Petal Search: lots of good results, low spam
petalsearch.com
petalsearch.com
Edit: OK, not only realted, this is built by Huawei: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petal_Search
Maybe you mean what Trump said about it?
Well, he also said the 2020 election was robbed. Among many other things that nobody would believe.
This is my top result for "rxjava": https://www.meetup.com/th-TH/topics/rxjava/
Searching for "middle platonism" surfaced several sketchy wikipedia mirrors, and then the talk page for the Wikipedia article.
It's funny because this is a problem my search engine has as well.
Infact, the UAs I blocked are no longer in use it seems so they are no longer limited.
EDIT: btw, not endorsing their search or anything, just mentioning thye may have learned and improved ;)
- ask for cookies but do not allow full refusal (i am in Europe)
- can even get and keep my photo if i use a Huawei phone ?
This must be extremely expensive, and there is no way they are making money here, at least for the foreseeable future.
plus despite being legally different company from Honor, which is now extremely growing in China and already overtaken again Xiaomi (and I guess they will be also agressive in Europe now with Google services) I am still pretty sure they share knowledge/development among companies
Petal search makes sense in Europe, only for Huawei, who cannot get the kickbacks from Google.
In China and Russia there are local alternatives.
I always wondered how such results could be. Never had the knowledge to test it.
Say you search for "seafood" and there are 50,000,000 results from 100,000 domains because everyone just loves making websites about clams and sushi; it's not really feasible to send you all of those results, your query would take 15 minutes and that's not a nice experience. The tricky part in search is finding the needles in the haystack.
So the crux is each of the index shards needs to know the ranking to be able to send you just the most relevant results.
How are you able to entirely avoid anything that ever asks for your location (and not just deny the request and keep using)?
You do know that any site can infer your location within a reasonably accurate ballpark (e.g. metropolitan area or district) from just your IP address, without asking.
Which is more than enough for a search engine and given that it'll be accurate in 80% of cases, no need to bombard the user with intrusive permission prompts right from the start.
Under both A and B we have our own opt-in preference. Under A, when the user enables the op-in preference, they are additionally bugged by the browser to allow that. Under B, they are not bugged by the browser: we just go ahead and start making use of their IP address.
By the way, I do not see anywhere in the Firefox settings a place where you can set what your location is. If users could specify their location, then that would be a good reason to prefer that mechanism over IP-based geolocation where the only way to change your apparent location is to use a VPN.
And I had the audacity to add something to it?
Better luck next time.
EDIT: I know I can deny it, I know other search services do the same, I know it can be used to search "close to me". My point is that trying to get this information by default is a bad sign.
Because, there you learn that:
> If you allow location access, Firefox gathers information about nearby wireless access points and your computer’s IP address, and sends this information to the default geolocation service provider, Google Location Services, to get an estimate of your location. That location estimate is then shared with the requesting website.
If you disagree with location access, such that you won't use an application or site that asks for it, why would you use a browser that goes out of its way to make that possible in the first place? If asking for it is morally wrong, then adding the code to the browser which figures out that location and gives it to Google first, and then to the site must be a capital crime.
Also from "learn more":
> How do I stop all sites from asking to access my location?
> If a site indicates to Firefox that it wants to access your location, Firefox asks, by default, whether you want to grant permission. You can set Firefox to automatically deny new permission requests to all websites, without asking.
edit: my bad, seems major search engines don't ask for location, but I remember seeing this request way too often on many sites to consider it something unusual to complain about specifically at this site
I just verified that if, in Firefox, you checkbox "[x] Block new requests asking to access your location" in the location settings, then a private window inherit this; and the popup no longer appears.
For some reason, the per-site blocking is not inherited by the private windows. Maybe it's considered an unacceptable info leak or something. Or possibly it might be this: the individual per-site location setting can be positive or negative (accept or deny). If the settings as such were inherited by a private window, that would be bad because if any accepts are present, they conflict with the concept of a private window. Maybe if the private windows just inherited the deny entries, that would be reasonable; could be nobody has bothered coding that up, thinking that users who are bothered about location can just use the global switch.
Suppose we want to create a search site that can use location info (for some entirely legit purpose), but we don't ask by default. That implies it must be an opt-in user preference.
To maintain a user preference, we have to create a tracking profile for the user. That's "evil" too, oops, and there will be a cookie pop-up.
Say we are already doing that; we have various preferences. Why would we complicate them by adding a location preference, if that preference is already handled in the user's browser? Firefox indicates right in the address bar that you denied location access to the site.
I always click deny on these requests, but if I had to code it, I probably wouldn't do it differently.
This is not tracking and would not even require a consent prompt for GDPR purposes.