I was reading this article at WUWT:
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2018/07/21/google-big-brother-knows-best/
Decided to do a test on https://duckduckgo.com/ as it is my usual search engine. Searched on “climate change”:
It sets out the Wiki in a special box on the right. Then has 3 boxes of what look like preferred (paid?) results on the top as ‘recent news’ with an arrow to get more. BBC, WMUR New Hampsire with a FUD story, and Fox saying C.Ch. has made fires and such worse. Then the list, starting with a flagged Ad for Amazon (I’ve removed all the URLs so I don’t have to reconstruct them with HTML of my liking):
Climate For Change – Free 2-Day Shipping W/ Amazon Prime
Free 2-Day Shipping w/ Amazon Prime. Low Prices on Millions of Books.Amazon Prime Benefits,Shop Amazon DevicesNASA: Climate Change and Global Warming
Vital Signs of the Planet: Global Climate Change and Global Warming. Current news and data streams about global warming and climate change from NASA.Washington State Department of Ecology – About climate change
Tackling climate change is a priority for us and we’re working hard to protect fish, farms, and waters from the damage that rising temperatures and shifting precipitation patterns will cause in Washington.Climate change – Wikipedia
Climate change is a change in the statistical distribution of weather patterns when that change lasts for an extended period of time (i.e., decades to millions of years).Evidence | Facts – Climate Change: Vital Signs of the Planet
Vital Signs of the Planet: Global Climate Change and Global Warming. How do we know it’s happening? Here’s the evidence.
“climate.nasa.gov/evidence/”Climate change | Environment | The Guardian
Our hemisphere is having a baking summer – and it’s not just down to climate changeclimate change | Causes, Effects, & Facts | Britannica.com
Climate change: Climate change, the periodic modification of Earth’s climate caused by changes in the atmosphere and interactions between the atmosphere and various other geologic, chemical, biological, and geographic factors.Climate Home News
Climate change news, analysis, commentary, video and podcasts focused on developments in global climate politicsWhat Is Climate Change? | NASA
To learn about climate change, you first must know what climate is.Climate Change | Weather Underground
Find information, blogs, articles, news, and multimedia related to global warming, climate change, and evironmental changes, how and why the climate is changing, and what we can do to mitigate itClimate Change | HuffPost
Climate Change news, photos and opinion. NOAA’s Research Just Shifted From Climate Change To ‘Empowering The Economy’ And ‘National Security’Climate and Environment – The New York Times
How Climate Change Has Altered the Way Cristal Champagne Is Made With a visionary in charge, Louis Roederer has walked the line between a big Champagne house and a grower-producer. by eric asimov
Not a skeptical voice among them and WUWT nowhere to be found.
Then I did a search on “Unbiased search engine” and it returned https://www.mojeek.com/
Yes, duckduckgo found mojeek as unbiased…
Same search there returns, in addition to the same set-out of the Wiki article:
Results 1 to 10 from 10,081,811 in 0.74s
Climate Change Reconsidered – Climate Change
climatechangereconsidered.org/
About Global Warming Climate Change Reconsidered II: Biological … II: Physical Science Climate Change Reconsidered: 2011 Interim …
See more results from climatechangereconsidered.org »
Watts Up With That? | The world’s most viewed
https: //wattsupwiththat.com/
site on global warming and climate change Menu Skip to content Home … alleging damages relating to climate change. Judge John Keenan wrote in …
See more results from wattsupwiththat.com »
Environment and Global Climate Change | U.S. Agency
https: //www.usaid.gov/what-we-do/environment-and-global-climate-change
Environment and Global Climate Change Gender Equality and Women s … Environment and Global Climate Change Global Climate Change …
See more results from www. usaid.gov »
What does past climate change tell us about global
https: //skepticalscience.com/climate-change-little-ice-age-medieval-warm-period.htm
definitions taken from Climate Change 2007: The Physical Science … Translations About Donate Climate’s changed before It’s the sun It’s not …
See more results from skepticalscience.com »
Climate change – Wikipedia
https: //en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_change
Climate change From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Jump to … Climatology Climate (category) Climate change (category) Global warming …
See more results from en.wikipedia.org »
Don’t know anything about the “climatechangereconsidered” folks, but WUWT shows up in slot #2. Then we start getting the “usual suspects” of all the Ra Ra Climate Depressives.
It looks like these folks have, in fact, made a non-biased search engine that isn’t just picking up Google, Yahoo or Bing and repackaging them. I’m going to be using them for a while and see how it feels…
Found the “add it to Firefox” button under the “about” link at the bottom:
Also, they are based out of the UK and have a UK centric choice on their top page, so may be better suited to non-USA based folks preferences and interests.
