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One of my least favorite things on the Internet is when you search a question on Google and the top hit is someone on Reddit or a forum explaining that for more information you should search the question on Google

Google search: Have airline seats been shrinking over the years?

Reddit · r/NoStupidQuestions
40+ comments · 3 months ago
Yes. Airlines have made seats apx. 1.5 inches narrower and reduced space front to back by up to 4 inches. Google for more.

You could have stopped at;

@mcc
> One of my least favorite things on the Internet is when you search a question on Google and the top hit is someone on Reddit

Same same when it's scAmazon every time I search for a book. Or HitGub when my search is about a piece of software Or StackExchange when I'm searching an error code, and so on.

I'd love to find a search engine that isn't always trying to send me to DataFarms.

I've got searxng set up with a bunch of search engines that don't get their indexes from Google or Microsoft. In particular yacy is a FOSS and distributed search engine where the results come from each instance doing its own crawling. It's a bit slow and sometimes the results aren't the greatest, but as the only truly independent search engine it's worth the cost.
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@sj_zero @strypey @mcc SearX/SearXNG is good

I found some interesting results using

fdroid ,ask , curlie , wiby , seznam , Naver , lemmy , lobster , openstreetmap

@strypey @mcc Quite a few times, there are legitimate answers on those.

One can use web.archive.org to bypass their collection, if desired.

@lispi314
> Quite a few times, there are legitimate answers on those

... which if they're useful, point to primary sources that are not hosted by DataFarms. If they're not, well, that's a problem we need to solve as the open web community.

> One can use web.archive.org to bypass their collection

If there was a browser plug-in that did that automatically, that would help. But a decent web search would be better. See my post earlier today about that.

@mcc

@strypey @mcc

... which if they're useful, point to primary sources that are not hosted by DataFarms. If they're not, well, that's a problem we need to solve as the open web community.

Sometimes, quite often in fact, those primary sources never existed, were never public or died before the web archive could get to them.

In some other cases such as audio & electrical questions, the "primary source" would be an electrical engineering textbook. Kind of a rather passive-aggressive "read the manual" answer if all it does is point to that without answering directly. (It is however perfectly fine and desirable for it to link to it as a reference for the answer.)

@lispi314
> Sometimes, quite often in fact, those primary sources never existed, were never public or died before the web archive could get to them

*taps the sign*

> that's a problem we need to solve as the open web community.

@strypey >>> Sometimes, quite often in fact, those primary sources never existed, were never public or died before the web archive could get to them
>> that's a problem we need to solve as the open web community.

That's really only possible if total abolition of copyright and trade secrets is achieved, or rejection of *all* proprietary materiel is (not only plausible but) universal.

Otherwise information that corposcum and their ilk refuse to share will only ever be available from insiders, leaks and reverse-engineering.

Success of the open web doesn't meaningfully affect that dynamic, only the tertiary release site of the information.

@lispi314
> primary sources never existed, were never public or died before the web archive could get to them

Points to Archive.org/is/ph, institutional repositories run by uni libraries, Open Access journals, CC-licensed textbooks and manuals, code forges, open hardware forges, SciHub, abandonware sites, BitTorrent magnet links, IPFS links, etc, etc.

> total abolition of copyright and trade secrets... or rejection of *all* proprietary materiel is

... clearly not required.