@PrabhjotSingh Qwant, Brave search, Startpage, and Yandex are the ones I use, when Google isn't finding anything, or I'm suspicious of them filtering stuff.

Qwant won't let me search here.

@polemon Do you often find that Google is censoring stuff?

@FaheemMitha "often" perhaps not, but certainly every now and then, yes. I just use a bunch of them at the same time, this usually yields the best results.

My favourite search-engine experiment is one I regrettably can't detail exactly here, but it's a two-word search term that Google fulfils with results all about a beloved series of classic children's books set in the English Lake District, while Bing's results are... of a different nature

Not censorship, both very defensible sets of results, but representing different choices of algorithmic priorities that are really fascinating to me

@polemon I see. That's something to keep in mind. I've historically just used Google.

@MichaelHomer wonder what duckduckgo does

@AndrasDeak Pretty much the same as Bing (perhaps unsurprisingly)

In fact seemingly everyone except Google gives the non-child-friendly results

Does it also happen when you're logged out?

@MichaelHomer who's the author of the books?

I mean, now I'm kinda interested in that experiment, but I have no idea what the books are, so can't try to come up with the keywords...

You can share the keywords here. That would be a classic case of mention and not use.

"Swallows and Amazons" (and sequels) are set in the Lake District.

They probably qualify for the "classic" moniker

I think us starting to guess here would have the opposite effect of what Michael is trying to (not) do :P

@FaheemMitha Till day before yesterday you could have used Qwant. Not now.

@PrabhjotSingh Oh. What happened?

> we are not yet available in your country.

@PrabhjotSingh Yes, I know. But why?

@FaheemMitha I have used Qwant for more than two years. Only thing I know about Qwant is that this is not available here now.

@PrabhjotSingh How was it? Did you like it?

@FaheemMitha Yes, I liked this. This searched more web pages in comparison with duckduckgo. duckduckgo I like because I once used LaTeX(ducks represent LaTeX users, IMO). StartPage is uses google for search. Yandex Translate I have used. But Yandex and Google, I don't prefer. I don't know why?

@polemon Thanks. I'll use Brave now.

@Mr.Linux This isn't something that can be answered with a simple sentence. Please post a question on the main site instead. Make sure to mention what you have tried so far (there are a LOT of resources for this and many questions already on the site).

duckduckgo.com/?q=make+iso+from+running+linux&ia=web

@jesse_b unusual welding combo

I can only suggest using Brave (the browser). It comes with a bunch of search engines pre-configured and has "Brave shields" which is essentially a very sophisticated ad-blocker. And, it's Un-Google'd Chrome, which is nice.

Isn't "un-google'd chrome" just "chromium"?

Afaik, it's essentially more bare-bones. Brave is a little different from Chromium, still

@ilkkachu Sorry, the books are by Arthur Ransome, what Faheem said. The Wikipedia pages will probably sort it out

@MichaelHomer Huh. I tried those since they were the only ones I could find that could possibly be misconstrued and the first few results in Google, Bing and DDG were all about the books and nothing raunchy.

@terdon character name + boat name

Oh. Dunno what those would be. OK.

But... I just tried on Google again and I got the other results

So the experiment doesn't work any more

Oooh. Interesting. Someone updated their algorithm. Or perhaps you had originally tried with safe search on by mistake?

No, always off (and no history). I was genuinely surprised the first time so I checked everything

However, this news article does still appear on the first page, so it's not completely gone, but it used to be stark

Huh. And what was the boat's name? I got the character. I would expect the combination of character and boat name to push down the lewd results given how popular these books are.

Ah, the species of bird from the title, presumably.

Yes

Well, duck duck go still gets me lewd for that. Even with both in quotes.

But google does not. So it seems to still work for me!

Interesting!

That really is an interesting example, thanks!

I'm pretty sure I tried yesterday and got the results I expected

I wonder if it profiles different browsers or something

I get the same Google results (not lewd) on incognito and non

I am getting the same ones from every browser, all incognito, now. Even more interesting that it's different for you

Location, perhaps?

I'm in Greece at the moment, but I'll be in the UK in a few weeks. I'll try again there and see if there's a difference.

Yeah, probably that. Odd that it changed so drastically though

Especially assuming that you haven't changed location. I was thinking it might make sense to assume that people who are located in the Anglo-saxon world would be likely to know of the books and that would raise the ranking of the book results. But, if so, why would it have changed for you?

Odd.

I haven't moved, no. It's interesting that it seems to be a toggle, not just gradually shifting the balance between the two

Somehow I thought those books were older, but the first one was published 1930. Less than a century ago.

Of course the world has changed a lot since then. Though English children novels tend to inhabit a universe of their own where reality is in limited supply.

hmm, I've never heard any of this

haha, yes, I can see how those search words could get understood in a somewhat different sense. FWIW, with Google, entering the boats's name in singular and the name of that character gives a me screenful of links to, well, that kind of stuff. Changing the name to plural (as in the title) focuses the results on the book (except for one link). With DDG, it makes no difference, it's just porn all the way.