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:
Yandex, a Russian search engine
I don’t know how safe it is to use but man, their reverse image search has always impressed me. Miles better than Google’s or Tineye’s.
I always figured the markets that Google didn’t penetrate successfully (Russia with Yandex, China with Baidu, maybe Korea and Japan) probably ended up with their own circle of innovation just because there wasn’t a huge dominant player sucking all the talent and money out of the room. Thry might have gotten an edge through noncompetitive regulatory policy, but that bought them thr time to build domething more duited to local needs.
Back when it was socially permissible to acknowledge Russia did anything well, Yandex was doing some fairly innovative stuff.
And then Yandex turned into local-scale Google, but even more sinister. Baidu, for all I know, is a similar story.
Yandex is op if you want to finding movies “legally” for streaming
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.
for context, the reverse r is pronounced “ya” and is a cyrillic character.