Spectacle8011

Spectacle8011, 11 months ago

My main search engine is Mojeek, and my secondary search engine is Kagi. I’ve paid for Kagi for over a year, and it gets good results. I think it’s great that every part of both search engines work without Javascript, and that Kagi’s results pages are very light. It’s also cool that it returns results for pages in the Internet Archive, which can be useful for certain esoteric topics. I’m de-ranking certain sites so they’re pushed to the bottom of results, like quora, twitter, w3schools, and reddit.

There are also no ads! At all! I used Duckduckgo in a VM today and it was dreadful how far you have to scroll just to get past the ads and see the actual results.

Kagi gets great results. My only problem is that, just like Duckduckgo, they use the Bing API. Now, Kagi actually uses their own non-commercial index Teclis, combined with their news index Tinygem, as well as calling Google’s API and many other search engine APIs (including Mojeek). My main search engine is Mojeek because they use their own index.

I’ve found Kagi great for technical/日本語 queries, which is something Mojeek doesn’t handle well. If I want to learn about a certain topic, I search Wikipedia directly. I think Kagi is the nicest and fanciest Bing/Google proxy around, with easily the best user experience of any search engine.

Spectacle8011, 11 months ago

I actually do remember hearing about this somewhere, but even though I have their blog/updates in my RSS reader, they never officially mentioned this before this user brought it up—maybe in their Discord server? Thanks for pointing this out! I can imagine they really wanted to get away from Bing after the price surge, as that was only a signal of more to come. Duckduckgo seems to be paying for that with the massive increase in ads.

However, it is still disconcerting the degree to which Kagi is hugely reliant on Google. Doesn’t change any of the positive aspects about Kagi, though.

Spectacle8011, 11 months ago

You are correct.

Spectacle8011, 11 months ago

I briefly compare Mojeek to Brave here: discuss.privacyguides.net/t/add-mojeek/12101/2

Pros for Brave Search:

• (Kind of) uses its own index for general results! Their indexing strategy is somewhat odd, but this is miles better than most of the other “search engines” listed here: www.searchenginemap.com
• Optionally premium. Users can pay to remove ads, improving the user experience. A monetization strategy that aligns with searcher’s interests.

Cons for Brave Search:

• Image search is heavily based on Bing, as far as I know. You’ll have to correct me on this one.
• Javascript required for certain primary parts of the SERP (Search Engine Result Page), like Image and Video results.
• Adding onto that, their SERPs are a lot heavier than Kagi and Mojeek, but nowhere near as bad as Duckduckgo.

Mojeek aligns far more with what I want out of a search engine. They are completely independent; they don’t even use the servers of big companies like AWS or Google Cloud! They use a local datacenter instead. I think it’s cool that their image search is specially designed for finding freely usable images (Creative Commons/Public Domain licensed), rather than relying on Bing Images. They also have a focus on the “smaller web” and independent creators—see their most recent blog post, for example: blog.mojeek.com/…/search-content-from-substacks-i…

Their staff are clearly very passionate about what they do and very knowledgeable. I trust them a lot, through personal conversations I’ve had with them. I just don’t have that same trust for Brave Search, as well as my usability problems with it.

Lastly, I’ve learned a lot of interesting stuff from Mojeek about search. Their blog is very interesting, even if you don’t use their search engine. I really liked this one, for example: blog.mojeek.com/…/generative-ai-threatens-diversi…

Spectacle8011, 11 months ago

If you’re using a desktop browser, I recommend adding search engines directly to the browser. In Firefox, this is easy because all you need to do is click the URL bar and hit “Add [Search Engine]”. And then you can add keywords to them which allows you to search them directly.

So, when I search for something on Wikipedia, rather than using a bang to go through Brave or Kagi, I just do @w query, because @w is my shortcut for Wikipedia in Firefox.

It’s especially useful for someone like me who uses a lot of different search engines, but it’s also faster and takes out the middle-man. If you’re using a non-iPhone non-Firefox mobile browser though, this isn’t really something you can do (yet).

