After DuckDuckGo announced that it would be abandoning its years-long commitment to “unbiased” search results by down-ranking “Russian disinformation,” two alternative search engines, Brave Search and Presearch, have committed to not censoring their search results.
Brendan Eich, the CEO of Brave Software (the company behind the privacy-focused Brave browser, Brave Search, and other products), told journalist and producer Naomi Brockwell that Brave Search doesn’t censor its results and detailed how Brave Search is expanding its own search index.
Currently, over 90% of Brave Search’s queries are provided by its independent search index which was built from scratch. Eich noted that Brave Search currently relies on Bing for the less than 10% of queries where it doesn’t have good results and acknowledged that this fallback “could be censored.”
“We’ll get to full independence,” Eich added. “Fallback necessary rn, but fades.”
We have our own index (cf. DDG) and we don't censor.
For <10% of queries where we don't have good results, we rely on Bing presently, so that fallback could be censored. You can tell when results come from them.
We'll get to full independence. Fallback necessary rn, but fades.
— BrendanEich (@BrendanEich) March 10, 2022
Eich continued by noting that Brave Search has an “Info” link above each search results page (which shows whether all the search results on the page came from the Brave Search index) and a “Search results independence” percentage in Brave Search’s settings (which shows the percentage of all Brave Search results that currently come from its independent index).
Presearch, a private, decentralized, blockchain-powered search engine, also tweeted that it “doesn’t censor.”
Presearch added: “That’s the power of decentralized, unbiased search. The need for decentralized, unbiased search will only grow from here.”
As Presearch notes in its tweets, its search indexes are built and hosted by a decentralized network of node operators. It’s also open-source which means users can contribute code that’s shown its search results pages.
In addition to the commitment to not censoring their results, both search engines have several unique aspects and features that enhance your search experience.
Brave Search has search shortcuts (which let you quickly jump to search results on a specific site), visual autosuggest, search filters (that let you filter by format, date, country, and more), featured snippets, and shelves that highlight recent news and videos.
Presearch has an integrated PRE cryptocurrency that’s used to reward node operators and users and can be staked by advertisers who want to display ads against specific keywords. It also has knowledge panels, a news shelf, a video shelf, quick links to related articles and related searches, search filters (that let you filter by image, video, or news), and quick links for conducting your searches via other sites.
You can start searching with Brave Search here.
You can start searching with Presearch here.
Article cross-posted from Reclaim The Net.
