ticky

im in ur web site

  • she/her

web dracat

made:
internet-ti.me, @Watch, Wayback Classic, etc.

avatars appearing:

in 2D by nox lucent
in 3D by Zcythe

"If it were me, I'd have [changed] her design to make [her species] more visually clear" - some internet rando

I post embeds of other peoples' things at @ticky-reposts



ticky
@ticky

it is probably a good idea to avoid making your new website sufficiently irritating that a search engine uses it as the first example of its URL rewrite function

A redirect looks like this:

^https://reddit.com/|https://old.reddit.com/

https://help.kagi.com/kagi/features/redirects.html#redirect-syntax


ticky
@ticky

I think I've been held back by the fact that Safari doesn't have direct support for anything but "the big five"1, but I am going to be giving their extension with equivalent functionality a go on all my devices, with DuckDuckGo as the fallback

as one of the people who's been paying for her email (in spite of how crazy that seemed) for nearly ten years2 I think it's time to start seriously thinking about paying for my search engine

DuckDuckGo is good, and I respect it a lot, but search in general is rotting. abusive sites with a budget abound and ad-supported search business models seem unable to cope with this paradigm, DDG included

so I'm going to try paying Kagi for a while, and see how it grabs me, we'll see how that goes


  1. the built-in list, at the time of writing, is DuckDuckGo, Google, Yahoo, Bing or Ecosia. All of which are ad-supported. Really wish Apple would bring back pluggability to search, what happened to Sherlock plugins, folks? am I right?

  2. seriously, my Fastmail trial started in May 2013, and I started paying in June. wow. if you want a discount (and to give me a little discount) you can sign up at https://ref.fm/u11157181


ticky
@ticky

Stats

  • Since the 2nd I've done 282 searches across 4 devices
  • I've used !g (to retry a search with Google) 4 times
  • I've used Kagi images 6 times
  • My Kagi CSS is customised to always show advanced search options, hide the cloud animation, and change the base font stack
  • I have blocked 2 domains from my results
  • 3 domains have been de-emphasised in my results
  • 2 domains have automatic redirects to optimised/cleaned alternatives
  • I set up a custom bang for cohost

Thoughts

  • So far I am not really sure what lenses are good for
  • Search results are broadly solid, feels as good or better than DuckDuckGo's
  • I really like the "blast from the past" search results (things scraped from the wayback machine) but I wish it were possible to target that with a search
  • The currency conversion widget is kind of weird and doesn't inspire much confidence in the few times I've tried it
  • I don't think there's anything tempting me to stop the experiment at this point, which is good because I prepaid a year of it lmao

ticky
@ticky

Stats

  • Since the 2nd of January I've done 1,001 searches across 6 devices
  • I've used !g or !gi (to retry a search with Google) 8 times
  • I've used Kagi images 36 times
  • I have blocked 2 domains from my results
  • 8 domains have been de-emphasised in my results
  • 3 domains have been emphasised in my results

Thoughts

  • Still don't really know what lenses are for.
  • Result quality remains pretty pleasing. The lack of ads and invasive nonsense is fantastic. I feel like I have resorted to Google more sparingly than in my time using DuckDuckGo.
  • With one month of data, I am using slightly north of 100% the costs I am paying for per month, according to their billing report. I wonder how this will trend over more time.
  • The AI-powered instant answer stuff is less overconfident than Google's, but still not really that useful. I would rather you use your CPU time to find the source for me rather than try to pluck out context which will probably not be right.
  • I don't really have more deep thoughts, I am just sort of content with the results. I think the hit rate of just 8 times resorting to Google out of 1,001 searches is pretty good. And to be fair, a lot of those were me looking for something really obscure.

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in reply to @ticky's post:

The annoying thing is that the mobile new reddit is pretty good, actually. So I end up using both depending on what device I'm on, and there's a few quirks where one can't do things and I have to resort to the other.

Edit: Also this feature is one I've wanted on other things, mostly for rewriting from fandom wikis to the almost always much better ones run by the community in question. I'm too broke to use kagi but I should really get around to writing a userscript to fake it on ddg or whatever.

