Showerthoughts
A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. The most popular seem to be lighthearted clever little truths, hidden in daily life.
Here are some examples to inspire your own showerthoughts:
- Both “200” and “160” are 2 minutes in microwave math
- When you’re a kid, you don’t realize you’re also watching your mom and dad grow up.
- More dreams have been destroyed by alarm clocks than anything else
Rules
- All posts must be showerthoughts
- The entire showerthought must be in the title
- No politics
- If your topic is in a grey area, please phrase it to emphasize the fascinating aspects, not the dramatic aspects. You can do this by avoiding overly politicized terms such as "capitalism" and "communism". If you must make comparisons, you can say something is different without saying something is better/worse.
- A good place for politics is c/politicaldiscussion
- Posts must be original/unique
- Adhere to Lemmy's Code of Conduct and the TOS
If you made it this far, showerthoughts is accepting new mods. This community is generally tame so its not a lot of work, but having a few more mods would help reports get addressed a little sooner.
Whats it like to be a mod? Reports just show up as messages in your Lemmy inbox, and if a different mod has already addressed the report, the message goes away and you never worry about it.
I'm guessing your understanding skipped the part about the PageRank system
Yeah it's a monopoly now, but back then it was a couple of Stanford kids with a good idea on how to make search engines suck less by ranking web pages. And it worked.
But as always, with great power...
As an added bonus: if I recall correctly (which I may not, it was a while ago now), the hilarious thing is that despite its success, the original PageRank system was based on flawed maths :D
Sort of, I don't know enough (or think I know enough) to speak to the specifics of the PageRank system stuff, which is why I glossed over it. From personal experience with however it works, earlier or now, I've not really felt like it suited the way I wanted to search for things, nor allowed for it.
On a really basic level I gather it was (and may still be) related to how often some sites were linked to from other sites, with some extra background weighting this way or that to help surface presumably relevant results. To put it crudely, sort of a popularity contest, give or take the weighting details. That tends to suck though for new or less popular/obscure stuff, the latter of which I tend to prefer (unintentionally, but somewhat intentionally).
You can't say I don't know enough and then critique a system.
You absolutely can. I did, and plenty of other people do all the time about a variety of systems, search engines included. That's not to say they'll be good critiques, but that's irrelevant to whether or not they can.
And in that vein, I'm not suggesting mine is a good critique. However it is reflective of my opinions from my experience with their system and my admittedly rough knowledge of it at the time of writing. Instead of adding to dismissive replies, how about we all get together and read the PageRank wikipedia page and learn together.
Usually people educate themselves on a topic before trying to talk about it as if they have a clue.
"But this is just, like, my opinion bro"
We're not in /c/technology nor a tech themed instance, it's a showerthought post (so the vibe should be casual), maybe learn to read a room?
Edit:
Also, it's not as if I was speaking authoritatively, I was speaking to my experiences and I was upfront about the limits of my knowledge. Instead of bothering to constructively correct me, you flatly went, "Yeah, no." and your entire entry into the convo was pretty condescending for no apparent reason.
Instead of bothering to constructively correct me
To quote a certain highly educated someone, we’re not in /c/technology nor a tech themed instance, it’s a showerthought post (so the vibe should be casual), so why would we go into technical details? maybe learn to read a room?
your entire entry into the convo was pretty condescending for no apparent reason
Except the stated one....
Usually people educate themselves on a topic before trying to talk about it as if they have a clue.
People are not gonna bother educating someone who won't educate themselves, especially when what is said is so completely incorrect they have no idea where to even begin.
Yeah, no.
Did you sleep through the search engine wars? Not a single search engine was good. There were sites dedicated to sending your search to all of the search engines at once.
Google showed up and it was game over. Their ad sales took off, and then they came out with gmail with 1gb of free storage and everyone went nuts for it since trying to stay under 15mb for your local isp was a pain in the ass.
Google disrupted very hard and continued to do so in many ways for a long time.
Yea but it's not the case today. I get as good or better results out of duck duck go, and bing is good too now. The only reason to continue using Google is if you love ads.
Yep. Some of the replies here are getting tied up in Google/search engine history, which doesn't matter as much with how the space is now and how Google's being better in the past wasn't necessarily entirely good given that it destroyed competition and/or has deterred much competition.
Ideally there would have been some check to address the rise of their pseudo-monopoly on search to ensure the service it provided remained decent so we wouldn't be having this discussion, but "free" markets go brrr.
For me it's still hit or miss when you're searching for specific troubleshooting error codes or programming. Sometimes Bing or DDG will miss the point entirely and show me things with no relation for my search query at all.
