kagi seems nice. i'm conflicted between yet another fucking subscription and the obvious rational for it

EDIT: lol i had no idea kagi was cancelled already sorry didn't get the memo

@aeva Just use a custom search URL to get working results rather than paying another bad reseller of Google/Bing results.

See also: https://goblin.technology/@dgold/statuses/01KS27XN21KCBNMPWN93GRQXA8

Gracchus Babeuf Bourguignon (@[email protected])

[1 media attachment] Lot of Kagi-shilling going on again after the latest nonsense from Google Please remember:- - Kagi requires you to sign in to use it; - So every search can be uniquely linked to your account; - If you pay for that account, this links to you as a real person. - Kagi's HQ is in Palo Alto, California, and is thus subject to US Laws; - This means their logs and records can be expropriated without a warrant by Federal Authorities; - Those authorities are currently under the control of an actual fascist demagogue. - Kagi began life as an AI-First Company. The name is a portmanteau of K and AGI -- Artificial General Intelligence. They are not a credible actor, and they are in no way safe for searching for (e.g.) Reproductive Health Providers.

goblin.technology
@dalias wait what they're just another reseller???!!
@aeva They supposedly "buy indexes from Google", whatever that means. My understanding is that they do a little more doctoring of the results than direct resellers like ddg do, but AIUI they are not actually crawling and indexing the web like a real search engine.

@dalias @aeva

Yeah. DDG etc. are search "brokers" in a way - but they license index/crawled results from Bing etc.

Running the engines to index/crawl _the whole web_ is a real computationally expensive affair. There've been a few attempts at peer-2-peer or indie indexing but its a hard problem to solve so those don't go very far.

@tezoatlipoca @dalias @aeva Can we just go back to "home pages"?

Like, a massive list of "human curated stuff to click on and ctrl-F" would actually be pretty useful with "the state of Things"...

@meejah @tezoatlipoca @dalias they call them "awesome lists" these days

@aeva @meejah @dalias

Hrm. I have been writing a tool that manages awesome lists and I didn't realize what they were called.

Here's the demo site: https://lists.awadwatt.com/index.html
Here's the github: https://github.com/tezoatlipoca/GeFeSLE-server#readme

The css is bad but its functional. Idea being lists can be changed, but infrequently; hosting a static html page is lightweight. List change -> update static html.

GeFeSLE Sample Site - Index of lists

@tezoatlipoca @meejah @dalias there's a lot of projects on github that are just readme's that are curated lists of projects within a a topic and for some reason they're all called "Awesome <Topic>" e.g. https://github.com/reHackable/awesome-reMarkable

I don't recall ever seeing them outside of github, so idk if it's like, a github thing or something. Mostly I mention it because it's a contemporary thing where people are taking the time to make curated lists for niche topics.

GitHub - reHackable/awesome-reMarkable: A curated list of projects related to the reMarkable tablet

A curated list of projects related to the reMarkable tablet - reHackable/awesome-reMarkable

GitHub

@aeva @meejah @dalias

I guess my concern about github is taht like Google docs or whatever, you don't OWN it; so if someone doesn't like your awesome list, it gets taken down.

My project's goal were:
- single binary self-hostable (assuming you can figure out the dns and rev.proxy stuff)
- list name + your host.domain==url of list. persistant
- access granularity to list level; public to private

Github is same on last two, easier on the first; but you have to adhere to someone else's T&Cs.

@tezoatlipoca @meejah @dalias oh yeah it's problematic for sure. I think those lists ended up there because github's search is tragically better for discovery than a real search engine, but I really wish this all were more indie web.
@tezoatlipoca @meejah @dalias we direly need an indie web search engine that can handle more complex queries than marginalia search
@aeva @tezoatlipoca @dalias kagi's "small web" stuff seems good .. But yeah in general I definitely agree.

@aeva @tezoatlipoca @meejah @dalias Hey if you have any particular queries that you find aren't working well please let me know about them, those types of problem cases are often very good for either finding bugs or as benchmarks as a a goal to work toward when adding new capabilities.

Like either here, or email me, or make an issue on GH. I'd appreciate it.

@marginalia @tezoatlipoca @meejah @dalias off the top of my head i just remember that things get dicey with more than two search terms.
@marginalia @tezoatlipoca @meejah @dalias the search that i had the most problems with recently on *every* search engine was "midi mandolin" (or to be precise, a midi controller that takes the shape and general characteristics of a mandolin (in which only two afaict exist), and definitely not anything about a knife or daw samples)
@marginalia @tezoatlipoca @meejah @dalias i thiink i managed to coax out an old article via marginalia about a roland pickup that could do midi, i don't remember how i got there. kagi surfaced a few semi-relevant forum posts that i didn't find with duck duck go, but most of the useful information for my survey of existing devices came from image searches instead
@marginalia @tezoatlipoca @meejah @dalias afaict there's only two things that fit the bill: a gaudy 10 string electric abomination that doesn't seem to be available for purchase anyway, and a prototype button grid on a pcb in the arrangement of the top of a fretboard

@aeva @tezoatlipoca @dalias I'm thinking like "original Yahoo!" etc

...but yeah, thanks! I do have several "awesome" github repos etc bookmarked. Mostly this is just whining / pining for the Better Times ;)