For the past year or so, I’ve been using and enjoying the search engine Kagi.
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@CptSuperlative Back to DuckDuckGo for now, very very very open to suggestions.
@inthehands @CptSuperlative DDG is Bing under the hood?
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@inthehands @CptSuperlative DDG is Bing under the hood?
@elight
Yes, with (theoretically) better privacy. -
@alter_kaker @SkipHuffman @CptSuperlative Agreed, it’s a really interesting family of questions.
I think — and this is speaking with my software engineer hat on! — that the biggest and deepest questions here are about the human relationships: Who knows who? Who decides what? Who shares what? •Some• parts of that can’t / shouldn’t be automated. With clarity around that, tech can help reduce friction! But the fundamental system scaling problems here are social.
@inthehands @SkipHuffman @CptSuperlative I agree. So what are the social scaling problems, and how can technology help address them while leaving humans in the drivers seat?
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@SkipHuffman @inthehands @CptSuperlative so one issue is how is technology able to encourage/enable creativity. I'd say that the other side is how can it enable discovery, both social and informational
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@SkipHuffman @inthehands @CptSuperlative so one issue is how is technology able to encourage/enable creativity. I'd say that the other side is how can it enable discovery, both social and informational
@SkipHuffman @inthehands @CptSuperlative for example, what you said above abt writing .md post with many references. I'd like a system where I can not only read the post with the reference, but also the ones that are referenced: here's a reaction to this. This way I can discover both additional perspectives and association surf, and new people. There was something similar in WP years ago with pingbacks but it was ugly and inconvenient to use, interspersed among the comments and with no context.
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@donaldball
Exactly. I don’t think they understand what they’re selling, what their customers had been paying for. -
@SkipHuffman @realn2s @JessTheUnstill Nothing endures but change and typos.
@inthehands @SkipHuffman @JessTheUnstill
and corrected 
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@inthehands I just got inspired to meme by this awful statement.
@morix @inthehands
I did some digging and decided Kagi is a KGB / FSB operation. If you don't mind my "unhinged" ranting: -
@mastodonmigration @inthehands He's not young. Based on his bio, he's in the 45-50 age range.
"I started my journey in tech in 1983 with C-64 and Elite"
Vladimir Prelovac
Vladimir Prelovac - Founder/CEO Kagi Inc. Builder of user-centric products and a dad of three.
(vladimir.prelovac.com)
He's run several different businesses over the past couple of decades.
He is not young and unsophisticated.
@unlambda @mastodonmigration @inthehands
Further Reading: -
@SkipHuffman @inthehands @JessTheUnstill
Perfectly fine
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@toolbear @mastodonmigration @inthehands huh? Are you implying that he's Russian or in the KGB? He's Serbian. What does the KGB or Russian oligarchs have to do with this? You're going to need to cite some sources
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@CptSuperlative @noodlejetski @inthehands It is open source, but by using a chromium based browser, you contribute to the fact that it becomes irrelevant for web devs to support other browser engines well. Which is a problem, because a single corporation does control the development of it despite it being open source. A fork would be totally irrelevant on the browser market and extremely hard to maintain. Apart from that, firefox is just the better browser.
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@trigonella
Indeed.I’d say that being apolitical or apathetic in the face of oppression •is• being political.
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This thread perfectly captures the problem. Thanks.
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@jeridansky Thank you.
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@inthehands
Is "duck" a hint?I've used only DDG for about 8 years now.
There's issues, but I don't know of a better alternative right now.
There seems to be a lot of us searching for a better search tool.
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@inthehands @CptSuperlative closing tabs
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@inthehands @glightly@mastodon.social @CptSuperlative one thing I've been thinking about—a tangent to this tangent—is an updated take on the old webrings. For blogs and other websites, using some kind of combination of tags, pingbacks, and algorithms to generate recommendations and related links. One of the things I miss the most about the old timey web is the feeling of "surfing"—not just getting a stream of content from a central feed, but chains of association. I still get it from Wikipedia, and that's it
@alter_kaker @inthehands @glightly@mastodon.social @CptSuperlative Good observation.
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ADDENDUM 1/2: Kagi is apparently now flailing around trying to find a quick and dirty fix for the uproar: “maybe you can disable Brave in your search results or we’ll try to make their services free or something” etc etc.
My deal-killing objection was not actually them using Brave’s services, but rather their •unwillingness to think• about the underlying issues in doing so. I can’t say that this “we’ll let you cover your eyes too” sort of response addresses my concerns at all.
@inthehands it's "i'm sorry you're upset"; they don't even understand why what they did was bad, just that people are mad at them
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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 how about a sidestep? For anything that requires breadth I use DevonAgent. Put enough effort for inclusions and exclusions it can be handy. The only problem is for deep searches (go five layers deep on links) it takes hours
