this post was submitted on 14 Sep 2023
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Privacy
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Brave Search fully using their own index since April 27, 2023. But they refuse to identify their crawler and rely on googlebot if sites want to be excluded. Also their search API monetization of possible copyrighted content while understandable is a bit doubious due to their public stance on transparency.
StartPage also blocks VPN usage.
DuckDuckGo by their own admission now re-rank "trusted" sites to the top when it comes to what they clasify as"misinformation" so calling their "censorship" mild is huge understatement.
If I wanted to search for unverified info or misinfo, I could, but almost always I am lookkng for factual and sourced information. Please don't force me to do otherwise.
It's more about someone else making the decision on what is "trustworthy" for you
That's how all search engines fundamentally work though. The whole point if that they try to bring the most relevant results to the top and downrank things like spam and unhelpful/irrelevant results. Downranking misinfo spam websites isn't "censorship". Not ranking resullts would make search engines completely pointless.
I'd disagree with equating disinfo with spam. Spam seems easier to classify, sites that try to get ahead by having nonsense keywords or whatever and want to sell you something. Dis- or misinfo is trickier, you need to decide what is correct info. Do you understand what I mean?
Absolutely those things are different. But the point of a search engine is to, crudely and algorithmically, sort out both.