Tag: search engines

You.com

~ cafebedouin

“You.com, which bills itself as the world’s first open search engine, today announced its public beta launch…

Founded in 2020 by Socher and Bryan McCann, You.com leverages natural language processing (NLP) — a form of AI — to understand search queries, rank the results, and semantically parse the queries into different languages, including programming languages. The platform summarizes results from across the web and is extensible with built-in search apps so that users can complete tasks without leaving the results page.

“The first page of Google can only be modified by paying for advertisements, which is both annoying to users and costly for companies. Our new platform will enable companies to contribute their most useful actual content to that first page, and — if users like it — they can take an action right then and there,” Socher continued. “Most companies and partners will prefer this new interface to people’s digital lives over the old status quo of Google.”

—Kyle Wiggers, “AI-driven search engine You.com takes on Google with $20M.” VentureBeat.com. November 9, 2021.

First I’m hearing of You.com, but it’s clear that something like this is the next iteration of search. Bookmarking to look into later.

Marginalia (Serendipity Engine)

~ cafebedouin

“It is a search engine, designed to help you find what you didn’t even know you were looking for. If you search for “Plato”, you might for example end up at the Canterbury Tales. Go looking for the Canterbury Tales, and you may stumble upon Neil Gaiman’s blog.

If you are looking for fact, this is almost certainly the wrong tool. If you are looking for serendipity, you’re on the right track. When was the last time you just stumbled onto something interesting, by the way?

I don’t expect this will be the next “big” search engine. This is and will remain a niche tool for a niche audience.

–https://search.marginalia.nu

I came to the About page for the explanation of the website, but the true gold is in the section: A Theoretical Justification:

The measure of a website should be how well it enriches the life of – and empowers the visitor, rather how well it enriches the wallet of the website owner, especially not at the expense of the visitor’s long-term interests…

…The purpose of the tool is primarily to help you find and navigate the strange parts of the internet. Where, for sure, you’ll find crack-pots, communists, libertarians, anarchists, strange religious cults, snake oil peddlers, really strong opinions. Yes all manner of strange people.

You’ll surely find uncomfortable ideas too, but I’m sure you’ll survive and find the experience worthwhile, because for every turd you step in, there are also plenty of brilliant and interesting gems to find that for one reason or another didn’t live up to the standards of the big search engines.”

https://memex.marginalia.nu/projects/edge/about.gmi

The whole A theoretical Section is worth a read.

Regarding using the site, I searched Occam, and in the first few listings there was this:

“Occam’s razor says to accept the simplest explanation, and resurrection from the dead is not it.”

http://www.provethebible.net/T2-Objec/G6-003.htm

I liked the formation of the objection. The website author then tries to make preposterous arguments that grossly misunderstands the point of Occam’s razor, weakly points out his incorrect assumption is not always right, etc.

The strange thing about reading through it, I’m left wondering what plausible explanation would not be simpler than the resurrection? There’s very little here that is forwarding an argument for the Bible, i.e.,

“But the claim of (conservative) Christians is not that the Bible has the most compelling story or the most spectacular intervention claims. They believe the Bible to be a truthful account of history, of God, and of Jesus Christ. Disprove these and conservative Christians have nothing.”

I think it’s a hard argument to make that the Bible is history. If that’s your ground, you’ve kind lost before you’ve really begun.

Anyway, an amusing interlude. Recommend this search engine wholeheartedly.

Data Voids

~ cafebedouin

“There are many search terms for which the available relevant data is limited, non-existent, or deeply problematic. We call these “data voids.” Most of these searches are rare, but in the cases where people do search for these terms, search engines tend to return results that may not give the user what they want because of limited data and/or limited lessons learned through previous
searches…In this paper, we want to offer some basic background on search engines before discussing the different types of data voids; the challenges that search engines face when they encounter queries over spaces where data voids exist; and the ways data voids can be exploited by those with ideological, economic, or political agendas.

-Michael Golebiewski and Danah Boyd, “Data Voids: Where Missing Data Can Be Easily Exploited.” Data & Society. May 2018

same.energy

~ cafebedouin

“Same Energy is a visual search engine. You can use it to find beautiful art, photography, decoration ideas, or anything else.

We believe that image search should be visual, using only a minimum of words. And we believe it should integrate a rich visual understanding, capturing the artistic style and overall mood of an image, not just the objects in it.

We hope Same Energy will help you discover new styles, and perhaps use them as inspiration.

–https://same.energy/

Duckduckgo.com

~ cafebedouin

“Virtually all internet users tend to be Google search engine users, by default. The main strategy for Google is to try to hold on to the users it has by implementing better security and privacy protection measures. This is something definitely on their agenda, but the issue still remains that user data is tracked. Therefore, Google is leaking some users who are leaving its boat in order to climb aboard that of Duckduckgo.

-Miriam Cihodariu, “Duckduckgo vs Google: A Security Comparison and How to Maximize Your Privacy.” Heimdal Security. May 16, 2019.

I left the Google boat two years ago. I have been consistently using Duckduckgo.com for a couple of years. It’s not as good as Google, but it is adequate for most searches you need to do. I typically only need to use Google if I am looking for answers to a difficult question, it requires Google maps functionality (such as looking for restaurants meeting certain criteria near a specific location), or I am looking for recent news on a specific topic. Duckduckgo.com has the ability to limit to news items, but the number of sources they have compared to Google is limited.

In short, Duckduckgo is a decent Google replacement, if you are willing to exchange a little functionality for a little more privacy. I think it is a worth doing.