this post was submitted on 21 Jan 2024
216 points (93.9% liked)

No Stupid Questions

35876 readers
1231 users here now

No such thing. Ask away!

!nostupidquestions is a community dedicated to being helpful and answering each others' questions on various topics.

The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:

Rules (interactive)


Rule 1- All posts must be legitimate questions. All post titles must include a question.

All posts must be legitimate questions, and all post titles must include a question. Questions that are joke or trolling questions, memes, song lyrics as title, etc. are not allowed here. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.



Rule 2- Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.

Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.



Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.

Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.



Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.

That's it.



Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.

Questions which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.



Rule 6- Regarding META posts and joke questions.

Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-question posts using the [META] tag on your post title.

On fridays, you are allowed to post meme and troll questions, on the condition that it's in text format only, and conforms with our other rules. These posts MUST include the [NSQ Friday] tag in their title.

If you post a serious question on friday and are looking only for legitimate answers, then please include the [Serious] tag on your post. Irrelevant replies will then be removed by moderators.



Rule 7- You can't intentionally annoy, mock, or harass other members.

If you intentionally annoy, mock, harass, or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.

Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.



Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.



Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.

Let everyone have their own content.



Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here.



Credits

Our breathtaking icon was bestowed upon us by @Cevilia!

The greatest banner of all time: by @TheOneWithTheHair!

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 

It is becoming near impossible to find relevant information from search engines. Duckduckgo, SearXNG, Bing, Google, and so many more mainstream engines have a significantly high noise to signal ratio, and it is getting worse.

Here are a collection of the best search engines I know, please add more to the list.

If no more high quality search engines exist, would it be possible to host your own?

EDIT: Some new discoveries. The addon uBlacklist and filters can block super SEO sites from appearing in search.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] cll7793@lemmy.world 7 points 10 months ago (3 children)

I've heard a lot of great things about Kagi, though the search limit and subscription is a little off-putting. A self-hosted Kagi would be amazing though!

[–] ClassyHatter@sopuli.xyz 9 points 10 months ago

Kagi has a free trial, 100 searches for free, so you can try it out and see if you like it or not.

[–] 1984@lemmy.today 9 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (2 children)

Why would they do all that work to create a better search engine than Google and give it away for free? What is going to pay their bills?

Google pays their bills by selling your data and spying on your searches, not to mention they are morally corrupt. Kagi pays their bills with your monthly sub. Seems a lot better.

[–] cll7793@lemmy.world 19 points 10 months ago (2 children)

I'm worried eventually even Kagi will get enshittified. It has been a common trend that almost always occurs. Open source is the only way to ensure stability. Conflict of interest is what leads to companies either overcharging, or even accepting to get bought out.

Don't get me wrong, Kagi seems to be a great company thus far! But for something as important as search it would be best to have an open source solution.

[–] 1984@lemmy.today 5 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (1 children)

Probably they will, but it could take a long time. Valve is still good as an example of a company that managed to not become crap.

Open source is the only way to provide stability? Can you explain more about this?

[–] cll7793@lemmy.world 8 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Valve is great! Private and non-profit organizations give me some hope for a better internet one day.

Regarding Kagi, there are other potential concerns with privacy, data leaks and price gouging as well. The Patriot Act and Snowden's leaks have shown that companies will lie in their privacy policy to appeal to authorities even if they claim they are not storing information. All your health related searches, sensitive personal details, private life, etc is also always linked to your payment method waiting for a potential data leak if they are lying. (Or a copy is just sent to five eyes)

All that is to say, be wary of trusting your privacy to companies. Monetization is a powerful motivator!

[–] Z4rK@lemmy.world 1 points 10 months ago (1 children)

You can pay with bitcoin, which might help keeping the account entirely anonymous for some.

[–] SoylentBlake@lemm.ee 0 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

After that power company got blackmailed in the American South and extorted for like 40000 Bitcoin, which they paid...but then within 24 hours the FBI had recovered all of it...which is something no one was supposed to be capable of doing, I'm going to go ahead and say Bitcoin anonymity is compromised.

That means the FBI or DHS has devoted the computational power necessary to track every.single.bitcoin.transaction and then indexed it all well enough to cross reference against metadata.

Bitcoin is as secure as they allow it to be. It's most likely allowed for the same reason the Tor network is, because it's an avenue to move resources or information to undercover assets overseas.

[–] Lith@lemmy.sdf.org 1 points 10 months ago (1 children)

At this point, I've come to expect that all of the products I like are going to be ruined at some point, so it's about establishing enough independence to more easily transition to the next service.

Kagi's great, and I'll worry about finding a better search engine once it gets worse, but I don't expect that to happen before my next renewal, so I'm happy.

[–] cll7793@lemmy.world 2 points 10 months ago

Self hosting is smart! Usually good things always come to an end, at least if they are not open sourced.

[–] nilloc@discuss.tchncs.de 3 points 10 months ago

Plus self hosting an index big enough and fast enough for a useful search engine is ridiculous.

[–] m_randall@sh.itjust.works 3 points 10 months ago (1 children)

They now have unlimited searches for $10/mo. That’s what got me to try it out.

You are correct though. I really do not like having all of my search history tied to my credit card (and then me). What helps me justify that is that instead of me being the product like google, by paying I’ve become the customer. Hopefully that incentivizes keeping them on the up and up.

I did come across searnxg in this thread. It looks like that can be self hosted so I’m gonna give that a try as well.

[–] Maalus@lemmy.world 11 points 10 months ago (2 children)

That's expensive as shit, what the hell.

[–] Z4rK@lemmy.world 3 points 10 months ago

Yeah, you may be fine with the $5 plan, but that’s the lowest tier available.

Afaik they are not really running a profit yet, just expanding, so that’s an eye opener to how expensive it is to run a search business and how much value Google and others estimate they get from your personal information.

For now though their user base seems fairly much leaning towards business users that can defend this expense as part of becoming more effective professionally. Hopefully over time they’ll grow large enough to provide cheaper plans for regular persons while staying privacy focused and ad free.

[–] m_randall@sh.itjust.works 1 points 10 months ago

I did 1300 queries which I think would put it at .007 cents per query. Sounds reasonable to me.