this post was submitted on 30 Sep 2023
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Technology
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Hooked on a search engine? What a f****** nut job. You want to hook me on a search engine? How about give me the results I ask for without ads, without manipulation, without spam, then don't take that information of what I searched for and apply it to me until the end of days and sell it to everyone and their brother.
And honestly I can't see anyone in the company watching that presentation and not coming up with the same overall feelings.
LOL.
My selfhosted searxng is close.
Willing to pay cash? Check out kagi.
I'm a cheapskate but I'm getting closer every month.
So long as I can de-shittify existing search engines with extensions and ad blockers, I'd have a hard time justifying that expense.
...but I also do not have faith that that "so long as" will remain something I can rely on, so kagi is definitely on my radar just from the few posts I've seen about it here.
Yeah the people who pay rave that it's better, but there's a well known effect that you generally think the thing with a higher sticker price is higher quality.
Investing into something - with money or otherwise - will develop a bias as well. I vaguely recall reading a study for a sociology class I took ages ago about auto-manufacturers trying to fine-tune their ad targeting. They gathered and were crunching data on which types of people paid the most attention to their ads, and one of the unexpected findings was that is was the people who had already purchased the vehicle being advertised. Apparently there's this subconscious thing we do where we keep looking for value in decisions we've already made, so folks would see the ads, tie it to their own car, and think "yeah, that's the good stuff!" lol.
Our brains are weird.
So, what are you gonna do? Switch search engines? Most of the population don't even think there's a choice.
Currently self-hosting Searx-ng. Goes out through a VPN. It's a meta search, so I my highest rankings are results that come back from multiple vendors. Pretty much eliminates sponsored results.
I haven't gotten around to putting it into my reverse proxy, so when I am out I just use duck duck go. Their results aren't as good, but they work.