At this point should we really be using these search engines? Feels like you're just doing their work for them.
this post was submitted on 02 Feb 2025
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This. I think the best way to make the Internet less sh*tty is to get away from Google search.
I like the SearX search engine. It gives old-school, relevant search results, not google ranked ones.
It's also spread out over many separate instances, so you can pick the one that best suits your search needs:
Very large part of why I moved away to kagi. It just works.
Additionally, it's system of weighting, instead of just a binary block, is very useful. Take fandom wikis for example. They're awful, yes, but sometimes they're the only result for a topic, and will do if needed. With a binary block list, you either see them or you don't. With the weighted system, you can downrank them, so if better results show up, they appear higher in the listing than the downranked ones
This looks like it has some potential. I'll probably give this a try.
Thanks for this, I'll give it a go.
Fantastic! Thank you for sharing this.
I have it installed, I'm curious how effective it will be.
Lately, I've been reporting AI generated cruft as "spam" to duckduckgo. In fact, it's not really spam - as there are some nuggets of useful information, but so sparse, I'd rather of skipped the article/website entirely. I hope these kind of Blocklists will evolve to include this kind of quasi-spam.
I bet we could make an effective blocklist just by discarding all websites with more than 200 words on them.