Longer post coming, but a brief note about searching for things on the Internet. Camille Paglia has talked often and plainly about her view that the emergence of widespread and performative gender confusion is a sign of a historical end stage. Google is pretty sure that’s not a real thing, and would you like a page on…foley catheters? There’s a grand total of one indirect sort-of result, a thing you can click on that will move you toward the thing you want, but you won’t just find the thing you want.
I've found Brave to have nosedived lately in quality of searches. Which is really too bad. Because I've been using it as my default for quite a while now
Brave is also not a uniquely independent search environment. They are based on Google's chromium back-end, which Google still controls the open source part, so if you think they have anything Google doesn't, think again. What they do differently is again--data usage and ad handling.
There are subtle differences since they do filter less stuff, so they are marginally better for a wider net.
Basically every browser is based on Chromium or WebKit, except Firefox. But Mozilla's politics are repugnant, and their business model is completely dependent on Google ad revenue. Bad incentives.
I hadn't heard of Gibiru before. I'll give them a try.
I wonder if they do their own crawling? DDG doesn't. It's pretty expensive. I like to understand how a service like this pays their bills, as part of my trust model.
Yeah DDG was marketed as some type of alternative but as you say, true alternatives are just so far behind that there would have to be a baby-bell type breakup of the monopoly...and of course we'd probably get similar results to the baby bell debacle where the government then creates the very thing they say they are trying to prevent.
Yeah, following the model of the Standard Oil breakup 70 years prior. Regulatory capture is by no means a new phenomenon.
I don't really mind much that there are so few core browser implementations, because they're all open source and can be forked by anyone willing to maintain them. In fact there are lots of superficially-different browsers atop these three code bases, and the web as a collection of standards ties them all together. Now, the co-opting of standards bodies by "industry giants"... that's kind of a problem, but it's al very political and complicated: the WhatWG coup over the W3C comes to mind.
Search is a very different issue, I think. Unless you run a crawler yourself, you must rely on a service, and the fewer competing services, the stronger their incentives to abuse that intrinsic power to suppress and promote.
I think the solution is to use lots of search engines, ideally from multiple geopolitical zones. (Don't bother with Baidu, tho! We're already on the "good" side of the Great Firewall.)
I don't know a lot about Gibiru, but I do know that in practical real-world testing it provides results that are uniquely different from all major search engines. I think they are still a Google-based algo, but I think they diverge from it somewhere in the search chain--just not sure how/where. I did have an article describing the ins and outs but cannot locate it. In the meantime, if I can't find something, I try there.
No article. No links to my ‘Stack. No…..nothing at all. For Google searchers, the article may as well not even exist - and I think it’s worth pointing out that this particular article was written after the predicted winter wave crashed over the country, destroying the official narrative about covid vaccines and their efficacy. This is important because the Censorship Industrial Complex admits that it censors true information if that information would lead to increased vaccine hesitancy — meaning they will censor the truth and promote lies in order to further the narrative. (This simple fact means we shouldn’t trust them about ANYTHING!)
I use google for mundane, day-to-day crap. Business phone numbers and such. DDG for info on vitamins, minerals, etc. I haven't used Bing since 2016, I think. Just haven't thought of it.
Google is absolutely the worst. Duck Duck Go was better a few years ago but I think they’re getting sketchy now also. I hate it when I KNOW I’ve seen something online and then can’t find it again because it’s buried somewhere. Small wonder my phone is perpetually at the limit of 500 open tabs! 🙄
I deleted my Facebook and stopped using google about 5 years ago. Google is an evil company. Most tech companies are. There was a time I believed tech companies wanted to improve humanity. Now I believe they work to enslave it.
Try Yandex.com instead. A shower of resulting entries for 'Camille Paglia transgender "end stage"'. Oddly enough (considering history), there seems to be less search engine censorship through that Russian search engine.
Sep 28, 2023·edited Sep 28, 2023Liked by Chris Bray
Yandex does censor pretty heavily. It's just things the Russian government wants censored, not what woke capitalism/davos/the DNC/etc. Want censored. So for the most part you shouldn't care, unless you're looking for porn or anything critical of their government.
