After CEO of DuckDuckGo, Gabriel Weinberg 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.”
Eich continued by noting that Brave Search has an “Info” link above each search results page (which shows whether all the search results on the page came from the Brave Search index) and a “Search results independence” percentage in Brave Search’s settings (which shows the percentage of all Brave Search results that currently come from its independent index).
Presearch, a private, decentralized, blockchain-powered search engine, also tweeted that it “doesn’t censor.”
Presearch added: “That’s the power of decentralized, unbiased search. The need for decentralized, unbiased search will only grow from here.”
As Presearch notes in its tweets, its search indexes are built and hosted by a decentralized network of node operators. It’s also open-source which means users can contribute code that’s shown its search results pages.
In addition to the commitment to not censoring their results, both search engines have several unique aspects and features that enhance your search experience.
Brave Search has search shortcuts (which let you quickly jump to search results on a specific site), visual autosuggest, search filters (that let you filter by format, date, country, and more), featured snippets, and shelves that highlight recent news and videos.
Presearch has an integrated PRE cryptocurrency that’s used to reward node operators and users and can be staked by advertisers who want to display ads against specific keywords. It also has knowledge panels, a news shelf, a video shelf, quick links to related articles and related searches, search filters (that let you filter by image, video, or news), and quick links for conducting your searches via other sites.
The problem with Brave Search and Presearch is that their search engines are basically just returning the exact same results as Google. We don’t know why. Maybe they rented Google’s engine or something, we really have no explanation but it is what it is… Searching on Brave and Presearch will display the exact same results in almost the exact same order with what Google shows. The only different engines which will display different results are indeed DuckDuckGo, Bing and Yandex.
Censorship is dumb. How would they even decide if a website is pro-Russia or anti-Russia? One article that criticizes something wrong in Ukraine and you’re out? They label the entire site as pro-Russia? Or one article praising Russia and you’re out? What about if you have pro-Russia OLDER article from before the war, from 2021 for example!? What should websites do according to these censors? Delete all their previous articles containing the word “Russia” to comply with their censorship requirements?
How about an OPEN-FORUM in which everybody post new threads talking about things? What if someone there on the forum posts something pro-Russia and a moderator either doesn’t see it or sees it and allows it? They will censor the entire forum too because 1 single member is pro-Russia while 1 million are anti-Russia on the same forum? And here is why censorship is defective, evil and backwards. They complain that Russia is the embodiment of evil because of many things, including censorship of Russian anti-war protests, Facebook, Twitter and others, yet what makes our West different when we censor just like in Russia? The West was supposed to be FREE, yet we behave like in Russia? We censor everything nowadays? What sets us apart then?
The above commentary can be interpreted by a low witted moron as “pro-Russia” for example. That low witted moron could be working at DuckDuckGo and could press the ban button after reading that commentary, but the fact of the matter is that this couldn’t be further from the truth. We oppose this war and we oppose ANY OTHER WAR, including American waged-wars. May God give us peace and we pray for the lives of the poor innocent Ukrainians dying for no reason whatsoever other than being in the wrong place at the wrong time, in this damned war!
If we’re outraged in the commentary above, we are because we are simply ANTI-CENSORSHIP of any kind! We do not need companies to regulate what we can read and what we can’t read. We are not their children and they are not our parents. They cannot be allowed to decide for us.
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WHAT THE HELL?! I thought DuckDuckGo stood for free speech! As a free thinker I used it a lot, now I may have to switch to a different search engine :(
Bye bye, duckduckgo of shoot. You are another fraud.
This is just another excuse to censorship.
Hold on am i being sensord after commenting on sensorship. Are you kidding me. WTF
The world is a scary place and in my eyes if your blocking something that will might sway my thinking on something then your up to no good weather it be good or bad I’m pretty sure that I am an adult and can the last I checked come up with my own conclution and don’t need these pricks telling what I can or cannot see. I just started with duckduck go and to find out this sensorship shit again weather good or bad it’s my decision. I don’t appreciate being steered one way or the other