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:

There are still search engines that (claim to) maintain their own index. Most surprisingly, br*ve:

  • Mojeek Search Engine@lemmy.ml
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    3
    ·
    edit-2
    9 months ago

    if you look at the repo they give thanks to:

    “The commoncrawl organization for crawling the web and making the dataset readily available. Even though we have our own crawler now, commoncrawl has been a huge help in the early stages of development.”

    There is nothing I can find which says how much of the index is CC and how much is their own; if there’s a decent amount of CC, this is originally for researchers etc. it’s not the best resource in the world for a search index: https://commoncrawl.org/

    That being said, as an independent search engine, it’s always good to see people take on the massive task of actually building an index, not becoming a proxy.