If censorship comes to the United States under Trump, it won’t be just social media, news media and blogs getting censored it will be American search engines too.

The two biggest international search engines, Google and Bing are both American. Russia has a search engine and so does China but I don’t trust either of those countries. That leaves Mojeek which is privately owned and based in the UK and has it’s own index and, importantly, is privacy based.

Here’s a map showing the search engine origins.

US Government Censorship

What I’m saying is for Canadians, Europeans, British, Australians, New Zealanders and many others, if you don’t want to be using a search engine that could be influenced by the US Trump government you have just one choice that is outside of US control or not controlled by Russia or China, you have one choice Mojeek. Just type in a couple of keywords in Mojeek and you should be set for general search. For real detailed searches like hunting for some obscure equipment part number you are still going to need Google. I always start with Mojeek and then use other search engines if it can’t find what I want.

Privacy

This isn’t just for foreigners, Americans need to consider both the censorship angle and also the privacy angle. Nobody needs to know what you are searching the Web for.

(Be aware there are some good smaller regional search engines for Czech Republic, South Korea and maybe others but these are only good for a small region and language so we don’t count them. Also, there are many others that pretend to be international but really rely on Bing or Google for most of their results.)

Yes, eventually new search engines with their own indexes will develop outside of the US, but that will take awhile, probably years.

So, we’ve already talked about hosting your blog outside the US, and new reports are European governments and corporations are looking for cloud providers in EU. They are taking this serious and you should too.