Search Engines Match Up - Why Say No to Google?

the typical unaware user just clicks on google search and really has no idea how even this simple and ultra useful tool has been co-opted to manipulate you yes the choice of a search engine has a significant effect on your privacy in this video we'll go through why google search is ultra popular the dangerous tricks it has and then we'll look at alternatives the popular alternatives to google search have different strengths and weaknesses and then at the end of the video i'll give you a suggestion of how to plan your search activities on your devices for a bit of privacy stay right there when you need better search results like those from google but don't want the google tracking check out privacy search engine start page dot com it does not collect or share any of your personal data so you can search anonymously i have a vpn service bytes vpn my company also sells the google phones and vpn routers these products are made to make your identity disappear on the internet if you're interested in them they are on my app brax.me the link is in the description in general we want some privacy with our activities on the internet and this of course extends to what we search for in search engines like google search which is the most popular one in case you didn't know most searches on the internet are done on two platforms google search and the second most popular youtube and this is the primary reason i'm on youtube i can't possibly reach a large number of people by disappearing from the top two sources of internet searches however for this video i will only specifically discuss search engines that serve external links and not platforms like youtube or wikipedia that serve internal content we'll compare some popular ones google search against bing duck dot go start page brave search yahoo search quant yandex and baidu there are many more search engines but these are the most well known ones some of these search engines are called privacy search engines they have a privacy focus and these are duckduckgo start page quant and brave search brave is the newest one of the bunch when it comes to privacy search engines there's a lot of misunderstanding and maybe incorrect expectations or assumptions let's set some things straight all search engines regardless of privacy claims use an advertising model this is particularly important when people start calling certain search engines bad because they spotted some ad trackers they have to make money and since search engines are free there is no other way for them to do that so if you're expecting some search engine not to serve your ads or not result in some ad tracker somewhere then you're starting off on the wrong foot you do not protect yourself from ad trackers by your choice of search engine the reason for me saying this is that the ad trackers come from the website that you click so just the mere action of clicking on a search link then you are popped into the website and the website will track you like it always does this has nothing to do with the search engine i've seen some criticism of privacy focused search engines and this is such a fake fear-mongering comment here's another statement i have heard the search engine tracks the link and records it well that is true it is also true of all search engines i would expect that the search engine will track their clicks so they can analyze the results to see if the result set is relevant or not i can't imagine a search engine not doing this and they have to track their performance because as i said earlier every single search engine is advertising based so they have to sell themselves to advertisers and sell their results now this does not mean that you should not protect yourselves these types of comments come from the fear of being tracked when you're using a search engine and it is a valid concern but we need to understand what the threat is so we can come up with a correct solution i'm just starting with a level playing field here all search engines serve advertising so do not be surprised if ad trackers appear it is a waste of time to focus on ad trackers i'll give you a more general and productive solution relating to ad trackers at the end of the video but don't expect that your choice of a search engine will affect this first let's focus on google search google search of course is the most popular they've blasted away all the prior competition names like magellan lycos infoseek ask excite have pretty much disappeared from common view although one of the earliest ones yahoo search still exists though less as a direct search engine at the moment these are the current market shares for search engines google takes the top spot at 91.86 percent and you can see that duckduckgo has point six percent now i won't really discuss baidu in this video since as a china specific search engine it's not really relevant to this topic you will see how google really stands out and how far the rest of the competition is and the only privacy focused search engine that even appears in the list is doc.gov google is very popular for a reason and this is because their search algorithms have historically given the best search results in the end it doesn't matter what the specific claims of each search engine is but if it doesn't return relevant search results then of course you will stop using it i do however caution you google search has transformed from just a basic search engine to be a tool to manipulate thoughts and ideas and this is a proven thing and i'll explain it to you more in a moment but first just another basic backgrounder most search engines build content by doing what is called web crawling search programs from each company called bots look up every domain in existence from the domain registry and then looks up all the website traffic it can find relating to that domain and that becomes the raw material for the search engine from there when you plug in a search term it is up to the algorithm to understand the context of what you're searching for and give you the appropriate search results to show you how context is relevant let's say you're searching for the word it it is of course a common preposition if you just allowed it to display occurrences of the word then you will get a lot of garbage but there's it the book it the movie and it as the acronym for information technology knowing the context and then understanding how to position it in the page is what people appreciate the less you have to scroll down and look then you know that the search engine has been doing a good job in my case if google search knows that i'm in the information technology business which it does then it would prioritize displaying information technology instead of the movie or the book and it doesn't show the preposition if it knows i'm not a techie but a movie buff it might display it the movie first unfortunately what we appreciate as the search engine understanding the context can be taken too far if i look at