Sidebar on WUWT Comment
Oddly, I put basically this same text into a comment at WUWT and it went to moderation. I suspect one of the URLs is on a hold list (skeptical science that isn’t?). When I attempted to release it from moderation, I discovered that I am still approved on the old WordPress site (that seems to still exist) but my comment didn’t go there (everything was last June at the latest).
Seems in the transition to the new site for WUWT, I’ve been out of the loop. As I’d basically dropped to very little moderation duties (the change to threaded comments broke my style of just do end to end of a thread… then when returning, pick it up at the end again. Can’t do that with new comments showing up everywhere in the thread) I guess that makes sense.
But the upshot is it may be a while (if ever?) before my comment appears there. So I’ve made this article here.
Probably ought to check my e-mail queue and see if some “directions” were sent to me that I’ve missed ;-) Or if I’m just being omitted…
Musings from the Chiefio 
How sites handle moderation is a mystery.
Therefore, when someone having just hit submit, and then 30 seconds
later complains, that too is a mystery.
I have accepted that mysteries of this sort are a part of life on the web.
I move on and check back later.
[ Energy Matters site often gave an error that I couldn’t get around. I still read, some, there.]
I can usually find what I want on Duck.
Sometimes I try Bing. Rarely Google. About half my infrequent visits to Google use the “image” tab.
It’s handy if site moderation stays a bit of a mystery. If all rules and situations are widely known any system can be gamed by those who want to cause trouble. Keep the veil.
PS: Thanks for a new search engine to try. I’m always on the look for anything-but-google. Sometimes I use IXQuick. https://www.startpage.com/ which promises not to track.
i will give it a try as well, I tried that test on “startpage” (ixquick) search engine and WUWT never showed up in the 15 pages of results it returned.
I have added it to firefox but have not figured out how to add it as the default search engine on Brave yet. Supposedly there is an “Add mojeek to chrome” process but I could not get it to work so I just book marked it.
Hmmm perhaps search engines as well as services like Twitter and Facebook would fall under this same 1946 Supreme Court Precedent (Marsh vs Alabama) which found in their decision that large entities which effectively monopolize a public venue which has become widely used by the public and is essential for the effective exercise of free speech, cannot arbitrarily limit some speech and promote others if there is no viable alternative to using their service.
From twitter:
Nick777 @realNick777
Replying to @trumpQFDaction @RepMattGaetz and 2 others
BTW, twitter VIOLATES the 🇺🇸Constitution !
1946, Marsh vs Alabama :
Supreme Court : ….the more that private entities open their property up to public use, the fewer rights they have to control or ban what people do on that property.
Duckduckgo doesn’t show WUWT on 1st page with a ‘climate change’ search. mojeek showed it 7th on 1st page when I tried it. I’ll try mojeek for a while – I’ve been using Start Page on Brave for some time now.
@Jo:
There are several search engines that don’t track. The problem is that many of them just refer the search to Google and return the results (so you are anonymized to Google but still get Google biased results).
The MoJeek folks claim to have a ‘created from scratch’ search engine without the bias AND not tracking.
So far it seems pretty good. A bit light on some content (i.e. smaller search database) but that will grow as their web crawler harvests more. Missing some features (like image library search) but that too will undoubtedly be added over time.
I had a few things return “nothing found” with malformed search keys, so their “fix up bad typing” algorithm is a bit light ATM; again, such things improve with time.
I’ve used Startpage sometimes. For no real reason I’d settled on DuckDuckGo. Now I seem to be using the “dropdown selector” for search engine choice more, not just taking the default I’d set.
Oddly, I used Google a few times a week of necessity. Why? Well, lots of the “free WiFi” folks will use a DNS trap to catch your attempt to use a Google Search as their trigger to pop up their “accept our terms to use the WiFi”… and it would not recognize Duck… so I’d have to type a Google URL to get it to trap into the “let me in!” page. No revenue to Google though ;-)
What folks like Google, Faceplant, er, Facebook, Twitter, etc. have ignored is that 1/2 their audience is NOT from The Left (by definition) and that biasing against 1/2 your customer base is a Very Bad Idea.
