buc.ci is a Fediverse instance that uses the ActivityPub protocol. In other words, users at this host can communicate with people that use software like Mastodon, Pleroma, Friendica, etc. all around the world.
This server runs the snac software and there is no automatic sign-up process.
@marlinz #Informationretrieval is depending on the current task and situation.
Sometimes #navigation is the most efficient one, sometimes it's #search. (my #TagTrees are a combination of both) And then there is teleporting, bookmarks/favorites, ...
Unfortunately, most people don't have the knowledge and experience to use multiple methods and decide which method to choose in a specific situation. 😞
I just read another fascinating insight from Karl!
The parallels between his blog posts on org-mode, Emacs, and PIM are striking.
They mirror my Teamcenter PLM work where users consistently demand order and structure.
I used to say in trainings: 'Folders are for people who don't know how to search.' (lie karl)
For that, I was viciously debated by attendees :-P"
#emacs #orgmode #pim #plm #teamcenter #search
Danke @publicvoit ich schmunzle gerade
Ever wonder if you're using Kagi to its full potential? Our new Tips blog is here to help, with feature guides, use cases, and more.
Think of a feature or product you could use a full guide for? Let us know! We're aiming to update this resource on a weekly basis.
No matter how esoteric AI literature has become, and no matter how thoroughly the intellectual origins of AI's technical methods have been forgotten, the technical work of AI has nonetheless been engaged in an effort to domesticate the Cartesian soul into a technical order in which it does not belong. The problem is not that the individual operations of Cartesian reason cannot be mechanized (they can be) but that the role assigned to the soul in the larger architecture of cognition is untenable. This incompatibility has shown itself up in a pervasive and ever more clear pattern of technical frustrations. The difficulty can be shoved into one area or another through programmers' choices about architectures and representation schemes, but it cannot be made to go away.From Phil Agre's 1995 article The Soul Gained And Lost.
If one were to continue the genealogy in this article from 1995 to present, one would find many of the same issues inherent in Cartesian dualism present in large language models. Like the STRIPS system Agre surveys, LLMs also generate sequences. They also must make choices among many available options at each step of sequence generation. They also use heuristics to guide this process that would otherwise explode intractably. The heuristics, or what Agre dubs "determining tendency", are random number generators and "guardrails" in LLMs instead of the tree-structured search of previous-generation AI systems. But otherwise the systems are structured similarly.
It's fascinating, but not coincidental, that the determining tendency of AI systems like these is so often perceived to have mystical or even God-like qualities. Breathless predictions about the endless potential of tree-structured search in early writing on GOFAI resembles modern proclamations of imminent AGI or superintelligence among generative AI boosters because both of these mechanisms---tree search or random number generation---are situated where the Cartesian soul would be. These mysterious determining tendencies, homunculuses of last resort, or souls are timeless, acausal factors that choose a single path from an infinite space of possibilities, and thereby direct the encompassing agent's behavior in an intelligent manner.
This is one reason why I posted the other day that if you removed the random number generation from LLMs, the illusion of their intelligence would more than likely quickly evaporate. You'd be excising their soul, leaving behind a zombie!
#AI #GenAI #GenerativeAI #LLM #GOFAI #search #heuristics #CartesianDualism #IntelligenceAsRandomNumberGeneration
I just did a google search for "laptop camera cover slider canada".
The first page returned contains:
Row of sponsored products (Etsy, Amazon, Walmart)
List of sponsored products (Etsy, Amazon, Walmart)
AI Overview ( unhelpful text mentioning Etsy, Amazon, and Walmart))
Result (Amazon)
Popular Products (all Amazon)
Sponsored result (Etsy)
Other questions
Result (Amazon)
Result (Walmart)
Result (Temu)
Result (Reddit)
Result (Amazon)
People also searched for
I'm an old.
I keep seeing #scam voicemail from different spoofed numbers, all asking me to call the same number:
855-357-2070
#search is slop. There's no reason to #report spoofed numbers, but I do it anyway. My #cellphone #provider swears that they do some kind of deep scrying on spoofed numbers, " Scam ID also catches spoofed calls because T-Mobile reviews beyond the incoming number and tracks actual call behavior." So how does their #spying fail to recognize these calls?
I'm getting several every day, Who can I reach out to to stop this bullshit?
Yes, I am a T-Mobile customer because my queer-platonic partner and I have a legacy Sprint contract that no other provider can beat. Because we were old when cell companies thought olds couldn't use technology. And we're also poors.
My #fediverse #search #engine plans are going well. Making great #progress with the initial dataset. Next comes #querying it through a UI.
In not so secret news, I'm working on a #fediverse #search #index service that pulls in posts from all known #instances of #content that is public across thousands of servers. I'll let you know when it goes live.
