this post was submitted on 30 Dec 2023
959 points (91.6% liked)
No Stupid Questions
36055 readers
1368 users here now
No such thing. Ask away!
!nostupidquestions is a community dedicated to being helpful and answering each others' questions on various topics.
The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:
Rules (interactive)
Rule 1- All posts must be legitimate questions. All post titles must include a question.
All posts must be legitimate questions, and all post titles must include a question. Questions that are joke or trolling questions, memes, song lyrics as title, etc. are not allowed here. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.
Rule 2- Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.
Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.
Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.
Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.
Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.
That's it.
Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.
Questions which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.
Rule 6- Regarding META posts and joke questions.
Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-question posts using the [META] tag on your post title.
On fridays, you are allowed to post meme and troll questions, on the condition that it's in text format only, and conforms with our other rules. These posts MUST include the [NSQ Friday] tag in their title.
If you post a serious question on friday and are looking only for legitimate answers, then please include the [Serious] tag on your post. Irrelevant replies will then be removed by moderators.
Rule 7- You can't intentionally annoy, mock, or harass other members.
If you intentionally annoy, mock, harass, or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.
Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.
Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.
Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.
Let everyone have their own content.
Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here.
Credits
Our breathtaking icon was bestowed upon us by @Cevilia!
The greatest banner of all time: by @TheOneWithTheHair!
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
I moved to Kagi paid search engine and haven't looked back.
There are open source search engines albeit you'll need to host it somewhere.
Any major search engine (think Google, bing, etc) are just place for companies to pay to get into the top results.
I've been using Kagi for about a month and I do like it. It's my first time using a paid search engine though, and it does feel weird and expensive.
SearXNG is basically the same thing. Kagi is just an aggregator they don't have their own engine
I think you have it swapped?
Searxng aggregates search results from multiple search engines.
Kagi is it's own search engine.
edit: https://help.kagi.com/kagi/search-details/search-sources.html#search-sources Looks like Kagi does aggregate to some degree.
Yeah I've been using searxng, It takes the aggregate of Google and Bing and all the rest and gives you rankings based on the aggregate.
As long as the same exact company doesn't advertise in all the browsers they don't end up getting higher return.
Hail Corporate
Although Google has been trying hard to blur the lines between legitimate search results and ads, there's still a distinction. For the results that aren't ads, they legitimately try to rank the best results first. After all, if people stop using Google search, they won't make as much off selling the search ads.
The bad "legitimate" results near the top of the search are often the results of people gaming the Google algorithm(s). SEO is still a cat-and-mouse game with Google, and it often works. If there were legitimate competition in search engines, SEO people would have to optimize for multiple search algorithms and it wouldn't work as well. But, since they only have to target Google, it often works well. That's one of the reasons you get bad recipes with tons of junk content before you get a tiny recipe when it's a recipe you're searching for.
A smaller search engine will have the benefit of not being the target of SEO optimization. OTOH, Google's massive scale and huge investment in search does give it better results when it can beat the SEOs. It searches deeper and is much more recent than a smaller alternative could afford to be without spending hundreds of millions on infrastructure alone.
Google has a great advantage in the SEO cat-and-mouse game (being able to hire and pay many very smart people). I think part of the problem is that Google has an incentive to not penalize pages with excessive and intrusive AdSense ads.
But, also a great disadvantage in that it's the target of every SEO scheme. If a change in SEO strategy results in a link going one higher in Google, but 200 links lower in Bing, the SEO folks will jump on it. That means Bing gets to focus on improving their search engine without really worrying about SEO.
Also, I think many smart people with principles are starting to shy away from working for Google.
I doubt that comes into it at all. AdSense doesn't really care how much traffic a page gets, just that whenever it gets traffic, they get a cut. AdSense has millions or maybe tens of millions of customers, and by the fact they're using AdSense, they're too small to care about. Google only cares about them on aggregate the way they do with Gmail users or YouTube viewers.
Search is an entirely different business unit and their #1 job is to maintain their monopoly on Internet search. One of the main ways they do that is by keeping up the quality of the results so that they don't lose customers to Bing, Duck Duck Go, or whatever. If another business unit in Google approached them and said "hey, can you lower the quality of your search results to send traffic our way?" They'd laugh and say no. The only way it might happen is if they're trying to drive traffic to another Google acquisition that's a strategic investment, like say putting some Google+ search results up first.