For the past year or so, I’ve been using and enjoying the search engine Kagi.
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@inthehands Yeah, the search results seem to net just about as bad as Google’s except for one test. https://danluu.com/seo-spam/
@jotaemei
A fascinating post, thanks -
@jotaemei
A fascinating post, thanks@inthehands It’s very long though, IMO. I gave up a fraction through it yesterday. I was just basing what I said on the matrix.
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@inthehands Yeah, the search results seem to net just about as bad as Google’s except for one test. https://danluu.com/seo-spam/
I thought it was pretty OK at boosting a handful of sites it appears to have special support for -- Wikipedia, Reddit, and StackOverflow, for instance -- but admittedly, if I was building a tool to replace Google, I would see it as unethical to boost those specific sites.
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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.
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@inthehands but they love open source, well-known to be a completely apolitical concept.
Lolbertarians are just fucking stupid. Like mind-numbingly, relentlessly fucking stupid.
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@CptSuperlative @inthehands vivaldi is great. Replaced chrome for me and the built in email client suits my work mail as an added bonus.
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@CptSuperlative Ah, I just use the super-sophisticated technique of closing tabs all the time and then searching my history in desperation.
@inthehands @CptSuperlative closing tabs
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@lunareclipse @inthehands You are right about privately held companies. In both cases, it comes down to what the owners/shareholders want, and that is usually profit.
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@qqmrichter @inthehands I did not intend to say maximizing profit was a good thing. I believe it is not. I only wanted to highlight what can be realistically be expected, and that is that the profit motive dominates corporate behavior (especially for, but not limited to, public companies). That is what shareholders want.
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@briellebouquet@queer.party @JessTheUnstill Yes. Fascists actively fuck semantics. That’s their game.
What I want is a framing that says human rights are •not• open for debate, but they •are• open for advocacy. No, not just “open for” — advocacy is a requirement, not an option. It’s normal. It’s just what we do.
That’s the needle I want to thread. Thinking not of fascists, but of the muddly middle: not paying attention, hesitant to engage, imagining they’re on the sidelines.
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@briellebouquet@queer.party @JessTheUnstill Yes. Fascists actively fuck semantics. That’s their game.
What I want is a framing that says human rights are •not• open for debate, but they •are• open for advocacy. No, not just “open for” — advocacy is a requirement, not an option. It’s normal. It’s just what we do.
That’s the needle I want to thread. Thinking not of fascists, but of the muddly middle: not paying attention, hesitant to engage, imagining they’re on the sidelines.
@briellebouquet@queer.party @JessTheUnstill There’s a particular sort of person, whom I’ll unfairly call the “upper midwestern archetype” in a jab at my home state, who could really go either way: fascist or anti-fascist. They’re malleable. They’re deeply conflict-averse. They just want something that’s easy to agree with.
I want active defense of human rights to be that super-normal thing that’s easy to agree with.
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@inthehands @qqmrichter 1/ Good article, but it focuses on what the academic says OUGHT to be true (a “return to managerialism”) with greatly constrained shareholder rights. I’m no economist, but that doesn’t sound good for small investors, especially since pensions have disappeared. The article explicitly supports my claim that shareholder value is today the dominant force…
@inthehands @qqmrichter 2/ My grandfather was CEO of a Fortune 1000 company from the mid-50’s to early 60’s. The BoD wanted to move manufacturing from Jersey City, NJ to Mexico. My grandfather resisted, saying it would cause major job loses in Jersey City. He argued that the company had a moral duty to support the community. The BoD said it hurt profits (which was true). When he defied the BoD, the company fired him. They moved the plants. The jobs were lost.
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@inthehands @qqmrichter 2/ My grandfather was CEO of a Fortune 1000 company from the mid-50’s to early 60’s. The BoD wanted to move manufacturing from Jersey City, NJ to Mexico. My grandfather resisted, saying it would cause major job loses in Jersey City. He argued that the company had a moral duty to support the community. The BoD said it hurt profits (which was true). When he defied the BoD, the company fired him. They moved the plants. The jobs were lost.
@inthehands @qqmrichter 3/ The BoD represents shareholder interests. CEOs work for the BoD. Even if a CEO is on the BoD, the CEO has a fiduciary duty to shareholders. Unless the CEO controls a voting majority of shares, the BoD rules. I was founder and CEO of an early stage company and learned this the hard way.
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@inthehands @qqmrichter 1/ Good article, but it focuses on what the academic says OUGHT to be true (a “return to managerialism”) with greatly constrained shareholder rights. I’m no economist, but that doesn’t sound good for small investors, especially since pensions have disappeared. The article explicitly supports my claim that shareholder value is today the dominant force…
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@briellebouquet@queer.party @JessTheUnstill 100%. This X-er thing you’re talking about just makes me apoplectic with rage. The South Park effect.
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Thanks. This just worked for me too.
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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.
1/
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.
