
- https://www.ecosia.org/privacy
There are still search engines that (claim to) maintain their own index. Most surprisingly, br*ve:
Essentially Yandex is as much of a Big Tech junk as Google. Same tracking, aggressive advertising and a huge userbase to draw everything from. Besides, unlike Google, Yandex has penetrated way more services and aims to form a life ecosystem, from search and mail to music, taxi (also bought Russian branch of Uber), to marketplace, tickets, online movies, everything. And of course it tracks you around the Web.
So essentially it's a huge Big Brother, just a lil more friendly to some use cases (like search for pirated media) due to lackluster Russian regulations.