I worked very briefly for a company that was hirable to push websites for SEO. It was basically all young underpaid contractors and interns even the HR team except for upper management who was all the same people from their previous big company running telemarketing bullshit.
So yeah just want to add the usual suspects definitely had a hand in the enshitification of the search engine as you might think.
Search engines funded by ads have this perverse incentive to not give you the best possible results (or at least stop trying so hard to improve their results) so you search more (and thus served more ads). This may not be true for the underdogs (because they’re trying to gain marketshare) but seems to be especially true for Google.
The true test is searching anything related to android and not get flooded by hundreds of links to auto generates blog content and useless bot created pages.
Here is an example for searching for “cats” with academic turned on. It’s not just .edus but it’s definitely part of the weighting. Nature is usually the first hit obviously.
You can also make custom searches with parameters and link easy access third party buttons. I did one for Google shopping for instance.
I hadn’t even seen other paid providers but I got real sick of Google about six months back, tried kagi on trial and paid for it before the trial was up, that’s how good it is.
I can customise it to ignore AI spam with custom filters + academic search + custom rankings + other custom tools. I can yeet domains from ever being seen again. It’s just very tailored to whatever you need. I hardly go elsewhere now. I find it curbs my compulsive rumination googling because I get clear, trustworthy answers and not AI telling me I have cancer or am distracted by something dramatic.
As a subscriber, one of the things I like about Kagi is how responsive the Kagi team is. I’ve reported a few bugs (4-5 maybe?) and they all got resolved fairly quickly. You can also find the founder on the Discord server talking with users. This was a breath of fresh air to me when I signed up.
I use Kagi too - they have a feature I haven’t seen before where you can basically optimize your own SEO. You can uprank or downrank any given website to varying degrees based on how much of that site you want to see in your future search results (I use this a lot for game wikis that have since migrated off of Fandom etc, but the stale Fandom page always shows up first in google search).
They’re also working on a feature to warn you which articles are paywalled directly from the search result, which I will use the hell out of.
They also have something they call Lenses, which are essentially search profiles that emphasize certain types of results (programming lens upranks stackoverflow, github, and API docs for instance).
All in all I’ve been extremely pleased with the quality of the product and the directions they’re exploring in. And being able to easily chat up the devs in discord doesn’t hurt either.
I had Kagi for a bit and enjoyed it, but I’m not sure I use search enough to justify the price tag.
I didn’t know about the personalized SEO thing- I wonder if you could have a “default SEO rank” that would basically average all the specific uprank/downranks from other users. So power users tweak their algo, and everyone else gets the benefit of using that human feedback to improve their results.
Yes it was, lol. By design it can only function as a ponzi scheme, the itention might have been something else behind it but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t a scam from the get go
It’s known that the original guy mined a whole bunch of coins to start with and has never cashed them in. He doesn’t seem to care about money much and just wanted to work on something interesting. Bitcoin is really a garage project that’s gotten out of hand.
Now, everyone who picked it up after that on a Greater Fool theory, sure, absolutely.
By being designed a deflationary currency, Bitcoin price was “doomed” to repeatedly spike with every halving. The “scammers”, then, are the people who got in early and hoarded Bitcoin.
So then the people who buy paintings from deceased artists are also scammers? They thought the exact same thing…I want to but this intrinsically useless thing that I think will increase in value because only a finite number exist and I think more people will want it in the future.
A scam is a deception of some sort. BTC is open source. No one is tricked into buying it any more than artwork.
Paintings are beautiful. Products are useful. Bitcoin is… nothing. It’s speculation. Any time when it could have been used as a practical currency is long gone.
If only anyone could actually prove btc is a scam in any way I’d gladly agree… any evidence at all. No evidence against an open source project since its inception 14 years ago. Is the evidence that impossible to reveal?
I’ll watch it. I hope it’s not 2 hours of opinion but actual dive into btc source code that shows something that I guess everyone(including banks and investment firms) has missed.
edit: This matches exactly what I said that scammers have taken an opportunity but btc was not created as a scam as was stated…so IS this a waste of 2 hours where btc is not the target but just a bunch of other coins and nft?
He also says that in order for anyone to make money by trading actual dollars for bits on a blockchain and then back again, or by mining those bits by paying an absurdly large power bill (to say nothing of single purpose hardware that becomes useless within a few years) and then selling them to the next guy, one must somehow convince some other poor soul that those bits on that blockchain are now somehow worth more dollars than they were when one bought them to begin with. No cryptocurrency can exist without bagholders. Categorically.
Agreed. It’s not inherently a scam nor a ponzi since this rely on lying about how much money you have to pay back everyone at once. Btc is similar to artwork. There is no intrinsic value to it unless everyone agrees it has. Work is done to complete both and both are unique. Both are finite. Only 21 million btc will ever exist and only x numbers of paintings by this dead person will ever exist. If enough people believe both are valuable then their values will rise.
I liked kagi for the first couple months I had it but then I noticed the results seems to be getting worse. Google tier. I cancelled because why pay for that?
I’m not sure if the results were better at first or whether I just noticed flaws more the longer I used it.
I’m often not even bothering to search for technical issues now. There’s been a big mindset shift in me. If I can’t figure it out on my own then pack it up and move on to the next thing. It’s a 5050 shot at best whether you’ll get help on a forum and search is a dumpster fire everywhere. I’m learning a lot more this way and retaining but fuck me running is it ever frustrating
I didn’t mean literally a car, I was going a long with their metaphor.
I saw a Veritasium video where they use a massive engine as part of a whole facility that tests buildings for earthquakes. That’s not something that’s going to be a problem. And in some applications, fossil fuels are what makes sense to use.
We should definitely use them in as few applications as possible, but yeah, if you wanna act like we should stop using them completely, in all applications, you can keep hallucinating.
not sure about other languages, but with Polish Google is still the most useful one, Bing and DDG don’t even hold a candle to it, that said i still think Google went to shit hard
I had not so good experiences with Contabo lately. Lot of outages and they withdrew 2 more month after the end of my subscription. Ionos had no outtages so far (5th month). In addition their web interface is better than Contabos.
There is actually a lot more search engines that you might think, plus there are privacy frontends for them you can aggregate.
Edit: Also the main poin’t of searxng is to use it as a proxy for them which hepps if you use an instance with multiple users, or host an instance for you and your friends for example.
I feel like 90+% of the time I use Google, it’s just because it’s more convenient than going to the actual website I want. Like if I want a Wikipedia article about a movie, it turns out it’s faster to type in the movie name in Google and click than go to Wikipedia and search the movie.
I used to do that to but then it started giving me info adjacent to what I was searching or a broader answer. Just got fed with that and the amount of sponsored search results.
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