41–50 of 81 posts
The site is designed beautifully to distract me to look around how it has been implemented rather than the main topic - search tips. Yes, Font could have been better for readability :)
Push the reader button in the address bar?
Great set of tips. On a side note, I wish the site had a simple, easy to read fonts option similar to the switchable light/dark mode.
Maybe your browser's reader mode fits the bill? Firefox allows to choose serif/sans-serif fonts, font-size, line spacing and background color for example.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Push the reader button in the address bar?
In Brave browser reader mode is not enabled if shield is enabled for the site. So I had to disable shield to see reader mode. Not intuitive, but there is work around.
i think i would have found most of the examples gwern listed, maybe not as quickly. i go wild on google iteratively before jumping to another search engine
but, is there a tournament or contest along the lines of 'producing some result via searches' quicker than others? im thinking a form of this might exist at defcon/thotcon/similar
ironically, instead of searching, im asking here haha
Some neat stuff here. Only VERY briefly mentioned (so briefly I missed it at first) however: Substituting Yandex for Google is great for many use cases. Being Russian, Yandex is no doubt heavily censored, but only for things important to Russian politics . Ironically, this means that for non-Russian users, it's considerably LESS censored than Google, which has SEVERELY crippled its search in recent years in the name…
Some neat stuff here. Only VERY briefly mentioned (so briefly I missed it at first) however: Substituting Yandex for Google is great for many use cases. Being Russian, Yandex is no doubt heavily censored, but only for things important to Russian politics . Ironically, this means that for non-Russian users, it's considerably LESS censored than Google, which has SEVERELY crippled its search in recent years in the name…
Surely this is not suggesting that Google searches afford any privacy. ;)
While it might not be the Russian government who is watching, Google searches are certainly not ephemeral nor free from analysis in real-time. Aside from "things important to Russian politics", I would guess Google on behalf of its customers, who could be anyone, including governments, is far more interested in what someone is searching than the Russian government.
The point I am getting at here is that there is privacy from a government and there is privacy from a company. Each is a form of privacy, but only the company is in the business of commercialising the information it derives from violating privacy. (Not to mention that, at least in the US, the government is subject to a body of privacy law that does not apply to companies.)
Both the government and the company may violate privacy in the interests of staying in power. They could, e.g., suppress certain information when it is in their interests. However only the ad services company has the additional motivation to collect information to generate profits. The government may believe it has no choice but to monitor web search. The company OTOH freely chooses to monitor web search, as a business.
Anyway, here is a question I have about Yandex.
Google, Bing and other search engines such as DuckDuckGo now limit the number of results that can be retrieved in one session. Based on personal observation, with Google the ceiling is currently 300, with Bing and DDG, it's more like 250.^1 I wonder if Yandex is doing the same.
These limits by Google, Bing, DDG, etc. are eliminating "discoverability" via searching the web. "General" searches that would yield more than 300 results will not return more than 300 results. Users collecting large numbers of results from a general search is effectively prohibited. Google's idea of discovery is "I'm feeling lucky". Of all the silly changes Google has made to search, the most useless feature persists.
Perhaps "broad" searches do not benefit an online ad services business as much as more specific searches do. Limiting total results also puts more pressure on websites to try to be listed within the first 300. (Solution: Buy ads from Google.) A website who is at position 301 is undiscoverable thanks to Google's inexplicable truncation. Interestingly, on some, perhaps all, of their different "UI's", Google no longer numbers results.
1. To illustrate the truncation, try a search for a common string that would appear in the tag of more than 300 pages on the web. https://www.google.com/search?q=title:[common string]&num=100&filter=0
off base question, i suppose inspired by porch sitting + reading gwern's case studies: https://www.gwern.net/Search#case-studies i think i would have found most of the examples gwern listed, maybe not as quickly. i go wild on google iteratively before jumping to another search engine but, is there a tournament or contest along the lines of 'producing some result via searches' quicker than others? im thinking a form o…
Monster energy sponsoring the fastest ‘search parent directory’ surfers.
Ahhh if only.
Also while I’m at it I’d like ‘kicking stones against other stones at juuuuuust the right angle to ping against another stone while walking leashed dogs’ to become an Olympic sport.
Some neat stuff here. Only VERY briefly mentioned (so briefly I missed it at first) however: Substituting Yandex for Google is great for many use cases. Being Russian, Yandex is no doubt heavily censored, but only for things important to Russian politics . Ironically, this means that for non-Russian users, it's considerably LESS censored than Google, which has SEVERELY crippled its search in recent years in the name…
Is there a search portal that does backend-side searches of all these politically-disjoint large search providers, and then merges and deduplicates the result?
I thought it was a really dumb name at the time, but I remembered it some 20 years later.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
DDG does support some search operands. https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/sy...
We're both correct. They support and ignore operands. "cats and dogs": Results for exact term "cats and dogs". If no results are found, we'll try to show related results. The entire point of using quotes (or + back in the day) is to limit the results to the search term. Fluffling up the results with stuff we aren't asking for forces us to consider and disregard each one of those unasked-for results - until we get fru…
Also google does the same thing all the time.
Also I just tried to get that behavior on duck duck go and it didn't do it. For my test quote, with three words that appear together on many pages but never adjacent, it just said no results found.
But if it works like google, it will tell you at the top of the page when there were no real results and it's serving fallback results. Look for that message instead of looking for a lack of results.
Some neat stuff here. Only VERY briefly mentioned (so briefly I missed it at first) however: Substituting Yandex for Google is great for many use cases. Being Russian, Yandex is no doubt heavily censored, but only for things important to Russian politics . Ironically, this means that for non-Russian users, it's considerably LESS censored than Google, which has SEVERELY crippled its search in recent years in the name…
"Zero privacy of course." Surely this is not suggesting that Google searches afford any privacy. ;) While it might not be the Russian government who is watching, Google searches are certainly not ephemeral nor free from analysis in real-time. Aside from "things important to Russian politics", I would guess Google on behalf of its customers, who could be anyone, including governments, is far more interested in what so…
Russia uses search data for things like applying pressure to political dissidents, blackmailing family members, harassing and attacking journalists etc. You can't easily opt out of this if you or your family is in Russia.
I consider the Google level of privacy completely acceptable, the Russian one not acceptable.