After hearing the unfortunate news that DuckDuckGo had deranked The Gateway Pundit from its search results, and announcing that it was going to start censoring “Russian disinformation”, I decided to test some alternative search engines to see how they compared against Google and Bing results.
The results were pretty shocking to me. Here’s a summary grid showing the highlights, but it’s worth reading the test results because this snapshot doesn’t tell the whole story.
Google: passed 2 out of 10 tests.
Bing: passed 7 out of 10 tests.
DuckDuckGo: passed 5 out of 10 tests.
Qwant: passed 5 out of 10 tests.
Startpage: passed 1 out of 10 tests.
Mojeek: passed 6 out of 10 tests.
Yandex: passed 9 out of 10 tests.
The clear winner, by a MASSIVE margin, was Yandex. Not only did it pass the tests, it passed them with the highest quality results out of any of the search engines. I found Bing, DuckDuckGo, Qwant and Mojeek managed to squeak by with poor quality results. It’s almost as if they just delisted or deranked the major conservative news sites, but didn’t want to return MSM sources because they knew the query terms didn’t fit the MSM narrative, so all they had left to serve me were obscure sites.
I also tried out the search engine Dogpile separately, which got roughly the same results as Qwant. It’s not nearly as good as Yandex.
You can set Yandex as your default search engine in the Brave browser by going to the Settings → Search Engine → Manage Search Engines, then hitting the “add” button and entering “Yandex” in the search engine field, “:y” in the keyword and “https://yandex.com/search/?text=%s&lr=20765&lang=en” in the search URL field, then selecting the entry and setting it as the “default” which will add it to the search engine list.
The tests I ran and results are listed below. Keep in mind that your results may vary from mine because some search engines track your preferences, search history and location to customize your results.
Ok so im switching out my ddg for this but a lot is coming up in russian despite it knowing my settings are in the united states…what up with that?
Went with brave… Every 3rd site was coming up in Russian on yandex
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