the word it in wikipedia it gives me a better way of establishing content without knowing too many details of my life when i search for it in wikipedia it gives me choices sorted into these groups arts and media film and television characters journalism other literature science and technology transport other but google being google make sure that every click you do on the browser or on the search engine is recorded and profiled to your specific identity and your specific device so this is not a mystery most of you watch this channel should notice all your searches on google are tracked to your google id which then appear in google activity history which is my activity.google.com even if you disable or pause the google tracking of your search history you can still be tracked using the technique called browser fingerprinting now google's pushing to eliminate most of the browser fingerprinting but mostly to prevent third parties from tracking you the reason for this is pretty illegitimate as far as i'm concerned what they're doing is no different than before they will track you using categories called federated learning of cohorts or flock but they will prevent external parties from identifying you to translate this for you in plain talk google will track you and identify you as always with all your activities but third parties have to obtain your identification to match these activities from google in other words they're establishing a monopoly of learning what you do on the internet they're not tracking you any less by the way if you use google search without logging in they are still tracking you with a cookie identity so particularly if you're using chrome nothing changes the moment you log into google then they've captured all your activity on the browser as well at least if you didn't clear your browser cookies now google has gone too far i discussed this in another video on the manipulation of google search what you've never realized about google search is that the search results are not organic nor are they just limited to the context of your search intent what google has done is to use google search to implement their social or political goals google search results are manipulated so that they can minimize what they don't want you to see and then popularize what they want you to see this is fairly obvious when two people in the same area search for something on google and google knows their political affiliations and changes the search results or maybe they don't even need to know political affiliation they can derive that from your search choices like those who search for fox news versus those that search for cnn this is becoming a very identifiable profile today so if they want to certain topics will be made to disappear then certain attacks on political figures can either be amplified or minimized depending on which posts are allowed to show on the first page i wish it ended here but as it turns out the alphabet division jigsaw.com has a mission to change the world and its mission is to change your opinion to this end they are directly using google search as the tool to change opinions specifically jigsaw partner moonshot cve from the uk actually targets particular groups and then tracks all the users by category depending on what they're searching for they have successfully classified and apparently limited themselves to finding violent right-wing extremist groups around the world you'd be surprised at their definition of a right-wing extremist group and you will also find that it includes big chunks of the population for example if you don't want to get jabbed then you'll be tagged in this group if you search for things they classify as conspiracy theory for example topics like the source of a virus then you will be tagged your political choices will definitely flag you what's interesting here though that this is not some balanced targeting of extremists instead google has chosen to put their political views as part of the google search algorithm they want to convince you that their choice is right so moonshot cve deliberately changes the search results for this purpose the original project started by moonshot cve was to change the search results for muslim extremists in london so whatever they search for will yield counter arguments to their jihad searches but like anything else once you make the technology available it will be used for whatever purpose and often only by the people with the power to use this technology in this case those who are into the social agenda of the specific company this lack of balance in the control of this powerful technology has made google search basically a manipulation tool a manipulation tool that is the antithesis of freedom and free speech i therefore urge you to use alternate search engines to deny them this power do not use google search unfortunately 90 plus percent of you will still use google search and we will continue to be zocked there is no denying that even the raw results of the google algorithm is superior to bing and yahoo fortunately there is a way to get google results but without giving it the ability to track you now this has to be combined with some other techniques i will discuss at the end of the video the only way to get google results safely is to use startpage.com start page is an interesting service and was initially promoted by edward snowden from what i recall start page does not have its own web crawling service instead it takes all of its results from google it is what i refer to as a proxy search engine by that i mean that it goes to google does a search for your search term and then returns the results and i would imagine it would also return the add results but because it went through an intermediate party the start page servers all the identification has been stripped out thus the search cannot be targeted to you even as an anti-jabber that has been classified as a violent right-wing extremist those of us who are privacy focused are also probably classified or targeted in some way maybe they consider us conspiracy theories who knows but i don't like it so if i really need full search capability at all times using google results then this is the best option to use startpage.com has to pay google for every click as far as i know so they do pop-up captcha codes to stop those who want to piggyback on their services so this is a bit of a pain but if you're looking for the best search results without causing any privacy damage to yourself this is the option let me contrast this to the other privacy search engine which is duck.go duckduckgo has really flourished so much so that they appear on the market share list of search engines now they are no more than a spec in google's eyes but there is no doubt that they are the largest privacy focused search engine like startpage.com they claim that they don't collect identifiers from their customers and your search results are based solely from your search terms what you may not know is that search results