Avis aux amateurs de décentralisation ! 🌐
Je viens de valider ma présence sur @HolosDiscover. C'est le moteur de recherche éthique qu'il nous fallait pour explorer Mastodon et au-delà.
💡 Comprendre la démarche : https://discover.holos.social/how-it-works
🔗 Lancer une recherche : https://discover.holos.social/
On se retrouve là-bas ? 😉
#Fediverse #Mastodon #Search #Research
"The AI-powered scam content army is here, and it's buying Google Ads."
"Use a search engine that doesn't show sponsored results at all. I use Kagi, which is paid and ad-free."
https://dev.to/davidshortman/i-googled-brew-upgrade-and-found-a-malware-operation-5be3
Great review about Kagi, and all the features that make it worth paying for:
https://dandelion-utilitarian.com/2026/02/17/kagi-won-google-lost.html
New study: "Our results also show #AI #search surfaces significantly fewer long tail information sources, lower response variety, and significantly more low credibility and right- and center-leaning information sources, compared to traditional search."
https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.13415
Kagi featured on @davidbombal's "Best OSINT Tools 2026: What Pros Use Daily"
"These are absolute game-changers."
I'm working on a website for a consulting business with a friend of mine (note: the business has two consultants but no business at the moment; this is early steps). Using a Hugo theme I downloaded, and saw that it has some placeholder text (see image). I was interested in who wrote the text so I searched.
I still don't know who the author was, but now I have a fun way to find web pages that haven't been completed at businesses, universities, nonprofits, etc.
Here, you try! Just paste the following into your favorite search engine:
in which roasted parts of sentences fly into your mouth
You searched for: "fungicide"
Best result: "kerosene 4L"
??? I mean, maybe? Especially if you ignite it?
Retail websites!
I'm thinking about how #discovery and #search could work in the #Fediverse. In particular, using one's social network as an alternative to a centralised search engine. One option would be to index URLs referred to in posts and boosts from your network, and I actually have the data and infrastructure set up to relatively easily try that, but I'm also thinking about a more deliberate way to post lists of bookmarks which others can index.
The simplest scheme I can think of is:
1. Use verified links to connect my #Mastodon profile to my homepage (done). This is a bit Mastodon-centric at the moment, but I'm sure there are similar approaches for other applications, and maybe we could eventually have a standard.
2. Use #FOAF autodiscovery to connect my homepage to a FOAF profile (done). This is resurrecting what seems to be a pretty dead technology, but it also does seem like a useful tool for the job.
3. Use some sort of semantic web technology to link my FOAF profile to my list of bookmarks (todo). I haven't yet found a good existing way to do this. There are various library and publishing oriented ontologies, some of which link to FOAF, but none really seem right for the job. It may be necessary to create something new here.
4. Express my list of bookmarks in a standard format (todo). Again, I haven't found an obvious existing way of doing this. The Firefox bookmark export format might be workable, but it's not great, and I think we really need things like annotations and a way to share indexing data. Maybe a single new ontology can cover both of these points.
I'd be very interested to know if anyone has any thoughts on any of this, or if anyone knows of any related projects, e.g. Ties from @raffomania and @pears.
Neocities founder stuck in chatbot hell after Bing blocked 1.5 million sites
Microsoft won’t explain why Bing blocked 1.5 million Neocities websites.
Archive: ia: https://s.faithcollapsing.com/h7qeh
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/02/neocities-founder-stuck-in-chatbot-hell-after-bing-blocked-1-5m-sites/#bing #geocities #google #microsoft #neocities #policy #search-results
New blog post is up! How I added search functionality to Rack Root, a FastAPI app.
I cover just about all the Python code I wish I had examples for when I was figuring this out. I go over the database class design, indexes/vectors a little bit, and the API design I ended up implementing.
#blogging #writing #development #search #rackroot #python #backend #fastapi #homelab #learning #databases #sqlalchemy
Huh.
"In addition to excluding neocities.org from search results, when we discovered the block, Bing was also placing what appeared to be a phishing attack against Neocities on the first page of search results."
https://blog.neocities.org/blog/2026/01/27/bing-block
#neocities #indieweb #websites #tech #technology #microsoft #bing #search
Using the Kagi Search Android app? How would you improve it?
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.kagi.search
ICE Agents Reportedly Told They Can Enter Homes Without Warrants From Judge
Topline Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents are being authorized to forcefully enter homes without a judge’s warrant, according…
#NewsBeep #News #Topstories #federal #Headlines #ICE #Immigration #Maine #Minnesota #Politics #search #TopStories #Trump #warrant
https://www.newsbeep.com/368349/
I may be doing something wrong, but...
I frequently delete all cookies, etc. and this means the DDG AI "thing" keeps coming back. AI should never be "opt out". It should be "off" by default and stay off until I ask for it.
