this post was submitted on 21 Feb 2024
613 points (96.2% liked)

No Stupid Questions

35393 readers
3 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 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 5 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (2 children)

If you want to pay for search (and some other stuff) you might consider Kagi. Check out discussions on Hackernews, the consensus is quite good for Hackernews Standards. I personally use it since it matches my view about privacy and I like to pay for that since that's seem a logical way to enable me not to be the product. The results are good and you can prioritize sites easily.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 9 months ago (10 children)

Man all this positivity for Kagi feels astroturfed. No offense if you're actually not a paid shill, but everywhere I go it seems too flowery to believe.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 9 months ago

I mean they give you 100 searches to try before asking you to pay so the opportunity cost to find out is pretty low.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 9 months ago

I've also said nice things about it, and it's just because I'm happy that I can look shit up again. The results are relevant, the blogspam and listicles get stuck in their own sections that I can safely ignore, and I don't get constantly tracked by Google when I search for random shit. It feels like using Google way back in the day before enshittification.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (1 children)

+1 to what others have said ... Plus I think lemmy is still way too small for "paid shills" in any case. It's okay to like a product you've spent money on, presumably that's why you're spending the money 🤷‍♂️

Edit: Granted, the original commenter does have a very small lemmy comment history (at least as seen from my instance ... maybe larger if you take the time to load their profile on their home instance)

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago

Totally valid, just looks a little sketchy lol

[–] [email protected] 5 points 9 months ago

It feels like it but it's really not. We're actual users who genuinely like the product because it's catered to nerds like us.

If you too are a nerd, I can highly recommend just giving it a try. If you look for it, you'll immediately notice many things that Kagi just simply gets so damn right.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Just try The free version is not enough in the long term but should be fine to evaluate.

What bothers me is that using it in incognito is cumbersome at best and almost impossible sometimes.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 9 months ago

In your settings you find a special url that contains your session. If you set that as the search engine, it also works as expected in incognito mode. However, when you log out, the link expires if I'm not mistaken.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 9 months ago

Also, i would love to try other payed search as wel. Its just that the Google problem to me seems to comes from the fact that the need to earn money on things I don't want them to. So out of principle, paying for search (as long as I can afford it) seems to me the right thing.

Als kagi is better then DDG, brave and bing on the axis where Google is stil best so basically almost as good. And on the points of OP it is much better than today's Google So all in all my experience is that contrary to ddg I never needed to go back to Google since I started using kagi. That's quite an achievement.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 9 months ago

Just try it? You’ll get a free trial, use a fake email, no payment details or use info needed as far as I can remember.

I believe also https://kagi.com/fastgpt is free to use.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Well, I just went for the 100 search free trial, liked what I got, and am now a paying customer. I rarely switch back to Google for specific local stuff, but for 99% of my searches, I prefer what I get on Kagi , and even more what they offer me besides that: privacy and no ads.

Believe what you want, but I'd say give it a try and see for yourself.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago

I've heard enough in the replies -- I will be giving Kagi an honest shot.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Some positivity is certainly genuine.

The volume does seem suspect.

Shoutout to them for not censoring it, at least!

alt-text: screenshot of the paid search engine in question, using their free trial to search for brand name mentions + “astroturfing”, filtered by fediverse sites

PS: I’ve spent like an hour digging into comment histories of people who mention paid search. Best believe though companies are gonna be PROS at seeding comment histories by now.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 9 months ago (1 children)

They have a really small userbase, but it lines up well with the demographics here: Early adopter, tech enthusiasts with a distrust in Google and tired of how bad search is now.

Early adopters are generally very excited about whatever they've picked up. They feel the same way about a search engine the same way I feel about wearing only the same brand of black socks. Super excited to tell everyone about it whenever I get the chance because of how much it changed my life.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago

Indeed.

I’ve said in a previous discussion I was sympathetic given “I’ve sounded like an ad before.” We evangelize great stuff.

Now in the history of their business has any employee ever even mentioned the brand name without disclosing their affiliation? My money’s on yes.

But guaranteed nerds who love it chime in too.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago (1 children)

I was just looking at it. I'll have to try it out. Starting out, I feel it's too expensive but I'll try it and see if my opinion changes.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago

That was my initial thought as well. You may or may not find it worth it for you. Time will tell I guess.