Though I think they are learning it this week. Twitter just announced a big revenue miss and their stock has dropped on fewer accounts than expected. Ya Think? Toss off the hottest Conservatives, you loose the conservative followers too. They re-candle somewhere else. Perhaps the “Largest one day loss by any company ever” of Facebook will have a certain “cold water in the face” effect. The financial news had rumors that Zuckerburg was being evaluated for replacement at the helm… Seems when your investors wake up to a 1/5 to 1/4 loss in one day, they think maybe it’s the fault of the “leadership”…
Google is so large it will take much more than a few PO’d conservatives leaving YouTube to have an effect; BUT, it is going to hurt them. I’m no longer using their search engine at all AND I’ve put a DNS trap in my DNS server for their ad revenue snoops (various things .google.com ) and now I’m going to BitChute instead of YouTube for any political / “non-PC” video interests.
Eventually that has to show up in a bottom line…
Which reminds me… this all started as a search for peer-to-peer based alternatives for all the central server services. Search, video sharing, social media, etc. I probably need to finish that little bit of Dig! sometime ;-) That will be the end game of all this. “We the people” doing P2P and just bypassing the Central Authority folks. Like this one: https://yacy.net/en/index.html
FWIW, exploring a dozen or so other search engines has been an exercise in dismal. It is very clear most of them either suck on the Google Biased Spigot or something similar. Both “climate change” and “skeptic climate change” essentially returning a propaganda spin list.
Along the way ran into another test. One person was complaining that the “suggested completion” terms for “Christianity is” were largely negative while those for “Islam is” were either positive or missing altogether.
I did find another search engine that reported WUWT in the top set of several pages that I’d check, but only when I had “skeptic” in the search key:
https://www.yandex.com/search/?text=skeptic%20climate%20change&lr=21756&p=1
One the 2nd page, 2nd item:
This is another one. Has paid ad links in the first 4 or so “results”, and had to use the “skeptic climate change” search term to get WUWT (on page 2) , but Heartland showed up even with just “climate change”.
https://searchconservative.com/#gsc.tab=0&gsc.q=skeptic%20climate%20change%20&gsc.sort=
Yacy doesn’t want to run on my Mac. Then again, lots of things don’t like how far backlevel it is…
This sort of fits here as it is a great example of media lock step bias – a video clip that shows word for word identical features on multiple news media outlets.
One minute twitter video clip
Hmm. Never having heard of Mojeek, I went over and tried “climate change” myself. No trace of WUWT, or any other sceptical site, in the top 150 hits. Nor Yandex in the top 60. Maybe your post has attracted the attention of the Search Engine Police … 8-0
Perhaps the search results vary according to where in the World you search from? Searching on ‘Global warming’ on mojeek is even more startling.
@Tim – You’re right about global warming – the GWPF second after Wiki (!), and a link on the first page which assures us that “The official position of the World Natural Health Organization in regards to global warming is that there is NO GLOBAL WARMING!”. (I’m with ’em there, though I don’t mind using unnatural health assist if it helps so won’t be signing up.)
The regional variation is a possibility, but I think searching the net for specific topics is generally less rewarding now than it was fifteen or twenty years ago, before the web moved in. They call it “progress”.
For many years I loved Google but it started to show too many paid links while making it difficult to get rid of pop up advertisements. It suppressed links that I knew were high traffic (e.g. WUWT) so I had to dig deep to find what used to be on the first page.
Lately I have been using “Startpage” which got rid of some of the “Tracking” problems but at its heart it is still Google.
IMHO, Google is beyond hope of reform so I am going to follow our fearless leader’s advice.
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You can still use google to get black balled web site results but you have to know they exist first.
For example using the following query returns pages of WUWT links
“global warming” site:https://wattsupwiththat.com/
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I tried ‘climate change’ in mojeek. With the search region set to Disabled(All Regions), WUWT was in the first page of results. With region set to UK it didn’t appear in the first 20 results. Which makes sense.
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I have added Mojeek.com to Firefox. Searched for “climate change”; WUWT came up fourth on page one. I use Ad blocker with Firefox so do not see any ads. I also do not allow location which in my case as most know is Australia.
My first hit searching for ‘climate change’ on Mojeek was a NIPCC site:
http://climatechangereconsidered.org/
I tried http://www.mojeek.com and got a 403! On both my desktop and phone (not connected to my wifi). So I went to Bing and put in http://www.mojeek.com, and then clicked on the “about” page. It came up, and so I did a search, and it worked! Very strange.
And the second item on my “climate change” search was WUWT. Not ready to throw over to it just yet as it will take some more verifying. And curious as to the 403!
@philjourdan – it’s an https link, not http.
@IIanfar – DOH! Ok, so I cannot tell my S from a hole in the ground! Thanks for pointing out the obvious to everyone but me! :-)
Well I just finished installing YACY on one of my R.Pi boards. Not all that bad a process. It is not in the Debian archive so you need to add a source.list entry for it. And the authentication keys.
