While I don't miss checking the index of my wall of Microsoft books (the light gray binders with the squishy plastic). At least those were (mostly^1^) correct and ad free.
Then the future began and you got MSDN subscription on CD with sample code. Woohoo.
they included a somewhat 20 pages of erratas that you sooner or later managed to memorize or punch and put in the correct place.
This is why I've really grown attached to Kagi (paid search engine).
It's made the internet usable again.
I'm honestly surprised how much of difference there is.
I'd really recommend people give it a shot. (there's a free trial for it)
I generally agree with that, but as an aggregation service it would need to justify not providing any actual content/information with its price structure. The same argument against AI models trained with user data.
For now, ignore my recommendation, as I don't yet fully know my stance on this, with the information provided.
However, I can say that I've been super happy with the search results.
I don't use their email service.
Just the search and the access to all of the LLMs that are out there.
I don't know what shady shit you're referring to. They do AI, but I don't use any of that. IMO their core strength is the search engine and how it works for you rather than against.
if Kagi were open source sure, but it's $10 a month and the CEO is kind of an asshole. And a generative-AI-bro (please don't make me call them GAI-bros)
read the official docs, and don't use google anymore, seriously, any technical question duckduckgo/ecosia can answer better because they use bing search engine
I forgot how this worked until I discovered NeoCities.
I suddenly remenbered when so many personal websites would have some page that's like "links" or "sites I love" or "other cool people", etc. And it was just a curated list of sites the author thought were neat.
And your bookmark function was actually really helpful, because "web surfing" was literally jumping from link to link to link, following rabbitholes and breadcrumb trails across the web.
Nowadays, I bookmark things but I never go back through them. I know Firefox sometimes automatically helps you remember stuff in your bookmarks though.
But there was a time when it felt like finding some niche site was a sort of secret club or cool treasure, and you had to make sure you could find your way back. :)
When you didn't make the bookmark, you were basically trying to backtrack which links you followed and what sites you visited to get back to that one website.
So many SEO trick to put yourselves into top google search for traffic.
I have google for bug and stuff, and most common bug can be found on shitty content Java tip page with broken format, lot of ads, and sometime untrue/outdate information.
It makes me sad because Google used to be great. The main feature that made Google great was the click rejection. Basically the search would know when you clicked on a link and didn't come back to the search results. This action would add weight to that result as "this probably has the information that was being searched for" so it would be nearer to the top later when others made similar queries.
This was their killer feature, it basically crowd sourced the correct information. After a small amount of time, the correct results would kind of float to the top so subsequent searches would put those results near the top to help satisfy queries faster.
Now? They seem to want to give you results that satisfy their partners, and keep you tied to the results page as long as possible. The focus seems to have shifted from being a good search engine with accurate results, to a meme of how to make money.
Never before has this shift been more clear to me than right now, directly in the wake of I/O 2024; an event my friends have taken to calling AI/O. Pretty much every single presentation was about Gemini and AI generated garbage, but this isn't what made Google's new direction clear to me. In the last 20-30 minutes of the event it was made perfectly clear what they were doing with I/O. And to drive the point home, every I/O has showcased stuff you can't use yet, stuff they're working on, and other cool shit. Some of it cost money, but there was usually some stuff that was just done because it could be done and it would be made available at some point, a nontrivial amount of it was free. At AI/O, the entire focus was on AI, with little to no non-AI stuff in there, at all, then at the end, they kicked everyone in the shorts. Here's our prices to access this shit. Buy it. As far as I'm concerned AI/O was a gigantic marketing circle jerk to sell their AI.
It seems that Google has entered the final phases of enshittification.
Saw an article that said that some execs demanded for search to have better user retention. I.e make the user search multiple times to find what they're looking for, so they can be shown more ads.
Just in case you're not just satirically listing things that are already awful;
Supermarkets increase their "retention" by limiting signage to keep you wandering and avoid "just get that thing and go" shopping. I don't know how common this is, but when I was a kid the major supermarkets had long lists of what items were in each aisle, plus highly visible signs in the aisle to show exactly where each category was. Now days at the major chains those in aisle signs are completely gone, and the categories have been whittled down to a few major categories; most products aren't represented on the sign at all e.g. you have to assume "cake mix/decorating" are in the same aisle as "flour".
Unskippable ads on all pumps are absolutely a thing that are getting more popular. Mobil is particularly bad for it in my experience.
The square button second from the bottom mutes the audio. I've taken to carrying a marker in my car and writing "<--- MUTE" next to them. Alternatively, a small screwdriver between the speaker grating.
It's frustrating because it's all done by people. Like if a volcano erupts you can't really get mad at it. It's just physics stuff. But all of this? People are making these choices. People made of meat and bone. Like, you could find the decision makers at Google who decided to shit up their product and kick them in the junk.
What if peoples relationships create a superstructure no single human can control, and we need active collective effort to supercede it?
If a single human refuses from a moral standpoint, a humongous amount of money to do something crap as CEO controller of whichever crap company, boards will replace them, and some other human will, because material condition dictate it has to be done. No one is really in control. The boards are all just optimising for profit, because if they're not, someone else will.
How to break the capitalist cycle of control over peoples will?
Supermarkets already optimise many things, products with lower margins are at the bottom in aisles, and all the junk food or cheap liquor is next to the cashier.
Supermarkets maximizing profit: put ads everywhere and hide the most commonly bought foods!
Many supermarkets already do things like putting the milk and bread at opposite sides of the store, so you have to walk through the whole store to get both. You'd often be walking past the end caps while doing so, which are essentially ads (companies pay to have their products displayed at the end caps)
This is possibly something you could implement in a meta search engine like SearXNG, though there are some privacy concerns.
Maybe it could locally store which domains you personally tend to click (and stay) on. Then automatically raise those domains when it sees them somewhere in the output of the underlying engines. This isn't perfect because you wouldn't get data from other users. But I think it could do a lot to improve search results.
I might actually clone the repo and see if I can get somewhere soon
The thing with Google was that the data about click through vs click back was supposed to be anonymised. Whether it was or not, inside of the black box that is Google's algorithm, who knows?
Either way, I'd be interested if you get any progress here. I've never tried to self host a search engine, but I might consider it.
I remember how people used to joke about the second page of Google results being a desolate wasteland where no one ever looks, now I just instinctively scroll down a bit because I know the first page of results is going to be trash.
