Amazing that nowadays if you want the best "uncensored" results you have to go to the Russian Yandex (at least on all topics unrelated to Russia). How did our society get to such a point...

It has been like that for the long time, actually. I've seen examples where somewhat political search clause (in Russian) yields completely different results on Google & Yandex (it's actually hard to tell which one "tweaks" the results, and what tweaking even really means, when you think about it — my guess would be both, but differently). But in a sense of intentionally hiding something "neutral" that I know perfectly well must be there, but isn't (and it seems like you can guess why) — I've never actually noticed in on Yandex, while on Google it has been like that for the whole decade already. (I don't find is that surprising, really. To me, it's perfectly logical, but I won't elaborate, because it would be political and extremely unpopular on HN, which seems like a worthless flamewar topic to me.)

But in my experience Yandex just isn't as good at searching things in English, as DDG/Bing. At least, I always preferred them for most use-cases except from some really specific ones. So it's a pity that this thing with DDG happened. I guess, I'll still continue to use it for now, because I don't want to hurt my productivity other that thing (and switching to a search engine I would have to adapt to most certainly would do that). But we'll see.

I suppose that's a real use case for a meta search engine: send queries to different search engines, then interlace the results removing duplicates.

DDG was supposed to be like this originally, but they stopped using Yandex a while ago so now its just a wrapper on Bing...

i mean yes, it's suboptimal. but hardly news that for the real deal, you gotta leave the main road.

If that isn't a rhetorical question... capitalism.

Related: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism

> capitalism

If capitalism caused censorship you would expect the least capitalist places to have the least censorship but the opposite is true.

If capitalism causes censorship, that doesn't mean it's necessarily the worst at causing censorship.

Additionally, we don't live in a stationary society, so, whatever capitalism did or did not cause in the past might not apply as-is today.

Capitalism (as practiced by democracies) allows you to start an alternative site that doesn't censor results as well. Totalitarianism (Communism) would not have. Choose your poison from amongst the various governments that have succeeded (for a while) in the past as I don't think Utopia is a possibility with humans as messed up as we are.

I'm not sure what your point is. The GP commenter asked what brought us here... it was capitalism. It was people starting other sites that didn't censor or didn't have ads or didn't do this or that. The winners of capitalism are what we have now.

right, russians went from cyber-shady to cyber-pure-evil and now everyone has to cut ties...