>Gabriel Weinberg @yegg Apr 17, 2022 · 10:18 AM UTC Hoping to clear up some misconceptions about our private search engine. First, there is a completely made up

>Gabriel Weinberg @yegg Apr 17, 2022 · 10:18 AM UTC Hoping to clear up some misconceptions about our private search engine. First, there is a completely made up headline going around this weekend. We are not "purging" any media outlets from results. Anyone can verify this by searching for an outlet and see it come up in results. Similarly, we are not "purging" YouTube-dl or The Pirate Bay and they both have actually been continuously available in our results if you search for them by name (which most people do). Our site: operator (which hardly anyone uses) is having issues which we are looking into. We are not and have never been owned by Google, and we also don't rely on Google's results for any of our search results. We have been an independent company since our founding in 2008. We don't track our users so don't have any search histories and therefore cannot alter results based on search history. This is different from "unfiltered" because every search engine's job is to filter millions of possible results down to a ranked order of just a handful. Search ranking and censorship are entirely different things. We make our results useful by ranking spam lower. We are not ranking based on any political agenda or my (or anyone else's) personal political opinions. We are also not assessing any individual news stories. Unlike independent media, Russian state-sponsored media is highly censored and violations are punishable by jail time or worse. This makes it inherently more spammy relative to independent media. The same is true for all censored media. Our product vision is much more than private search: it's the "easy button" for privacy in one app. Today it's an everyday browsing app with built-in private search, tracker blocking, HTTPS upgrading, button, email protection, and (for Android) app tracking protection.<