Many “alternative” search engines are better for privacy, but they are still vulnerable to censorship, because they rely on g**gle and m*crosoft’s indices for their search results. This isn’t a deep-hidden secret either, many of them disclose what search index they use on the “about” page, for example:

There are still search engines that (claim to) maintain their own index. Most surprisingly, br*ve:

            • HEXN3T@lemmy.blahaj.zone
              1·
              9 months ago

              Let me break this down:

              Я: “Ya” sound

              н: “N” sound

              д: “D” sound

              е: “Eh” sound

              к: “K” sound

              с: “S” sound, or “C” sound as in “citrus”

              Other fun facts:

              1. There aren’t usually separate letters for capitals and lower case, only being written either full or half size.
              2. Cyrillic isn’t hugely or vastly different from Greek. The л (L) is often written like lambda (Λ), and п (P) is very much like pi (Π). Other similar letters include Д (Delta), Р (Rho), Ф (Phi) and Г (Gamma), in no particular order.
              3. Водка (Vodka, almost trivial) literally means “heavy water”. Water is «Вода». Possibly the most important word in all of the Motherland.
              4. Like virtually all major Eastern languages (and most languages in general), Cyrillic is pretty phonetically consistent. Letters basically never make multiple sounds, unless accents and such are used.
              5. ВORДТ (The show), which doesn’t even fit in English OR Russian, is transliterated to “VORDT”, which I find kinda funny.

              I don’t actually know Russian, or any Cyrillic language. You’re welcome. Bonus dog for engagement.