Now we have Google whose value comes with their incessant privacy abuse, and Bing/Bing front ends (DDG). Cool and exciting are definitely no longer the emotions I associate with web search.
The only good thing about it was that it used to give unfiltered results for some queries that google had shadowbanned (such as for piratebay or scihub). However as far as I can tell thats no longer always the case.
I highly encourage anyone who frequently uses Google images to try out Yandex.
What's really interesting is the differences in the results -- it seems like Yandex is actually filtering for high quality art. I've got a project on the back burner to scrape google and Yandex for the same queries and then do different sorts of analysis on them and see if anything interesting pops up.
Going by eye, most photo results on Yandex are higher resolution, and more saturated. It also doesn't pull images from video thumbnails like Google does.
Yeah, I meant it's good for porn and pirating.
Certainly, a few of those are Bing/Google frontends, but many more are independent or weighted mixes of commercial and noncommercial indexes. I really like Kagi, Wiby, Marginalia (Search), and Teclis to name a few.
I found most of these through this post: https://seirdy.one/2021/03/10/search-engines-with-own-indexe...
I have never used mojeek for the simple fact that there’s no link to the app from your blog.
Having to guess (or google) what the actual url for the app is is a bit too much friction for me. Especially when I do most of my HN browsing on mobile.
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1088622/how-do-i-create-...
https://you.com/search?q=How+to+create+a+list+of+strings+in+...
You are right. The second result seems more relevant. We'll look into whether we messed up the # Thanks :)
I do think it's a lot harder to beat one of the largest tech companies in the world at their own game than carving out some niche for yourself not just in what is indexed but what you are doing (and then maybe taking over the world once that foothold has been firmly established).
Right now Google is tackling website discovery, fact retrieval, shopping, "what's the address for that site I sometimes visit", and so on, through the same search bar, mostly by guessing what you want based on your search terms. Like a swiss army knife, which is capable of many things but not great at any particular thing, I think this is in the end incredibly limiting. If two people search for "coffee", one of them wanting to find a place to buy it, and the next looking for information about the beverage; there can't be one best result. You get this weird dance where the search engine attempts to read your mind about what you want, and you're attempting to read its mind about which terms it expects to show you what you want. Very frustrating.
You can probably take any of these niches and make a superior product, something that isn't constrained to the search bar format.
Right now I'm really sort of down a rabbit hole of finding new formats for discovering and exploring websites. Previously I've built <https://search.marginalia.nu/explore/random>, which led to the logical next step of <https://explore.marginalia.nu/>. They're just frivolous toys, but the more I dabble in this space the more I think there are viable alternatives to search bars and social bookmarking sites like Reddit and HN that deserve serious exploration.
I realized the other day that thanks to Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace, these big companies know a ton about you just because your employer uses them. For example you might not be signed in using that web browser, but your work account just leaked your IP address or device metadata to Google, so they know it’s you anyway. It’s almost impossible to stay completely private online, these days, and still participate in the economy or society.
I would, though, draw a line and say that just because it’s possible to trace doesn’t mean it should be allowed… but we’ve all seen how the most effective countermeasures isn’t legislation but instead clients that can outsmart the trackers - like adblockers, privacy VPN proxies, DNS black holes, and Apple’s iCloud Private Relay (or similar VPNs) which would anonymize your IP address, partially defeating the point made earlier. (I say partially because it’s not like every packet is going to get a new IP address, that would break TCP connections… they could associate your work profile with your anonymous traffic using the same relay IP, if both traffic sources hit the same Google server from the same device, say…)
And of course we have historically shown that almost any collection of data can reveal a lot about a person, from Netflix watch history to search terms. I’m ignoring the obvious - that searching Google gives it information about you with every search.
- Google cannot legally protect payment information in any 1st, 2nd, or 3rd world country without explicit permission. There isn't a single country they operate in that will let them 'scrape' payment information in the manner which you claim. - Any decent adblocker blocks GA cookies. GA does NOT collect payment info. Period. If you actually bothered to read that legally binding language or if you sniffed what is passed to GA you would know that. Please head back to your conspiracy subreddit and try again. - Many folks like myself have completely left the Google ecosystem. Our adblockers block Google. We don't use google.com or Youtube. When you hit a popular Google property and notice an uptick in ads that is why. I use duck duck go as a search engine, and I personally dislike watching videos, however if you are someone who likes videos, I hear TikTok is all the rage these days.
I need to be clear here. I am not saying that it is impossible to track you, but rather, it isn't realistic or scalable across billions of users. For starters, Google would have to figure out how to beat Firefox containers or uBlock origin, and that is the simplest of problems. Next, they have to figure out how to bypass your local hosts file for a long period of time, otherwise they will get piholed...
so, you agree that it is possible but you didn't figure out how.
ubo and ff-containers are lipstick on a pig, they don't change the nature but the apperance (i use them nevertheless).
If you anonymize your IP, and turn off tracking, then yes, not much to say there until they start fingerprinting the fonts you have installed or something…
And again, I'm not sure whether you're just pretending to not understand what I'm saying, but I've already explained (twice) that Kagi lets you choose which spammy results you don't want to see, so "Why would I pay a premium for a search engine that returns a full page of spam?" appears to be answering someone else's post entirely. The whole point of what I'm saying is that you don't get a page full of spam, which you do get on every single one of the big, free search engines. I think I've run out of different ways to explain the same thing now so I'm going to bow out here.
Edit: whenever I see the Jenkins logo, I always think of the Ask Jeeves logo from back then