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Personally, I don't think this was a complete/valid test - Yandex could be censoring other things. The input test data primarily covered things that would fit a

Personally, I don't think this was a complete/valid test - Yandex could be censoring other things. The input test data primarily covered things that would fit a specific narrative, not one for the 'other side'. Has anyone done a more complete test?

sacrosancty 5y ago
Yes. I think the conclusion is that you would do well to use both Yandex and a typical western one for anything political.
mrozbarry 5y ago
I think the validity is mostly scoped the current major world-wide events. It would be interesting to have some sort of topic censorship ranking website; give it a topic, and it ranks various search engines.
bjourne 5y ago
Can you give examples of queries for the "other side"? I'd like to test them out.
- marcusverus 5y ago
  Zelensky is a hero -- should return five results in which the author considers Zelensky to be a hero. Russia thousands arrested -- should return five results about arrests at recent war protests in Russia Russian casualties in ukraine -- should return five results listing figures in the thousands.
  - kordlessagain 5y ago
    This is why the index shouldn't be full of crap. A smaller collection, curated by the user, is where it's at. Maybe you should do a pull request!
    - robbedpeter 5y ago
      This is a little silly when you consider volume. A search engine should crawl millions of pages and sites, and over time develop quality indicators so the crap can be filtered out. Anything that works equivalently to Google's algorithm will suffer from the same crap infection as Google results, and to a lesser degree any of the other top 20 engines and meta-search tools. Something like ublock lists and p2p sharing in closed communities could provide semantic indexing and gradual manual curation, so with a few thousand people you might get novelty + quality in an engine. If you stick to a small, curated list of sites, you won't get site level novelty, and quality will eventually suffer relative to searches that scan over new things. Even then, consider reddit - build a reddit search that's as good as Google. That updates once an hour. Sharing bookmarks isn't feasible when you want the functionality of a general purpose search engine.
  - bjourne 5y ago
    Oddly enough, Yandex pass these tests with flying colors.
anothernewdude 5y ago
I expect any search engine worth using to filter out spam and low effort crap. Yandex does neither.
- asddubs 5y ago
  neither does google these days

sacrosancty 5y ago

Yes. I think the conclusion is that you would do well to use both Yandex and a typical western one for anything political.

mrozbarry 5y ago

I think the validity is mostly scoped the current major world-wide events. It would be interesting to have some sort of topic censorship ranking website; give it a topic, and it ranks various search engines.

bjourne 5y ago

Can you give examples of queries for the "other side"? I'd like to test them out.

marcusverus 5y ago
Zelensky is a hero -- should return five results in which the author considers Zelensky to be a hero. Russia thousands arrested -- should return five results about arrests at recent war protests in Russia Russian casualties in ukraine -- should return five results listing figures in the thousands.
- kordlessagain 5y ago
  This is why the index shouldn't be full of crap. A smaller collection, curated by the user, is where it's at. Maybe you should do a pull request!
  - robbedpeter 5y ago
    This is a little silly when you consider volume. A search engine should crawl millions of pages and sites, and over time develop quality indicators so the crap can be filtered out. Anything that works equivalently to Google's algorithm will suffer from the same crap infection as Google results, and to a lesser degree any of the other top 20 engines and meta-search tools. Something like ublock lists and p2p sharing in closed communities could provide semantic indexing and gradual manual curation, so with a few thousand people you might get novelty + quality in an engine. If you stick to a small, curated list of sites, you won't get site level novelty, and quality will eventually suffer relative to searches that scan over new things. Even then, consider reddit - build a reddit search that's as good as Google. That updates once an hour. Sharing bookmarks isn't feasible when you want the functionality of a general purpose search engine.
- bjourne 5y ago
  Oddly enough, Yandex pass these tests with flying colors.

anothernewdude 5y ago

I expect any search engine worth using to filter out spam and low effort crap. Yandex does neither.

asddubs 5y ago
neither does google these days