Today I Learned
What did you learn today? Share it with us!
We learn something new every day. This is a community dedicated to informing each other and helping to spread knowledge.
The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:
Rules (interactive)
Rule 1- All posts must begin with TIL. Linking to a source of info is optional, but highly recommended as it helps to spark discussion.
** Posts must be about an actual fact that you have learned, but it doesn't matter if you learned it today. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.**
Rule 2- Your post subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.
Your post 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.
Posts and comments 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 non-TIL posts.
Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-TIL posts using the [META] tag on your post title.
Rule 7- You can't harass or disturb other members.
If you vocally 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.
For further explanation, clarification and feedback about this rule, you may follow this link.
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.
Unless included in our Whitelist for Bots, your bot will not be allowed to participate in this community. To have your bot whitelisted, please contact the moderators for a short review.
Partnered Communities
You can view our partnered communities list by following this link. To partner with our community and be included, you are free to message the moderators or comment on a pinned post.
Community Moderation
For inquiry on becoming a moderator of this community, you may comment on the pinned post of the time, or simply shoot a message to the current moderators.
Oscar winners 2024 before:2023
(It actually ends up being useful because many of the results seem to come from pages created earlier but updated now)
You used to be able to improve them by adding quotes too but for some reason that just pushes all the sponsored results to the top these days
Sponsored results make me irrationally angry and push me to Kagi every time I see them.
Google outright ignores their operators now. There are a bajillion examples of them doing so on Reddit if you doubt that. You can search the subject and see for yourself. They'll occasionally honor them if there's no money to be lost, but they'll blatantly ignore them to show you sponsored content and sites with AdSense on them.
If you really want good search results, check out Kagi.
The reincarnation of Marie Antoinette over here
Do you use it? How good are the results on rare topics?
I'd be willing to pay for an actually good search engine, but most engines I check give subpar results to google. It's fine to use a privacy focused search engine for easy searches, but I don't want to pay for one that will still require me to use google for anything complicated or super specific.
I use Kagi for everything, and use DDG and Google as backup searches. Usually, if Kagi didn't get me what I want, others won't either. I still prefer using multiple engines when looking into certain things, and that's no fault of Kagi.
Best feature IMO is personal ranking and DenyListing. For example, I can downrank Microsoft.com from my results, uprank StackOverFlow, and block CNet from my results. I can also downrank or block SEO nonsense sites from my results. I use this feature carefully, because I don't want to create my own bubble, but some sites are empirically terrible quality
There is a 100 searches trial which oddly enough is actually plenty. It was a very good experience but I wish there was a cheaper plan to be fair
Kagi is good, but for rare topics try search.marginalia.nu
To everyone complaining about DDG, what are you using? I’ve been using DDG for years now and it’s been fine for me. I have also been testing out StartPage.
Kagi
Every time I switch to DDG I'm constantly discovering things that I can't find because they just don't pop up in the results
...constantly discovering things that I can't find...
Maybe I'm having a stroke...but...
Wat
I assume they mean something like:
Every time I switch to DDG, I tend to discover things that I can't find on google because they just don't pop up in googlee results
perplexity
Searx
Are you a native English speaker in an English speaking country looking for English pages?
Because as a French speaker, when I tried DDG a few years ago, it was pretty hard to have some useful results. Like, I was looking for some local results and they were nowhere to be found.
I know it got better, that it's possible to tweak this, and that I should try it again. But because the first impression wasn't good for me, it made me dubious about giving it another try.
We should have a search engine blocklists, like for adblocks, with common sites known for bullshit (AI) generated content.
For some reason google won't implement user-defined site blocklist, even though some other search engines have that feature. You'll have to add -site:website_name manually every time you search.
i'll just drop this here: uBlacklist, a Google Search filter which implements exactly this feature for Firefox/Chrome/Safari
I need a more specific one, before:ai
I just had it happen again. That is to say I did a basic search and not a single returned item was what I was looking for. I tried again on DuckDuckGo and got the same useless results.
Search is fucking doooooooooomed and these workarounds aren't helping all that much.
All I wanted to know was the pre-cooked weight of fast food company X's basic patty. What I got was 20+ articles with press release, media hype, and stealth ads disguised as articles. Just tell me how many g of beef it is, k.