"But Bing promptly coughs up a link at the top..."
And while you're at Bing, it has perhaps the best free AI image generator. Goo- Goo- Google, Goodbye.
I also just cancelled my YouTube Premium membership, after having have it for over a year, to protest their demonetizing Russel Brand. Google has gone way to the evil side. WAY WAY to the evil side.
No GOOGLE has been my SOP for several years now. I just wish more people would let go of the convenience over substance nipple long enough to realize they are being fed mind altering synthetic milk.
I've been increasingly frustrated using Duck Duck Go for a while now, and came across a recommendation to switch to Brave Browser. Does anyone have experience with that? Is it ultimately owned by BlackRock or something?🤦♀️
Sep 27, 2023·edited Sep 27, 2023Liked by Chris Bray
Brave is an excellent browser. It was founded (I think) and headed up by (for sure) Brendan Eich, a Silicon Valley exec who got canceled some years ago for having donated money to a political group that favored traditional marriage, which is to say, marriage, some years prior. At the time he was canceled, he wasn't even particularly conservative, but I would imagine that his experience has made him unsympathetic to woke cancel culture.
Same experience here. Around the time of the George Floyd incident I vaguely remembered that a white guy had been choked to death by the police. I Googled "white guy choked by police" and every conceivable iteration and permutation of the search terms and got only pages and pages of stories about George Floyd. I went over to bing.com and put in the same search phrase and instantly got the name of Tony Timpa, an absolutely appalling story of police misbehavior. That's when I learned that there are people at Google, live humans and not algorithms, who decide what you can know and what you can't.
Sep 27, 2023·edited Sep 28, 2023Liked by Chris Bray
Google, DuckDuck, Brave, Yandex, all of these main search engines most accessible are pure crap these days. Because Google is crap, and the others buy their product, then apply their own touch. Very limited results, many gibberish suggestions, often not even related to the search words. And at some time in the last few years the search engines stopped recognizing Boolean search symbols that help filter results. The search engines today ignore them.
I was a darn good internet sleuth by knowing Boolean, but they've made that skill irrelevant. I know there is such thing as a "dark web" out there that takes off the content constraints and filters that this web most use exists in. Making it more free, but you assume more risk on it, illegal websites that get LEO attention, and that you really don't want anything to do with.
But I wonder if anyone knows of a non-Google based search engine on the dark web where information is accessible and knowledge of Boolean still matters and can get you to more of the full resources available on the web? There has to be a way around this Google monopoly on internet search and I think it might be on the Dark Web. Avoiding the problematic sites.
Google "customizes" your results, resulting in what used to be called "filter bubbles". Fun party game: everybody use the same search and marvel over the wide variety of results. They suppress the wrongthink for everybody, though.
Thanks for the RefSeek pointer! I'll add it to my list.
Google is collaborating with the "enemy." They hold patents on voting machines, voting machine software, and "body activity connected to digital currency" primarily crypto.
I've been using it, along with the Brave (privacy-respecting) browser, for years. Presearch.com is a backup choice, not much experience with it
And sure, sometimes turning off the default settings for Google and Android apps is less convenient. But being spied upon constantly is too high a price for those little conveniences.
Use a VPN or tor, and a non mainstream browser like Brave to reclaim a bit of your privacy. I'm also in the process of turning my Gmail acct into my spam email acct-- use another service entirely for email that matters.
That's exactly what I did, and it makes such a huge difference to how I feel about email.
Also worth knowing: Proton recently launched a new "Proton Pass" password manager that helps you create fake emails when you want to sign up for something (I use ProtonMail, not sure if it works with other email systems) so my "email that matters" email is never exposed.
Not a search engine, but I've been playing with Bard.google.com, their experimental AI. Sometimes it gives really good answers, but then sometimes it just lies to your face! User beware!
I will never seek out AI (although it may well seek me out). I think it's baloney and will never become more than that because our glorious overlords WANT to feed us baloney.