Oh, that might make a good fallback option for me! I actually wrote it, and mine is more aggressive. It redirects to a totally different, independently run wiki. (I'm currently populating its known wikis with NIWA members and affiliates as a reasonable starting place. There's a couple other I know of personally I'll do, and then I'll probably release a 'beta' of sorts to try to get more redirect pairs from the community?)

oh wow nice!! i somehow missed the part of your comment where you specifically mention redirecting to better community-run wikis 🙃 this is a very cool project, the Good Internet is the kind that we can curate for one another

in reply to @ticky's post:

I've been using Kagi for the best part of last year and honestly I've been very happy with it. While I remember having to pull the !g bang almost constantly on DuckDuckGo I barely do it on Kagi. The only times I do is when I actually need to check if something shows up on Google or not, it's been great.

nice! I don't think I've done it as much lately as I've had to in the past, but I still do find their image and local results less than helpful at times, so hoping Kagi are a bit better at that stuff

i'm a happy kagi customer until they run it into the ground believing that extremely expensive conversational AI will gain them enough paying users to cover the search power users who flocked to their platform early on 🙃

supposedly. i refuse to sit in their discord server where they apparently announce product plans without thinking them through first, my wife tends to send me screenshots w/o context

I guess part of the problem is that it's likely a losing battle. There's a good reason there are so few search engines these days. Search has near-zero value to the majority of people in the first place, and the quality of results on most of the ad-supported engines make the [some clever name for the search equivalent of the Overton window] so narrow that I don't think many people who aren't ultra nerds will consider it worth paying for the prospect of them being better.

Hi I am here requesting a custom tag for following search engine trials and tribulations and general core internet service alternatives. SEO + AI generated crap has finally gotten big enough to push out useful search results and also has eroded my trust in ANY page returned by DDG or google to not have been created explicitly to get a click from me.

On that note, please sell me on fastmail. Why should I trust giving them payment info? Not to say they're bad at all, that's just the question I ask myself when considering any alternative to google (they stink) and I've never come up with a great solution. "How do I know they aren't terrible now, will not become terrible in the future?"

Hi I am here requesting a custom tag for following search engine trials and tribulations and general core internet service alternatives

Got a suggestion for that?

sell me on fastmail

How do I know they aren't terrible now, will not become terrible in the future?

Speaking slightly cynically? You don't, sadly.

I like them, and I trust them about as much as one can trust any company which employs Australians. They've been making reasonable product decisions, their platform is reliable, and they're largely a hands-off affair. I use them for all my domains, and have various aliases for each use, as well as making judicious use of their masked email feature. If you need greater guarantees and can take the inconvenience, ProtonMail is probably more trustworthy. But they have the features I need at a fair price and have acted reasonably for the past decade.

"ticky-search-engine-news" ? I'm terrible with tags, just has to be something extremely unlikely to be used by anything else.

Yeah I know protonmail has been the standard for privacy stuff... I always end up just waffling about and not doing anything. I guess that's the goal for services that want your data, huh?

If payment info is that sensitive to you, give them something with a rotating CVV or a one-off card. (Also, not sure what country you're in, but you can always issue a chargeback if a vendor does something bad.) But I've been using them for over a decade and they've never let me down. They also seem to shepherd JMAP and have nice privacy features (like one-off generated email aliases with 1Password integration). Jessica's right about the Australian angle, but if your alternative is Google, you're only headed in a better direction.

All good points. Thank you.

I just assume any company will, given enough time if they don't up front, use payment info or whatever parts of payment info they can scrape as part of ad profiling. Perhaps that's being very cynical. If they info they want is just Legal Name, then I'm not sure if a rotating card could get around that. Maybe they can't get any of that info from the payment handler depending on who is doing that? I do not know. It seems like a very deep and dark hole, the terrible things companies will do if you give them an inch, so I try to avoid it.

They only ask for whatever is associated with the card. And why would they be engaged in ad profiling? They don't have any ads anywhere. It's a pretty straightforward transaction: you pay them for email hosting and they provide it. I think they even open-sourced their billing system (github). But if you're thinking that adversarially, I'm not sure anyone can convince you of anything. All relationships require trust, including the most fundamental relationships in computing.

The ad profiling stuff being more generally speaking than with this company. Though in my head I always think of discord as the use case. Paying discord feels more like giving them another data point than giving them money. At least that's how I feel about it, and that's based on basically zero info so it could be entirely wrong.

So, the real problem here is in fact my ability to trust anyone that stands to potentially make a buck off of data. Which is more difficult to solve.

Fastmail is, obviously not discord. If nothing else, they're trying.

I've never heard of Kagi, but I'll have to put it on the list of things to keep in mind.

I'm in almost the exact same situation with fastmail¹ - end of Nov 2013, and I've been slowly cutting Google services out of my life for a while now, but search has been a hard one. As awful as Google is now, it's got over a decade of whatever data they collect on me and still generally produces passable results, somewhat better than DDG.

But I genuinely want an alternative to google here that reduces my dependency on them and doesn't do overtly harmful garbage like serve obviously false "quick answers" scraped from questionable web sources by unverifiable ML models.

  1. honestly at this point its webmail client experience is probably better than gmail too and its online storage is fine but you can just use it on desktop as an ordinary WebDAV share which is awesome

in reply to @ticky's post: