HN Explorer

Poll: Best search engine for controversial topics?

27 points by TechBro8615 ↗ HN
I was just watching Sundar Pichai explain to Congress that Google is not a monopoly. He was answering questions about Google’s censorship – “if users don’t like the results, they can use a different search engine, right?”

This got me thinking, and I realized that we actually do have a number of options for searching the web these days. It’s no longer such an expensive problem that only Google can solve it.

So, I’m wondering — if you are looking for information on a controversial or politicized topic, which search engine do you trust to surface the most objectively ranked results? Maybe as an example, imagine you’re searching for vaccine side effects. Where do you search first?

24 comments

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readflaggedcomm
Search engines prefer to show blog spam, ignore the terms I request, and disable the ability to exclude confounding terms (maybe that's just Bing). Forum discussions often link salient primary sources, which blog/news agencies are reluctant to do. Signal-to-noise on image boards and Reddit may be low, but it's still nonzero.
version_five
Agree with this. If I were searching for something controversial but with some traction already, I'd be inclined to try reddit or even search through HN for links. A lot of non-mainstream but sometimes still reasonable stuff gets posted here and just not voted up. Censorship is less the problem on bigger search engines than the fact that there's nothing to sell on a search for something controversial. At best you're likely to get the most extreme "fox news" (or worse) inflammatory version, necause you're more likely to click on it, if you are able to successfully search on a regular engine.
deviledeggs
For vaccine side effects, you're best off going straight to arxiv, biorxiv, or a well known site for free academic papers I probably can't mention here :)

Most of the vaccine skeptics are nutjobs just appealing to their base of terminally paranoid people. There's real stuff out there, but you're best off just searching for scientific papers because the signal to noise is terrible

bawolff
The government info page or their reaction db?

Wikipedia?

My doctor?

About the last place i'd look for medical advice would be a generic search engine.

joemazerino
Wikipedia is wholly unreliable for information outside the scope of leftism or contemporary media.
estaseuropano
Surely some articles have a slant, but to assume that the vast horde of Wikipedia contributors are all 'leftist' is just absurd. Wikipedia is doing a great job overall at getting facts across in a neutral manner - if you have the feeling that's not reflective of your viewpoints then you could either question the source or you could consider whether your viewpoints do correctly fit to the facts. It's very easy to dismiss sources that don't fully agree with your views, but that prevents you from ever strengthening or improving your views.
bawolff
I know usa politics are nuts, but drug reactions is not a partisan left vs right issue.
version_five
If one wants to get facts about drug reactions (for example) then sure, there will be articles in reputational journals reporting on studies (that should be objective), as well as straight up reporting, like the adverse reaction data. But as soon as you want context or analysis on how to interpret the information and what to do about it, opinion and world view are involved. There may also be legitimate or groundless views about the trustworthiness of figures reported, potential cover up or under reporting, etc. This all gets magnified when it's about a topic that is being used as rhetoric to change people's behavior.
justshowpost
Yet leftist websites are known for silencing any reporting of negative drug reaction among the hundreds (or maybe thousands) of other issues on their agenda.

This includes ones ran by infamous Dorsey MD and Zuckerberg MD.

For example, the first two reports of unfortunate Michigan boy died from heart muscle bag inflammation vaccine side effect resulted in two bans.

cung
There’s also searX and metager, just to name a few non-corporate owned search engines.
timoth3y
> which search engine do you trust to surface the most objectively ranked results?

What exactly do you mean by "objective"? This is not cheap deflection. The core competence of a search engine is how they rank results. I suspect most engines are trying to return results that are "useful" or "accurate". I'm not totally clear on how you would measure an "objective" result or what the benefit would be.

> imagine you’re searching for vaccine side effects. Where do you search first?

Probably the CDC or WHO. A general search engine would probably turn up a lot cranks, scams, and misinformation. Although, any of the above search engines could probably point you to the right page on those sites.

It would be a pretty easy experiment to run if someone is so inclined.

machinehermiter
I think flat earth is the best test case. What would an "ojective" flat earth search result look like?

I would almost have to say that a flat earth search result should contain "evidence" that is pro flat earth. I hardly need to read evidence that the earth is not flat.

I would want to know what these people are thinking to believe something so ridiculous. The last thing I want is for the engine to believe I am such an idiot that it would be harmful for me to read a narrative about the earth being flat so that information needs to be buried.

justshowpost
CDC's layman tier texts shilling for vaccination are full of word «may», thus they are giving zero promises

Both CDC and WHO pro tier texts, in turn, are full of contradictory statements, sometimes directly contradictory. Most infamous example is dime-worth face mask efficiency topic.

In addition, CDC is being partisan despite 8 years of budget cuts under It's Bush's Fault rule, while WHO is known for helping Chinese Communist to hide virus outbreak probably in exchange for bribe.

freediver
It would have to be a search engine with a business model that alignes its incentives with the incentives of the user thus probably being a paid product which none of the above qualifies.

Everything else will introduce bias coming from the fact that advertisers are paying for the product to exist and inherently biasing results.

clydethefrog
For any controversial political stuff I recommend the "enemy" search engine. You will not find easily the more controversial gaffes of the Biden family on Google, but on Yandex it will be top result. But if you want to know more about Putin's corruption or Navalny's life in prison, use Google.

For X rated sexy stuff, Bing with safe search off. Duckduckgo is usually the best for website that don't care that much about copyright.

ColinHayhurst
Every search engine will rank certain URLs higher. A crawler, indexer, ranking engine has many choices embedded within. Do you trust one that personalises or one that produces the same results for all? Use more than one, as I do. And note that I am biased as a team member at Mojeek.
ALLTaken
I use https://searx.me/ specifically https://searx.bar for controversial topics.

Google seems to often times redact content and once during a academic research project in advanced military technologies me and my colleages even got "white-screened". Searches returned empty results, which resulted in many results previously. This on all my devices and friends devices also even though they were on a different network and location.

A few days later the results came back, it appeared to us like a screening, before taking serious action. Our prof got nervous and handed us some information in case we get prosecuted or imprisoned for our research topics.

justshowpost
This is actually very tough question. Here are my thoughts:

I know for sure what Google is full of word-filters, shadow-bans etc etc. The last benchmark which amazed me much was "left wing terrorism" when Alphabet blatantly pushed their agenda onto me mixing-in rare violent rightwingers into the what they called a «search results». I remember the old days when Google just started counting clicks and got criticised for shaping the results to the user interests. Now its not the case, the only correct interests is Big Brother interests. Also, Google DE and Google FR pages were inciting mostly peaceful riots. Definitely no go.

Also, I totally don't get why yandex.com got on the list, it is fully controlled by Terrorussia and their midget tyrant. BTW, my observation are that their image search censors different things than Goo, but such swamp-to-swamp is hardly suitable for everyday use, like CNN ⇔ RT zapping.

DuckDuckGo... *sigh* DuckDuckGo tries, tries very hard... but fails *sigh*. If there are any censorship there, its well hidden behind the terrible search quality. Also, I've noticed very typical to DDG failures to satisfy exact phrase queries. It is a toy.

I read what Microsoft is really into censorship but don't know if they are extended the policy to web search because their search quality is even worse than DDG's. I use microsoft.com very often, they have 2-3 distinct(!) versions of documentation pages also a terrible link rot, but integrated Bing is not of any help there.

Brave is actually very promising but I'd rather conservatively say what more assessment needed to rate them. Simply too immature to judge them right now.