For the past year or so, I’ve been using and enjoying the search engine Kagi.
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For the past year or so, I’ve been using and enjoying the search engine Kagi. Its search results are…fine, no worse than others, and it’s ad-free, stated privacy as a primary goal, and seemed to have a better ethical sense than its competitors.
Or so I hoped.
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They also seem to be losing the war vs content farms, and that is only going to get worse in the next few years.
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Which is it? Doesn’t matter.
When I give a company access to all of my searches, I’m giving them an •extraordinary• degree of trust. Earning that trust from me requires a keen ethical awareness, and a sense of responsibility that never shrinks into the shadows and says “Not our problem! Not our responsibility!” when market forces raise ethical questions.
I want a company with a moral compass and a spine.
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> I want a company with a moral compass and a spine.
Hear hear. And *both* are needed. I've seen companies that have learned to pretend they have a moral compass (because they've had their PR RLHFed into knowing what to say), but no spine in that they don't do anything meaningful to align with their empty words. -
@inthehands "Pants-on-head-stupid" is a phrase I plan to steal. Thank you!
And thanks for the warning about Kagi.
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@glightly@mastodon.social @CptSuperlative I like the idea of community-curated directories. It may be an idea whose time has come again.
Still, I really do need •search• for my daily life: an esoteric error message while programming, a book whose title I can’t quite remember, a question about some scientific fact…no amount of community curation can do that. Both and!
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@ChildlessBambino@mastodon.green @cschack @flowerpot @inthehands
so many options, so little clarity...you'd hope that each one of these companies would have a link on their homepage with large bold text like: "how we make our money and what our business motives are".
in the case of qwant, i have to do a web search to find that they answered this on a forum: https://help.qwant.com/en/docs/overview/how-does-qwant-make-money/
it's ads.
so the motive to track (and rank bad results higher) will eventually creep in.
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@glightly@mastodon.social @CptSuperlative I wish I had a nice way to do that to hand to you on a platter, or to invite you into! I am hopeful that the Internet is tilting back a little bit more toward being community-driven like this, so here’s hoping….
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Search is a wasteland right now. Alas. And there are no good choices.
But look, if I’m going to •pay• a company money for search, it needs to be a company run by ethically mature people. If and when Kagi is run by such people, maybe I’ll give that paid plan another go. For now, well, maybe these childish people will blunder their way to maturity and maybe they’ll just blunder, but either way, they won’t be doing it on my dime.
/end
@inthehands “Search is a wasteland right now.“
I’ve switched to perplexity. No idea if they’re ethical but in a set of poor choices they save me a bunch of time.
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@meltedcheese @inthehands the legal requirement to maximize profit over everything only applies to publically traded companies btw. If you're not on the stock market the goal is whatever the owner decides.
Granted yes, the incentive is still there and basically we can't have nice things under capitalism.@lunareclipse @inthehands @meltedcheese also, "maximize shareholder profits" is not actually a requirement. It's a theory not based on any actual law. Many rich and powerful people do benefit from pretending it's a requirement, though
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@inthehands I just got inspired to meme by this awful statement.
@morix @inthehands Politics is stifling innovation in cotton farm personnel management. --Confederate leaders, probably
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@CptSuperlative
What are the groups and workspaces, how do they work? You're another person I see mention them, and as I use Firefox I'm not familiar with the terms.Personally I tend to use technique of "topic per window", makes it easier to clean up when I'm done with this topic/task.
@inthehands -
@ChildlessBambino@mastodon.green @cschack @flowerpot @inthehands
so many options, so little clarity...you'd hope that each one of these companies would have a link on their homepage with large bold text like: "how we make our money and what our business motives are".
in the case of qwant, i have to do a web search to find that they answered this on a forum: https://help.qwant.com/en/docs/overview/how-does-qwant-make-money/
it's ads.
so the motive to track (and rank bad results higher) will eventually creep in.
@ChildlessBambino@mastodon.green @cschack @flowerpot @inthehands mojeek's answer to this question is hilarious; it's basically:
> well, we don't really know how we're going to make money in the long term, but for now, we're getting all of our money from one extremely rich man.