During the install it complained that the package was not authenticated. It may be that a reboot / restart of the process is needed before the Yacy install so that the authentication keys are installed completely ( I’m guessing here). I just went ahead and said to install it unauthenticated. While that is generally a Very Bad Idea as it lets your install be spoofed (by TLA among others); I am using a new install board on a more or less isolated system so “feh!”. ;-)
Install instructions are here:
http://www.yacy-websuche.de/wiki/index.php/En:DebianInstall
if you want other system type installs, see the sidebar here:
https://yacy.net/en/index.html
In the install for Debian, it calls out an Openjdk version to install:
Well, first off, I couldn’t find it in the install process… they are now at openjdk-8 so 7 was not to be found… Took me a while ti figure out that it was 8 now and to try it. Second off, 8 was already installed and the newest… So that step wasn’t needed at all (On Devuan latest…)
It installs easily but asks a couple of questions during the install for which I was not prepared. How much memory min, and max. I accepted the defaults of something like 180 MB and 800 MB.
Post install, it asked me in the FireFox dropdown if I wanted to add the Yacy search engine. So I did. That got me the German Language one (doh!). Nice to refresh some minimal coping German, but… Further down in the install instructions it says to use:
So I did. That gave an English search panel with sidebar admin button.and the option to add it to the dropdown. Which I did.
A search on “climate change” was unremarkable. A search on “global warming” was at least 1/2 skeptic sites. Neither one showed up WUWT in the top couple of pages.
In use, searches caused swapping. Likely due to the 1 GB Pi memory being only 867 MB after the Video Processor chunk is carved out, then take out 800 MB for the max I allowed and we’re down to 67 MB for the OS and everything else. I think the max ought to have been closer to 400 MB for this hardware…
Searches are fairly fast. In general I like it. A side panel has options for things like sorting by date and context search, also documents vs images. There are check boxes for type of file (html, php, txt) and language all with page number counts. A very nice touch. It looks to me like you can filter rapidly using those.
At one point (somewhere I’ve forgotten) I got a notice from it that my firewall prevented sharing my services to the outside world and that it would be nice if I opened port 8090 or set up a DMZ server to contribute to the shared pool of “indexes”. At some point I’ll be adding a Yacy server to my DMZ just because I think it’s cool… but not this machine. You can still DO searches without that opening in the NAT firewall (outbound NATs and works, it’s inbound unsolicited that has no NAT map back to you).
Attempting to use the Admin button gives a “user / password” box that I could not get past. Either it forgot my choice of password at install time, or I forgot it, or the UID I’m using doesn’t have the admin rights it wants, or something… I’m going to do a re-install at some point anyway, and will either figure out what needs fixing or just do the “no passwd anyone can admin” as a test case.
Overall I like it. It sucks a bit too much resources with the 800 MB memory limit and an already too fat FireFox for an older Pi M3 not optimized in any way for speed. (I.e. I’ve not checked what the clock REALLY is on this one). It’s “OK’ but the swapping gets to be a bit annoying (I’m running to real disk for that and can see the light flash… it isn’t the fastest disk…)
So there you have it. I’ll be doing a re-install with looser / fixed admin rights, 400 MB max memory, and skipping that whole “add the German page” step ;-) Then, some long time from now, put up a more dedicated Yacy engine in a DMZ. I really really like the idea of community driven no-TLA spying distributed no-central-server to attack / serve summons search.
It’s a bit “techy” so for most things I’ll stick with Mojeek. But in my office / Pi kit, well, it’s the playground for tech stuff ;-)
Interesting… YaCy has a “load balancer interface” that lets you try it out without installing your own instance (and also without contributing to the share load of running it…) Link here:
https://yacy.net/en/Searchportal.html
Sample search here:
http://search.yacy.net/yacysearch/index.html?query=sceptic+global+warming&Enter=&verify=false&nav=filetype%2Cprotocol%2Chosts%2Cauthors%2Ccollections%2Cnamespace%2Ctopics%2Cdate&startRecord=0&indexof=off&meanCount=5&resource=global&prefermaskfilter=&maximumRecords=10&timezoneOffset=420
Searching on “sceptic global warming” it finds lots of sceptics (instead of that crap “how to talk to a sceptic” and “how to show sceptics are wong” pages Google serves up) with a WUWT article on page 2. Nice.