from duckduckgo actually come mostly from bing.com and partly from yahoo.com and maybe some other part from yandex so duckduckgo is similar to start page in that they appear to proxy for others they may also have their own crawler where duckduckgo is done well is their integration to mobile if you download a duckduckgo browser on mobile then by default you use the duckduckgo search engine and in fact i preload duckduckgo on the google phones that i sell since they have smartly made an asteroid version of the browser the main problem with duckduckgo is that the results are often limited the search results are a fraction of what you would find on google search and obviously the algorithms would be limited to what algorithms are available on bing and yahoo i do have a pet peeve with duckduckgo for a long time you couldn't search for odyssey so i was concerned about some sort of censorship since odyssey a platform where i have a big presence was banned from the app stores so i was worried if this platform is sensor free or if it is a consequence of their affiliation with being in yahoo anyway i tried it today and i can now search for odyssey but i'm sure it prevented many of my followers from finding me on that site in the past it's a black mark for sure and i will look for signs of censorship like this in the future on any other search platform there's a new search engine from the makers of the brave browser brave search braves claim to fame and their differentiating technology from duckduckgo is that they claim that they are not a proxy search engine that they say they have their own web crawlers and being a privacy focused web browser they are also promoting their search as a privacy focused search engine however in actual use clearly brave is way behind the other players even a search for the word it in my prior example yielded only 9 results from brave and an unlimited number from duckduckgo and google another search engine that i don't think i've actually seen market much to the privacy crowd is quant.com this is a search engine from france and they claim to have no user tracking either they also claimed to have their own web crawlers instead of performing a proxy search on bing and yahoo but using the same its search on it yielded a small result set though a bit more than brave search being in the eu they are completely subject to gdpr privacy laws which google bing and yahoo can ignore in the us however start page and yandex are both domiciled in the netherlands so they are subject to eu laws as well so what's left yes we're not going to talk about baidu i'm sure chinese citizens are tracked very well by the ccp on baidu what's left is bing yahoo and the index no pun intended anyway these platforms will obviously track you using your microsoft id yahoo id and whatever identifiers they can find but i have no personal knowledge of them manipulating users like they do on google search and if you want to use these platforms then you might as well stick to duckduckgo since that is the source anyway there's no particular reason to go direct to being in yahoo where some amount of user identification is being done unless you're from russia i can't imagine the benefit of yandex yandex can give better results for russian search queries because they recognize russian inflections in the text now let me tie this in a ribbon with some clear advice when you click on any link to any website because of google analytics tracking will occur and this is independent of the search platform although google analytics is directly tied to google search so you have to learn to protect yourself against the threat of your website visits being identified the solution is what i call browser isolation and i discuss it extensively in another video with that title what you do is set up several browsers i would use at least three and one of them must be chrome in my case i use chrome brave and firefox other than chrome you can choose any two like on a mac you may choose safari over firefox the strategy is to use chrome only for things google and only for things you will allow them to know about you with your google id so on my chrome browser i run youtube gmail google earth and things that are clearly going to be spied on by google i'm very careful what i do in this browser since i'm logged in with my google id i will never go to any website on chrome that i do not want google to know about whatever i do is intentional for profiling then i have a second browser which is running firefox on firefox i handle all other websites amazon ebay twitter etc then i have a third browser which i use for accessing google things but without a login for this i use brave and i restrict it to not save cookies if you will use facebook which is really bad and i hope you don't then you need another browser just for that it's because it's another serious tracker so any youtube videos i look at that i don't want google to use for profiling or if i want to look at political videos then i do it on brave i never log into google on this browser and i clear cookies regularly only on this browser in all cases meaning all three browsers in my example i do not use google search ever in my case i use start page on one and duckduckgo on another so if i need different search results i can do it safely so the goal here is not necessarily because i have to evade start page or go the goal is to prevent websites using google analytics from pinpointing your identity because then you will be profiled for visiting a site even without doing a google search there are technical reasons for this approach in the browser isolation video it should also behoove you to have a vpn since that is the other way they will track you in google analytics so think of google analytics as a spy for google search and it's embedded in every website this browser isolation is a very important technique you can actually change what google knows about you by feeding the desired information on chrome click on things you want them to see intentionally on chrome and keep yourself logged in with a google id when doing this i'm on the platform odyssey.com and i'm now one of the top creators on there just in case i get the platform please follow me there using the link in the description if you found yourself enjoying my videos i hope you support the cause by hitting the subscribe button and the notification bell that will help us grow the chat that will help us grow with the message thank you for watching and see you next time you

Channel: Rob Braxman Tech

Views: 110,710

Keywords: internet privacy, internet privacy guy, tech privacy, privacy, google search, jigsaw, moonshot cve, tainted search results, manipulated search results, startpage.com, startpage, duckduckgo, qwant, bing, yahoo!, yandex, search engines, search engines review, search engines comparison

Id: k-7oOqGy5ek

Length: 23min 10sec (1390 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 02 2021

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