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PaperclipPerfector  18d ago (text post)   2256 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for September 1, 2024

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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Brave + Kagi

There's no point in going on the internet now without an ad block - that's like going naked for a run over a landfill full of medical waste. Thus Brave + Privacy Badger.

Google as the search engine has been going down in quality lately. I've used duckduckgo and brave search, but Kagi seems to be cleaner and results for me are better, and I like the search engine when I'm the customer, not the raw material to be processed and sold.

Does Kagi do the same political filtering on search like google and duckduck? (sorry, I mean, "helpful weeding out of misinformation")

They actually took a stance against doing that. Vlad is CEO and responding to arguments in that thread.

Most relevant:

The very basic question of what do you police (or don't) next is not answerable. For example 'how to kill an animal?', 'how to rob a bank?', 'how to hack a computer?' - although objectively less impactful than the original example, would eventually draw attention from sufficently large groups of people who will passionately call us out on not doing something about these queries on the same moral grounds. And again this never ends, you end up being in the business of pleasing everyone. Good luck with that.

Thus the best option for us is to simply refuse to make the first precedent no matter what the pressure is and stick to search being search. Perhaps one day Kagi may become your 'assistent' with personalised biases, but for now it is just a search engine.

Not that I noticed any. Of course, I have my own bubble so I can only answer within what I tried to search for. Also, you can tune the rankings - e.g. say this site is more trustworthy and this is less, so it would rank according to your preferences. E.g. if you don't want to see a lot of reddit, you could downrank it, or vice versa. But I haven't noticed any helpfulness of the sort you mention there.

They have a free trial plan so I definitely would suggest to try it out before committing with payment. I upgraded to paid when I tried it out and saw that when trial was over I was upset I can't use it anymore.

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