> You will certainly not regret having your search company funded entirely by one extremely rich man.https://blog.mojeek.com/2020/12/frequently-asked-questions-about-mojeek-business-model-surveillance-privacy.html
https://blog.mojeek.com/2020/10/who-funds-mojeek.html -
@ChildlessBambino@mastodon.green @cschack @flowerpot @inthehands mojeek's answer to this question is hilarious; it's basically:
> well, we don't really know how we're going to make money in the long term, but for now, we're getting all of our money from one extremely rich man.
> You will certainly not regret having your search company funded entirely by one extremely rich man.https://blog.mojeek.com/2020/12/frequently-asked-questions-about-mojeek-business-model-surveillance-privacy.html
https://blog.mojeek.com/2020/10/who-funds-mojeek.html@ChildlessBambino@mastodon.green @cschack @flowerpot @inthehands (ok, so this may be an exaggeration: the number of extremely rich people who expect an RoI is probably greater than one.)
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Search is a wasteland right now. Alas. And there are no good choices.
But look, if I’m going to •pay• a company money for search, it needs to be a company run by ethically mature people. If and when Kagi is run by such people, maybe I’ll give that paid plan another go. For now, well, maybe these childish people will blunder their way to maturity and maybe they’ll just blunder, but either way, they won’t be doing it on my dime.
/end
@inthehands any thoughts on searx or searxng? I'm looking at those as potential replacements.
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What I found was _not_ a thoughtful, careful response. What I found was the founder of Kagi saying:
“Politics finding its way into tech is one of the reason we do not have innovation any more.”
Reconsider your partnership with Brave - Kagi Feedback
Brave, as you know, is led by Brendan Eich. s homophobia is so disgusting that he was forced to resign as the leader...
(kagifeedback.org)
Well shit. That is the reddest of red flags.
4/
@inthehands thanks for bringing this to my attention. I don't just want a better search engine, I want a better world. Cancelled my subscription.
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@inthehands
Search is pretty limited and the few independent players aren't as useful for a lot of things, but AI could level the playing field... ...By making the content of the big players so bad it doesn't matter what search engine you use, you'll still get rot! I guess we'll be going back to curated site directories for most things but that won't help for error messages...In the meantime, what do you think of Mojeek? I've found them useful on occasion.
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@patrickleavy @inthehands @CptSuperlative Qwant who secretely added the keywords "président République" to all searches about Macron? https://next.ink/6115/108737-qwant-resultats-encore-dates-erreurs-404-et-complots/
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@ChildlessBambino@mastodon.green @cschack @flowerpot @inthehands (ok, so this may be an exaggeration: the number of extremely rich people who expect an RoI is probably greater than one.)
@ChildlessBambino@mastodon.green @cschack @flowerpot @inthehands
swisscows? Ads.
also, they put this right on their home page:
> "Both pornographic and sexual content are not indexed and not displayed by our search engine."
this sounds actively homophobic
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@inthehands any thoughts on searx or searxng? I'm looking at those as potential replacements.
@thunderfist No idea. I’m looking around too, same as you.
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@inthehands
Search is pretty limited and the few independent players aren't as useful for a lot of things, but AI could level the playing field... ...By making the content of the big players so bad it doesn't matter what search engine you use, you'll still get rot! I guess we'll be going back to curated site directories for most things but that won't help for error messages...In the meantime, what do you think of Mojeek? I've found them useful on occasion.
@ddlyh ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I'm more or less at square one investigating search engines. -
@ChildlessBambino@mastodon.green @cschack @flowerpot @inthehands
swisscows? Ads.
also, they put this right on their home page:
> "Both pornographic and sexual content are not indexed and not displayed by our search engine."
this sounds actively homophobic
@ChildlessBambino@mastodon.green @cschack @flowerpot @inthehands maybe we need some kind of co-op?
like, to use the search engine (after a kagi-style free sampling), you buy a share or something...?
or have the organization placed in some kind of trust that is designed so that it's owned by no one? (i seem to recall some european gamedev company set up like this...?)