It's worse than simply blocking you from seeing wrongthink. I think Google has managed to break their whole system in the attempt. It's hard to find anything at all with Google now.
Bing is run by the same kind of people and on the same trajectory, just at the slow pace of Microsoft.
Duckduckgo is just an aggregator of other search engines, and has its own layer of censorship now, rendering it doubly useless.
Brave search is less censorious but they do their own indexing, which isn't as comprehensive as Google was in its prime.
Yandex, Baidu and other foreign search engines will find things that Google doesn't want you to see as long as Putin/the CCP/etc. don't mind.
And they're all sticking idiot chatbot summaries at the top now. Not to mention the flood of AI generated nonsense pages dominating what search results there are.
We're watching the web rot in real time. People had best relearn what bookmarks are and start curating, like we did back before Google invented PageRank.
Even that won't last forever as independent websites are fading away. Dead links everywhere and getting worse all the time. It's a quiet apocalypse. RIP the new Library of Alexandria, 1989-2016. It was good while it lasted.
Bing, better than Google, who would have thought. Thanks Chris. I love Camilla Paglia; a true feminist, strong, not asking for protection from the patriarchy.
Brave is good — both the search feature, and the full browser.
I switched about a year ago, I really like it so far.
I've found Brave to have nosedived lately in quality of searches. Which is really too bad. Because I've been using it as my default for quite a while now
Brave is also not a uniquely independent search environment. They are based on Google's chromium back-end, which Google still controls the open source part, so if you think they have anything Google doesn't, think again. What they do differently is again--data usage and ad handling.
There are subtle differences since they do filter less stuff, so they are marginally better for a wider net.
https://www.computerworld.com/article/3292619/the-brave-browser-basics-what-it-does-how-it-differs-from-rivals.html
There is also Gibiru, but it is not US based though the searches there are markedly different than the big dogs.
Basically every browser is based on Chromium or WebKit, except Firefox. But Mozilla's politics are repugnant, and their business model is completely dependent on Google ad revenue. Bad incentives.
I hadn't heard of Gibiru before. I'll give them a try.
I wonder if they do their own crawling? DDG doesn't. It's pretty expensive. I like to understand how a service like this pays their bills, as part of my trust model.
Yeah DDG was marketed as some type of alternative but as you say, true alternatives are just so far behind that there would have to be a baby-bell type breakup of the monopoly...and of course we'd probably get similar results to the baby bell debacle where the government then creates the very thing they say they are trying to prevent.
Yeah, following the model of the Standard Oil breakup 70 years prior. Regulatory capture is by no means a new phenomenon.
I don't really mind much that there are so few core browser implementations, because they're all open source and can be forked by anyone willing to maintain them. In fact there are lots of superficially-different browsers atop these three code bases, and the web as a collection of standards ties them all together. Now, the co-opting of standards bodies by "industry giants"... that's kind of a problem, but it's al very political and complicated: the WhatWG coup over the W3C comes to mind.
Search is a very different issue, I think. Unless you run a crawler yourself, you must rely on a service, and the fewer competing services, the stronger their incentives to abuse that intrinsic power to suppress and promote.
I think the solution is to use lots of search engines, ideally from multiple geopolitical zones. (Don't bother with Baidu, tho! We're already on the "good" side of the Great Firewall.)
I don't know a lot about Gibiru, but I do know that in practical real-world testing it provides results that are uniquely different from all major search engines. I think they are still a Google-based algo, but I think they diverge from it somewhere in the search chain--just not sure how/where. I did have an article describing the ins and outs but cannot locate it. In the meantime, if I can't find something, I try there.
Yandex appears to be the best for non censored results.
It can hang, though. Be sure you modify your VPN, any ad blockers.
Have tried Brave. It can't handle my basic banking? And I've Google searched and I'm not alone. Confirmation bias?
