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
Both luisa and dolores watches her slightly concerned
Mirabel: I swear! This is literally the 6th time you’ve done this, this week!!
*Mirabel in front of a mirror*
Mirabel: Camilo!!! I swear to your chicken ass legs that if you don’t give me my glasses back, I WILL make sure that YOU won’t even recognize your own face after what I PLAN to do to you if you don’t take your dumb looking face with your dumb looking hand and give me back my goddamn glasses back!
Dolores in the back watching her with luisa: she thinks she’s camilo *snickers*
Bruno walks in with a mischievous grin (Thunder!)<Ay bruno🤦♀️ really? Like imagine him walking in looking ‘like that’ and him saying it looks like rain? Oh no no>
You’re telling the story or am I? <Pepa be like so am I the one who’s gonna say it or you? Like literally it’s about my brother telling (wishing?) us a bad marriage>
I’m sorry, mi vida, go on <Fèlix literally said I’ll shut up now (in the nicest way)>
Bruno says, “It looks like rain” (Why did he tell us?)’ <Imagine how furious Pepa got😬>
In doing so, he floods my brain (Abuela gets the umbrellas) <that in causing she did this>
Married in a hurricane (What a joyous day but anyway) <Félix being a loving husband🙂>
The media has already framed the backlash against this as “THE FAR RIGHT IS ANGRY AT DUCKDUCKGO FOR TRYING TO STOP RUSSIAN DISINFORMATION!” because of course they are.
Yeah, that’s the ticket.
DDG: We’re going to be the free speech, free expression alternative to google, a search engine without the data tracking and corporate information manipulation. If a site drives a lot of traffic and provides various unorthodox opinions, we won’t punish it for doing so.
Me: wow that’s exactly what we need to maintain what’s left of our free society. We cannot govern ourselves without considering all sides and dynamics of the complex issues facing us. I’ll use it even though the search engine itself is complete ass.
DDG: haha we were kidding and we aren’t going to do that anymore.
Me: bye
Media: REEEEEEEEEEEE
Russian disinformation is just anything they don’t like.
