this post was submitted on 09 Mar 2025
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Now if only anyone of them would offer a paid ad-free option. I'd drop Kagi in an instant
I use Kagi because of their strong stance against censorship. If I want to find information about controversial topics, I expect my search engine to give me the results it has crawled. I use this community test list to determine if they're censoring results. Most search engines fail this now. I imagine any EU search engine will fail this on day one.
@JasSmith @madjo Lemme guess... 'Cause 'Murica is the only country that knows freedom?
If things like that are censored it usually happens on the ISP level, not at the search engine. Those "censored" pages might rank lower but there could be dozens of perfectly fine explanations for that. Mostly because some of those pages know diddly squat about SEO or their pages might be socially relevant but are really bad at / for driving ad revenue.
But calling that "censorship" is IMHO not correct.
No I mean actual censorship. For example, RT and Sputnik. They have also banned PressTV and CGTN. They suspended broadcast licenses for EADaily / Eurasia Daily, Fondsk, Lenta, NewsFront, RuBaltic, SouthFront, Strategic Culture Foundation, and Krasnaya Zvezda / Tvzvezda. All of these sites would be explicitly banned from any EU based search engine.
Note that I am not giving American tech companies a free pass here. Google is one of the worst.
Also note that "censorship" doesn't exclusively refer to government censorship. That is an American-centric perspective using the Constitution as the lens. Censorship is often conducted by individuals and organisations. In this case I am referring to the EU.
Pretty much all of those """news""" sources have been witnessed to spread complete fabrications and fake news, and were used to undermine democracy on this continent, much like how Fox News and the likes are actively undermining democracy across the pond by spreading lies as "opinion pieces".
How quickly we shift from "it's not happening" to "okay it's happening, and here's why it's a good thing!" It's fine that you prefer the government to choose which information you're allowed to view. I don't. I believe I should be allowed access to all information, and I should be allowed to choose what I want to read. I think banning books and websites and news is wrong.
@JasSmith Well there is a whole discussion to be had about banning media who is spouting lie after lie after lie and are propaganda machines for the respective regimes.
But before you just assume censorship... try it yourself. I can open rt.com, tass etc and search for them.
Sometimes the search result are all nerfed to hell, but they are there.
And some pages (Zwezda) seem to have blocked access from my country at least, but that's on their site & RT does not have a valid certificate...
rt.com is blocked for me. If you can access it and you're based in the EU it means you're using a foreign DNS provider like 1.1.1.1 or 8.8.8.8.
I understand well the arguments used by governments to restrict access to books and websites. I reject them. I believe I am the best person to decide which knowledge I am allowed to access. I am certainly far more qualified than the government.