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Comment by wlonkly | Hacker News Reader

They'll get their 15 minutes, but there's no _there_ there. They're owned by System1, a bottom-of-the-barrel advertising company where 1990s web brands go to die (Metacrawler? Startpage.com?? Dogpile?!?!). Their maps are OpenStreetMaps maps.

People think they have their back (because OSM is showing Lake Ontario), but it's just marketing.

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as opposed to a top of the barrel advertising company like Google

There is significant differences in advertising. The things at the bottom of the barrel in advertising are often literally malware.

Nah, it's all malware. Some just for your brain.

You mean like software that restricts what your devices can do and collects and sells your personal information? Its the very same barrel.

I think of the three comments that make this point, this one is the most constructive.

I still don't think Google is quite the same, but I agree that they share some fundamental problems and should be rejected as a whole.

The things at the bottom of the barrel in advertising are often literally malware.

So… Google, then?

It's not like it hasn't been repeatedly documented that malware is pushed through Google Ads and other properties.

Or a top of the barrel choice like just using one of the many non-profit FOSS apps that are also UIs over OpenStreetMap instead of one of the scam commercial ad-wrappers.

But what regular people know what nonprofit FOSS apps are?

That barrel rotted away a long time ago and all we're left with is a head -- the top is the bottom.

Dogpile?!? There's a name I haven't heard in what feels like 20 years.

The concept of searching a bunch of search engines made sense to me.

Ironicly this is what my agent does today on my behalf because regular search has become so bad

Unfortunately at the other end of that websearch is a bunch of slop, your agent can't save you from it.

My experience is otherwise, try alternative search SaaS like Exa, i.e. pay per search, but use multiple because they return different sets. My agent looks at the results, includes some, performs more searches. It's more of a deep search thing, very similar in spirit to how I used to run multiple queries, click a bunch of links, evaluate, keep good ones, run follow up queries, and end up with an alt-tab of dozens of browsers, each with dozens of tabs.

> The concept of searching a bunch of search engines made sense to me.

It made sense to somebody else[0], too.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DuckDuckGo

>Startpage.com

I thought that was still the best way to get anonymous google index search results?

I also enjoy their privacy focused email startmail.com

They forgot to scoop up mapbalst!

never mind looks like they got swallowed up by bing maps (that’s where Bing got line drive from, TIL!)

Doubleclick

Perhaps it would have died, too

But no

I think people are more going on the "name it what you want" pages doing the rounds on socials, created originally for the Gulf of Mexico and now Lake Ontario, which a lot of people have seen, rather than the name presented by MapQuest's regular map which I don't think many people see.

https://gulfof.mapquest.com/lakeontario/Epstein%20Files

https://gulfof.mapquest.com/gulf/Epstein%20Files

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