Seems that each person who sets up an instance of YaCy can crawl the net (or I presume subset of it) so you can set up a YaCy node and assure it searches sceptic sites… that is your ‘local index’ that you then share out to the rest of the world…
At this point, I’m pretty much certain I’m going to buy a “cloud” instance and set it up as a YaCy server. Entry cost is about $15 / year and if you go up to $20 / month you can get a quite large server. They also let you put your own “donate” button on the server if you run one, so it could be possible to at least break even and potentially make money (depending on donations).
I’ll need to do some figuring on actual loads on the system vs cost of VM Instance, but I’d be willing to just give it a shot and see how the costs fall out. If nothing else, an instance can be ‘tuned’ to limit total net bandwidth used (the usual variable cost in a cloud VM instance as you usually buy a server size – so already set limit – but with variable network costs.
I’ll likely set up a DMZ Pi board first just to get some data on use / bandwidth, so I can figure if the Cloud VM is going to be a ‘cheap hobby’ or an expensive boondoggle…
Just as I thought:
https://yacy.net/en/Tutorials.html
So if you are a “Skeptic”, you can set up a YaCy server and “site crawl” a list of skeptic sites (say the “recommended” or “bookmark” sites from a few key skeptic sites…). That loads up your index that is then shared out to the whole public YaCy collective.
So one guy with an internet connection and a small computer (or a VM in the cloud) can assure that the skeptic sites are in the search index.
Nice, that.
Mojeek is now my default browser.th
While it has much to recommend it there is a British bias. When I enter “Duke HIGS” in Startpage this is the first link that showd up and it is the one I wanted:
http://www.tunl.duke.edu/web.tunl.2011a.higs.php
Using Mojeek the first four links had nothing to do with physics. Here is the fifth link:
https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2011/04/duke-university-has-found-neutron.html
While Mojeek did not find the TUNL (Triangle Universities Nuclear Laboratory) that link mentioned some interesting research using HIGS such as 6 MeV gamma rays for detecting U235.
Ooops! Firefox is my browser and Mojeek is my preferred search engine.
Mojeek is more all inclusive (ie does not bias results) but that is also a weakness, as it is relatively poor at relevance if you have a subject that happens to return lots of hits that have only an oblique connection to your search key.
It does have an advanced search function (accessable via the “hamburger” menu icon on the upper right of the page but it is relatively primitive compared to google’s advanced search. (although being able to specify the crawl date is a nice feature)
https://www.mojeek.com/advanced.html
Having played with Mojeek for a few days, I must say it is rather interesting – a bit like DDG used to be, or Ixquick before they defaced it with Google and made it indistinguishable from Startpage. It is, for a start, a refreshing change not to have Wikipedia right up at the top of the hits, so I don’t have to scroll past it (!).
I think half the problem with search engines is relevance to what you’re looking for. For example, if I as a radio amateur search on, say, “magloop antenna” or “class E PA”, 99% of the time I am searching for technical articles on the making of, or performance of, or theoretical considerations in the design of – not in buying somebody’s commercial offering. Google, and its derivatives like Startpage and the others, seem to take exactly the opposite view, which makes them essentially useless to me.
Someone needs to introduce an extra variable, say “commerce”, “theory”, “experience”, “opinion” or what-have-you, to allow the hapless searcher to distinguish between different angles on {whatever the search was about}, if we are not to drown in the exabytes of irrelevance all around our topic of interest. As it is, by the time I’ve refined and refined my search criteria to get where I want to go (and often still failed), it would likely have been quicker for me to derive {whatever it was} from first principles.
Steve C: “Someone needs to introduce an extra variable, say “commerce”, “theory”, “experience”, “opinion” or what-have-you, to allow the hapless searcher to distinguish between different angles on {whatever the search was about}, if we are not to drown in the exabytes of irrelevance all around our topic of interest.”
Excellent!
Right now, I use “reviews”, “troubleshoot”, “how to” in my searches and that really helps get useful results in the first page. I’ve found Duck-Duck-Go works fairly well for me when I use those qualifiers.
I suppose if I were hunting for papers on a scientific topic, I could throw in “abstract” and I’d get decent results.
Anyhow, until some search engine comes up with your broad categories, you’ve given me a nice way to think about how to choose qualifiers within broad categories to get better results. Thanks!
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I’ve found Mojeek very useful for getting the variety I want, but at times it fails to give the most common answer. Then I revert to duckduckgo. Like when I just want the wiki, or when looking for a youtube on something.
I find I now use the “dropdown selector” to choose a search engine (in FireFox) more than before but a large amount… but I’m now able to get exactly what I want far more quickly by using each search engine for its best use.