Spectacle8011, 11 months ago

As an Arch user for 3 years, I can corroborate this. Steam recently broke because a shared library updated, so I had to downgrade it. There was that whole pipewire nonsense before that. It only happens every few months, but it’s annoying when it does. And some packages aren’t as up-to-date as I would like, so OpenSUSE Tumbleweed or Fedora are looking like attractive options to me in the near future.

Spectacle8011, 11 months ago

I approve of the BLOOD-C references. That movie had some great moments: files.catbox.moe/2xr0xl.webm

Spectacle8011, 11 months ago

Yes, I like the default workflow. I always have particular applications on the same workspaces, and I close them as I need to. Sometimes I have multiple, usually a maximum of two on one workspace, because I can ALT+TAB through them. I like that the top bar is uncluttered. I don’t use the dock at all, but Activity Overview is sometimes useful. I can operate the desktop completely with my keyboard. It’s also very minimal without too many options, and it looks pretty. I find it very usable.

The only annoying thing was needing to manually create shortcuts inside of dconf for workspaces 5-10. I really don’t know why they force you to do that…

Spectacle8011, 11 months ago

Yay. It’s fixed for my NVIDIA computer, too. All of the bizarre scaling issues and other nonsense is fixed.

Spectacle8011, 11 months ago

• The package manager.
• New releases make it to the repositories quickly.
• The software is as vanilla as possible; no changes made by the distribution except to get it working.
• The wiki.
• +/- No nagging graphical updater.
• +/- Users can share build scripts for building software from source very easily
• +/- No particular stance on free software licenses.

Spectacle8011, 11 months ago

I usually don’t mind when most packages get behind, but the one I always notice is GNOME. It’s been taking longer than I would generally expect for Arch to ship a new major update for GNOME. Fedora seems to have more up-to-date packages in most areas and ships them vanilla like Arch, as well as coming with a host of other sane defaults, so I’ve been thinking of making the switch…soon.

Spectacle8011, 1 year ago

You can build visual novels in Ren’Py, which uses only Python, but that might not be what you’re looking for.

Spectacle8011, 1 year ago

It is interesting though that we find ourselves working around a bug we did not introduce triggered by code we do not control.

I imagine a lot of a browser's codebase looks like this. From what I understand, browsers expect webmasters to screw up their markup and make allowances for it.

Spectacle8011, 1 year ago

but browser should not crash what ever some website does.

Sometimes crashing would be better than trying to beat wonky code into shape: https://samy.pl/myspace/tech.html

3. Sweet! Now we can do javascript with single quotes. However, myspace strips out the word "javascript" from ANYWHERE. To get around this, some browsers will actually interpret "java\nscript" as "javascript" (that's javascript). Example:

But on principle I agree. I can't say whether Google Images works or not on my Firefox browser, because I'm using Mojeek.

Spectacle8011, 1 year ago

However, there are independent engines out there. The first one that pops to mind is Gigablast, which does it’s own indexing/crawling.

Gigablast went down 2 months ago. The crawler is available as free software, though.

Mojeek's Search Engine Map gives you a good picture of the search engines out there. You can also see Seirdy's very informative post on all the different search engines out there, which is fairly regularly updated: https://seirdy.one/posts/2021/03/10/search-engines-with-own-indexes/

Spectacle8011, 1 year ago

I’m in the process of playing Higurashi, released in 2002, and it’s good. It’s a very different experience from the anime. I actually played the Umineko VN first, which became my favorite thing in any medium quite quickly. Higurashi just keeps getting releases, re-releases, new adaptations; the train keeps going. The original release had very amateur art, but modern console releases in the Higurashi franchise have polished opening movies, redrawn sprites and full voice acting.

This certainly isn’t an obscure title, of course. Higurashi doesn’t offer you any choices, and it plays out just like a novel with no branches. Personally, I prefer kinetic visual novels like Higurashi and Umineko, but I know many don’t share this opinion.

And I suppose I’ve played Subarashiki Hibi, too, which is a 2011 remake/re-imagining of Tsui no Sora from 1998, which I really liked. I don’t really count that one on account of Subahibi being a completely different game.