For the past year or so, I’ve been using and enjoying the search engine Kagi.
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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.
@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...?)
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@inthehands
Oh.Have you come across Marginalia (https://search.marginalia.nu/) and Wiby.me (https://wiby.me/)?
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@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...?)
@ChildlessBambino@mastodon.green @cschack @flowerpot @inthehands also: is it just me, or does it seem like we basically never hear about the involvement of public libraries and/or library-science PhDs in the development of search engines?
it seems like that would be a natural cornerstone of any new search engine. And yet.
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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….
@inthehands @glightly@mastodon.social @CptSuperlative it was just a few days ago that I posted a desire for a directory to the non-shitty web. I was taking an online dream vacation. Search is bad. Travel sites are bad. Everything is bad.
Everything is a scam now, as others have put it.
I feel so good on the fediverse. It causes such contrast with the standard web. Here, here, I say, to real people building a real directory. For now at least we have this place.
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@ChildlessBambino@mastodon.green Hadn’t heard of it before. Thanks!
@inthehands @ChildlessBambino@mastodon.green the substack integration makes me a little leery of mojeek to be honest.
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@RMiddleton @inthehands @glightly@mastodon.social @CptSuperlative Damn, everything IS bad. I got a couple of gift cards, so I'm comparing prices on Target and Fred Meyer. I had to change browsers, devices, internet connection, and VPN several times just to find every product on each page. I was only looking for 3 different items.
I switched to searching a local store's site, and the damn thing just worked. They cost more, but the time I could have saved if I did that first would have been worth it.
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@inthehands I really appreciate this thread. Vlad's response was something I read, felt strange about, but couldn't articulate why. This is pretty spot-on.
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@Itty53@mstdn.social @morix @inthehands
You just fundamentally know that the goose is not going to have ANY of your bullshit. NONE.
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@lunareclipse @inthehands @ravindra Correct. The shareholders decide what to maximize, if anything. The legal requirement is that the Board of Directors and Officers of the company have a fiduciary duty to the shareholders.
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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 same
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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….
@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
