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:
Which search engine.is R?/
Yandex, cyrillic logo
Wow I checked Yandex and its pretty neat. Also its Russian so your search data might be safe from US and its big tech. Would you recommend using it ?
Generally no, but if your hitting a dead end looking for things on Google/Bing based engines, it doesn’t hurt giving Yandex a shot.
I’ve recently started using it and the top results tend to be exactly what I’m looking for