Always a good reminder that Google is censoring even the smallest stuff.
https://simulationcommander.substack.com/p/screaming-into-the-censorship
No article. No links to my ‘Stack. No…..nothing at all. For Google searchers, the article may as well not even exist - and I think it’s worth pointing out that this particular article was written after the predicted winter wave crashed over the country, destroying the official narrative about covid vaccines and their efficacy. This is important because the Censorship Industrial Complex admits that it censors true information if that information would lead to increased vaccine hesitancy — meaning they will censor the truth and promote lies in order to further the narrative. (This simple fact means we shouldn’t trust them about ANYTHING!)
I use google for mundane, day-to-day crap. Business phone numbers and such. DDG for info on vitamins, minerals, etc. I haven't used Bing since 2016, I think. Just haven't thought of it.
Google is absolutely the worst. Duck Duck Go was better a few years ago but I think they’re getting sketchy now also. I hate it when I KNOW I’ve seen something online and then can’t find it again because it’s buried somewhere. Small wonder my phone is perpetually at the limit of 500 open tabs! 🙄
I deleted my Facebook and stopped using google about 5 years ago. Google is an evil company. Most tech companies are. There was a time I believed tech companies wanted to improve humanity. Now I believe they work to enslave it.
Try Yandex.com instead. A shower of resulting entries for 'Camille Paglia transgender "end stage"'. Oddly enough (considering history), there seems to be less search engine censorship through that Russian search engine.
Yandex does censor pretty heavily. It's just things the Russian government wants censored, not what woke capitalism/davos/the DNC/etc. Want censored. So for the most part you shouldn't care, unless you're looking for porn or anything critical of their government.
Ironic how that works, huh? Something like politically unsatisfied Californians moving to Texas or Florida.
Butbutbut I heard that was Russian disinformation!!!111!!!
(ps I have used it and the search results are better than I'm accustomed to)
"But Bing promptly coughs up a link at the top..."
And while you're at Bing, it has perhaps the best free AI image generator. Goo- Goo- Google, Goodbye.
I also just cancelled my YouTube Premium membership, after having have it for over a year, to protest their demonetizing Russel Brand. Google has gone way to the evil side. WAY WAY to the evil side.
No GOOGLE has been my SOP for several years now. I just wish more people would let go of the convenience over substance nipple long enough to realize they are being fed mind altering synthetic milk.
I've been increasingly frustrated using Duck Duck Go for a while now, and came across a recommendation to switch to Brave Browser. Does anyone have experience with that? Is it ultimately owned by BlackRock or something?🤦♀️
Brave is an excellent browser. It was founded (I think) and headed up by (for sure) Brendan Eich, a Silicon Valley exec who got canceled some years ago for having donated money to a political group that favored traditional marriage, which is to say, marriage, some years prior. At the time he was canceled, he wasn't even particularly conservative, but I would imagine that his experience has made him unsympathetic to woke cancel culture.
I have been using Brave quite successfully for over a year (since the Duck went woke). Good search, not woke (as far as I can tell, and plenty fast.
Thanks, John! I'll give it a try!
Same experience here. Around the time of the George Floyd incident I vaguely remembered that a white guy had been choked to death by the police. I Googled "white guy choked by police" and every conceivable iteration and permutation of the search terms and got only pages and pages of stories about George Floyd. I went over to bing.com and put in the same search phrase and instantly got the name of Tony Timpa, an absolutely appalling story of police misbehavior. That's when I learned that there are people at Google, live humans and not algorithms, who decide what you can know and what you can't.
Google, DuckDuck, Brave, Yandex, all of these main search engines most accessible are pure crap these days. Because Google is crap, and the others buy their product, then apply their own touch. Very limited results, many gibberish suggestions, often not even related to the search words. And at some time in the last few years the search engines stopped recognizing Boolean search symbols that help filter results. The search engines today ignore them.
I was a darn good internet sleuth by knowing Boolean, but they've made that skill irrelevant. I know there is such thing as a "dark web" out there that takes off the content constraints and filters that this web most use exists in. Making it more free, but you assume more risk on it, illegal websites that get LEO attention, and that you really don't want anything to do with.
