the search situation is dire because sure "toilet not filling" doesn't tend to have misinformation, but if any schmuck can register a 4 dollar domain and get gpt2 to blast out some misinfo that the google algo loves and make bank on advertising (also sold by google) then how am I supposed to trust google when I ask it about things that tend to have common misconceptions or falsehoods like pest remedies or medical symptoms?
@SuricrasiaOnline remembering the time when google let you remove certain domains from results for your account. was amazing. it's gone now, of course
@SuricrasiaOnline Yeah, for whatever reason search has gotten disastrous in the last five years and ... well, I have my suspicions why, but
@SuricrasiaOnline I feel like it doesn’t have to be, if it lets the user choose sources they want to use…?
Maybe it could allow rating quality of results for sources to help highlight good/new ones? Idk
@SuricrasiaOnline i know https://kagi.com is trying to be normal but i haven't used it enough to know
@catalina I like how I clicked "random websites" and got the main page for a tilde server populated by people I know
@SuricrasiaOnline oh hell yeah
@catalina @SuricrasiaOnline ha, I searched "how to fix a toilet" and got an art project I'd never heard of by a friend of mine about how people use search engines
@SuricrasiaOnline archwiki, tvtropes, etymonline, dict.org, something with all the man pages, memory alpha, emojipedia
@SuricrasiaOnline I think searxng lets you do this
@SuricrasiaOnline DDG just uses Bing for search data, but the ! searches make it actually useful despite that.
@mdhughes what's ! searches?
@SuricrasiaOnline @mdhughes ddg calls it "bang syntax" and it just lets you query another search engine, often site-specific, through ddg. all it does is redirect you.
@SuricrasiaOnline @mdhughes it reminds me of the query shortcuts from krunner in kde3.5 except it's curated and in your browser instead of your desktop
@SuricrasiaOnline if anything, ddg is *worse* at seospam than google, i just can't stand giving google another bit of data so it's worth the sightly shittier results
@_ @SuricrasiaOnline the duck is pretty good at tech and and other "clinical" questions for me at least but with more organic and open ended questions really mess it up
@SuricrasiaOnline https://duckduckgo.com/bang
Welcome to the Internet power tools!
@mdhughes @SuricrasiaOnline at this point "!g to get different results" is so ingrained in my muscle memory I sometimes do it in google
@SuricrasiaOnline I kinda wonder if I should blame javascript for search being Bad now or if I'm being crazy. Many websites these days don't load much of a document at first and just give some script tags to load the rest through a JSON API. Web crawlers can't parse that, and even worse I've seen some sites have stopped using useful tags for links and instead implement everything through onclick events. More and more information is on closed apps like Facebook or Twitter, so it's mainly the SEO hackers hosting their own sites.
@SuricrasiaOnline just realized the formatting on my instance got rid of the "<a> tag" part lol
@SuricrasiaOnline yeah i wasn't gonna because _i_ use ddg and i get those weirdo results
and now i'm probably to reply to the next post and say "just use !bangs at that point"
@SuricrasiaOnline i don't think allow-list only for search is a good idea, but allowing users to block certain sites from showing up, or at least rate results as helpful / not helpful, would be pretty useful
@trwnh @SuricrasiaOnline you should try YACY, it allows you to do both (but the search is still eh)
@SuricrasiaOnline isnt the duck literally just bing trough some anonymizing?
@SuricrasiaOnline that's already become kind of a meme of people searching specific sites for good info
@vulp@wetdry.world @SuricrasiaOnline@cybre.space i feel called out
@vulp @SuricrasiaOnline it’s like that image ai that got better when you added ‘unreal engine’
@SuricrasiaOnline What's the shortcoming with the "text contents" search option?
@noyovo I've never gotten it to work
@SuricrasiaOnline huh dang. we usually are searching for phrases in quotes or multiple words with each in quotes, maybe that's revelant - like: https://archive.org/details/texts?query=%22Omelette+du+fromage%22&sin=TXT
@noyovo ohhh weird. I was searching on this page: https://archive.org/details/books
I'll have to use this page from now on
@SuricrasiaOnline lol yeah they don't make it obvious tbh! but once you find it it's great. the homepage should be
https://archive.org/details/texts but also the top right search box should have it as an option for any page in that category. the "books" page might just mean stuff that's "officially" uploaded by an IA employee somewhere, which is a lot but far from all the text/docs/books on there
@SuricrasiaOnline you mean there weren't 17 separate lifestyle blogs that really reviewed products in $PRODUCT_CATEGORY last $($CURRENT_MONTH - 1)?
@trysdyn
boomers - say they don't trust the internet but actually do
millennials - say they trust the internet but actually don't
zoomers - they are the internet
@SuricrasiaOnline Well, it's basic knowledge to never ever ask Google medical questions unless you know what to avoid and what to look for.
If you look up cancer treatment in german 80% of sites are about "alternative medicine", many even trying to tell you NOT to do chemo or radiotherapy but to smoke weed and eat amygdalin (poison) instead. It's ridiculous.
here's a hint. if you're on a page you found through google, ctrl+f for the phrase "Amazon Services LLC Associates Program"