Interesting. There was a time when I noticed that DDG didn't scan as often and so wouldn't have the very latest news, but now they are functionally identical to me. If I don't find something on one, I'm pretty surprised how I don't find it in more or less the same way on the others
"disrupted" 🤢
Annoyingly, Google has gotten so bad over the past year, that I basically give up trying to find a good result half the time. And the other half, I have to spend 10 minutes retrying search terms to find anything that either isn't an ad, an embedded side-scrolling bullshit thing, and irrelevant websites.
I've tried Kagi search a few times this last couple of weeks and was reasonably impressed. If it works out I'd be happy to pay a few pennies for better product recommendations
I was informed about Kagi through one of the posts here and tried it out. It's quite amazing how much better it is compared to even DDG. I didn't mind DDG but it felt "old" but Kagi seems to prioritize user experience over everything else. It may not be free, but it's worth the cost for me.
What's the cost? What makes it better? Is it like Google used to be?
They have a few plans, but the cheapest is $5/mo. If you go past the allotted searches it's pay per search after that (at a very tiny cost).
I switched to DDG when Google started adding cards at the bottom of the first page and made search results utterly useless for me. DDG wasn't bad but it still felt like something was missing or some results were flooded by a specific site. Kagi went the extra step to group results from a site sorta like how Google has.
Ultimately it's the benefits of old Google but some nice refinements and QoL improvements. Because it's paid for, they don't need to sell your data or shove paid for results down your throat.
Thank you!
I'll tack on to what the other commenter said:
- Cost: I considered myself a heavy searcher (software engineer and gamer) and have been surprised to see I have rarely exceeded even half of my allotted searches ($5/mo, 300 searches). I'm now reprogramming my brain to stop turning to alternatives when something should be easy to find because "I might use up all my queries".
- Better: apart from all of the cool features, and there are many, there's also that it just "feels better". I don't know how to qualify that despite being a professional in that world. It's kinda the opposite feeling that I had using Google over the last 5+ years where I wondered if I was getting dumber or if the internet (and Google) was absolutely full of garbage.
It's on the very short list of subscriptions I pay for right now despite having a very limited budget at the moment.
I think based on your response I'm going to jump in. What other subscriptions you think are worth it?
Not the OP but currently have:
- Kagi - Search...
- Proton - Email, Calendar, VPN, Pass (I just use for aliases). Now that I've upped my privacy knowledge I need to reevaluate. I do like their products though from a useability perspective. VPN supporting port forwarding is a bonus.
- Backblaze B2 - off site backups using rclone and Round Sync (android rclone) to sync files
- Mullvad VPN - Just got based on the XMR payment option and RAM only servers. Still deciding where I have a VPN included with Proton. I don't like putting my eggs all in one basket though as I did with Google so its attractive to keep.
- Bitwarden - Password manager. May switch to self hosted in the future.
- Standard Notes - May switch to self hosted if I don't lose any features I use.
You obviously have good taste 👌😁 (no /s)
Thanks! Also trying out these just to evaluate this past week, lol.
- EteSync - Contact sync since Proton won't integrate natively with android (grr). Probably self host this one when I get time to rebuild my server also.
- Jmp.chat - More of a curiosity, but thought it was cool I could get a number with voice/text over XMPP (native dialer integration, tex t in XMPP client) plus a data eSIM all with Monero and without giving any info. Not private due to the calls/text come in the clear. Could be anonymous if you get a phone not tied to your name. Obviously you can be narrowed down to a tower you're connecting to also. Using a free xmpp server now but want to self host this one also.
- Frugal Usenet / NZBgeek - Bought with crypto over VPN and no personal info. Working on rebuilding my mini-pc server as an *arr stack, then look into self hosting everything else.
Sorry, I forgot to check for replies til now. I'm using almost the exact set of services the other commenter is, minus mullvad (proton is fine for me), backblaze (I have a homelab with a lot of redundant storage capacity and have enough important stuff backed up to the cloud in other ways I'm fine with having to rebuild the rest if something big happens), and standard notes (but I have been considering switching to it just this week, just haven't done the research).
I used the trial and then just started paying for it. So far, it is much better results, and I like that they do not track you. Also, their small web lens has been fun to play around with.
Another Kagi fan here. I pay $10 a month.
I'm a reasonably heavy search user, but have never hit the quota.
It's wonderful to have relevant results again.
The one thing it doesn't work for is shopping. From time to time I use Google. I should probably switch that to Bing, as the lesser of two evils.
I use duckduckgo and no matter what you do it gives localised results. They are getting worse and the only reason to do this is to make more money so I know they are taking data, selling data, or pushing ads or all three.
timing is everything. always has been.
Yes, the other part of the sucking is because of direct Google involvement.