But I wonder if anyone knows of a non-Google based search engine on the dark web where information is accessible and knowledge of Boolean still matters and can get you to more of the full resources available on the web? There has to be a way around this Google monopoly on internet search and I think it might be on the Dark Web. Avoiding the problematic sites.
Google worked fine just now on that specific search. Seems they detected the fuss.
Everyone please use RefSeek.com.
But don't trust any of them.
You give them too much credit.
Google "customizes" your results, resulting in what used to be called "filter bubbles". Fun party game: everybody use the same search and marvel over the wide variety of results. They suppress the wrongthink for everybody, though.
Thanks for the RefSeek pointer! I'll add it to my list.
Google is collaborating with the "enemy." They hold patents on voting machines, voting machine software, and "body activity connected to digital currency" primarily crypto.
Links here, IF you can't find it from the above.
https://patents.google.com/patent/US20200258338A1/en
https://patents.google.com/patent/US3766541A/en
https://patents.google.com/patent/WO2020060606A1/en
No jab for you, Grandma? No food - no heat!
I haven't searched with Google in years. First I used Bing, then Duckduckgo. Does anyone have a search engine that they really like?
https://search.brave.com
I've been using it, along with the Brave (privacy-respecting) browser, for years. Presearch.com is a backup choice, not much experience with it
And sure, sometimes turning off the default settings for Google and Android apps is less convenient. But being spied upon constantly is too high a price for those little conveniences.
Use a VPN or tor, and a non mainstream browser like Brave to reclaim a bit of your privacy. I'm also in the process of turning my Gmail acct into my spam email acct-- use another service entirely for email that matters.
That's exactly what I did, and it makes such a huge difference to how I feel about email.
Also worth knowing: Proton recently launched a new "Proton Pass" password manager that helps you create fake emails when you want to sign up for something (I use ProtonMail, not sure if it works with other email systems) so my "email that matters" email is never exposed.
Startpage dot com
They're just a third-party front-end for Google. So, like DDG, you can escape your own personal filter bubble that way, but not the mass censorship.
Alternatives:
https://yandex.com
https://metager.org
https://www.mojeek.com
https://presearch.org
https://www.qwant.com
My 93-yr-old MiL just mentioned that to me yesterday :)
Brave
DDG
Not a search engine, but I've been playing with Bard.google.com, their experimental AI. Sometimes it gives really good answers, but then sometimes it just lies to your face! User beware!
I will never seek out AI (although it may well seek me out). I think it's baloney and will never become more than that because our glorious overlords WANT to feed us baloney.
You might want to read this article then:
https://venturebeat.com/ai/oops-google-search-caught-publicly-indexing-users-conversations-with-bard-ai/
startpage.com or swisscows.com
It's worse than simply blocking you from seeing wrongthink. I think Google has managed to break their whole system in the attempt. It's hard to find anything at all with Google now.
Bing is run by the same kind of people and on the same trajectory, just at the slow pace of Microsoft.
Duckduckgo is just an aggregator of other search engines, and has its own layer of censorship now, rendering it doubly useless.
Brave search is less censorious but they do their own indexing, which isn't as comprehensive as Google was in its prime.
Yandex, Baidu and other foreign search engines will find things that Google doesn't want you to see as long as Putin/the CCP/etc. don't mind.
And they're all sticking idiot chatbot summaries at the top now. Not to mention the flood of AI generated nonsense pages dominating what search results there are.
We're watching the web rot in real time. People had best relearn what bookmarks are and start curating, like we did back before Google invented PageRank.
Even that won't last forever as independent websites are fading away. Dead links everywhere and getting worse all the time. It's a quiet apocalypse. RIP the new Library of Alexandria, 1989-2016. It was good while it lasted.
Yeah DDG tanked early in the Covid Years, they sold out fairly quickly.
Brave has been good sofar.
Google is only useful for entertainment nowadays, kinda like a mystery lucky dip, you use it to see what goobly gook it gives you.
Bing, better than Google, who would have thought. Thanks Chris. I love Camilla Paglia; a true feminist, strong, not asking for protection from the patriarchy.