I'm looking for a new search engine BTW. Suggestions welcome. 🙂
FreeBSD search: <https://www.freebsd.org/search/>
FreeBSD mailing list search engine: <https://lists.freebsd.org/search/> – thanks to @_bapt_
my personal #digitalindependenceday state is this
✅ #Mastodon (instead of X/Meta)
✅ #Signal (although all the other messengers are still installed because #family )
✅ #Browser Vivaldi (replacing Firefox/Chrome/Edge)
✅ #search #Kagi (replacing Google and co)
✅ local music collection (instead of any streaming service!)
✅ #Vaultwarden (instead of relying on browser, 1Password, etc.)
✅ #bazzite #linux (for the HTPC in the living room)
✅ eMail Self-hosted and #posteo (parallel to Google, removing it from existing accounts as we go on)
✅ self hosted Synology instead of Google Drive / OneDrive, iCloud
⭕️ Payment (#VISA und #paypal)
⭕️ Android
@greger Very hard to find. Both @kagihq and @Mojeek have this feature called Lenses/Focus which I find very useful; allowing you to search a specific set of domains, like online encyclopedias, small independent sites like blogs, university websites only, etc.
If I know I'm looking for hard facts from reliable sources and not generic and bloated content writing for ad revenue, I use those options.
OK, who can explain to me why #DuckDuckGo image search results change when I switch on the 'Italy' setting (top left)? Dont say "results from Italy" because there's a Japanese Wikipedia result in there.
(This is no invitation to come tell me why I should use another #search engine.)
I did a basic image search from StartPage yesterday, for "Sisyphus".
Wow.
I guess it's been a while since I tried this. There are lots of famous paintings and drawings around this classic character and his story, but rather than getting a lot of those, 95% of the results were very obvious "AI" slop. Awful, shitty slop. Stuff that jumps off the page saying "No human intellect or feeling was used in the production of this image".
A few big landowners are really letting their flocks shit all over the village commons. Not gonna have much of a commons left at this rate.
#commons #AI #slop #diffusion #image #search #village #VillageCommons
GAH. Gotta remember to stop using #DuckDuckGo search.
I literally searched for bookshop.org
The first hit is an ad for a different book retailer.
Ugh, I’m getting tired of searching for simple programming answers and hitting pages that start “Python is a really popular computer programming language”, then scrolling down 2/3 of a page of guff before finding what I need.
No I won’t ask ChatGPT, that’s a whole different dumpster of wrong.
"Google's 'free' search comes with the cost of your time wading through ads, your attention sold to advertisers, and results that prioritize revenue over relevance. Kagi flips that model."
https://www.makeuseof.com/i-switched-default-search-from-google-to-niche-engine/
We have a playlist of tips and quick feature demos for a range of Kagi's products.
What would you like to see next?
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLN_f3QMLVdxboQN5YulNanFlImgTJmcSS
One Open-source Project Daily A simple, fast and user-friendly alternative to 'find'
Geeks: Can anyone recommend any papers or blog posts that discuss techniques for refining and improving search results in a full text search engine? I am getting results that are technically accurate but unsatisfying.
To be clear, I am not talking about SEO.
one interesting thing about yacy - it is basically portable, all self contained so you can just grab the folder and move it to another machine and it just works. I have it on a hdd raid, it is a bit slow, moving it to a machine with nvme or ssd helps a bunch #yacy #search engine #index #tagcloud #related
I dared to type the same string in google search engine
The output was surprisingly on point, the presentation not great and the massive massive fully identifiable string I had to strip out!
That's where the hidden danger is, that string was so big it took about the whole size of the displayable part of my Android, think about it
The images were totally wrong when you scroll down on google search
https://www.google.com/search?q=Stefano+Marinelli
#programming #Stories #ITnotes #Stefano #Marinelli #networking #technology #search #engines #Duck #DuckDuckGo
It is very nice and heartwarming to know that there are still search engines left which properly bring up what you asked for.
When I typed the string that you can see at the bottom of the screen cap {Stefano Marinelli} I got proper results
I could immediately go where I want to and read what I want to read
#programming #Stories #ITnotes #Stefano #Marinelli #networking #technology #search #engines #Duck #DuckDuckGo
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=Stefano%20Marinelli&ko=-1&kbg=-1&ia=web
#Business Model #Opportunity: Parametric #ARM #RISC #SBC #product #search!
The #OpenWRT TOH is AMAZING, but oWRT doesn't run on everything, afaik. (or it doesn't make sense to use a particular SBC for networking, hence it's not included)
I want something like #Geizhals, the parametric price comparison search engine, in DE/AT/PL/UK/EU ...for a COMPLETE set of old and current SBCs, on a global scale!
I'd bet, @geerlingguy might like this idea.
"click specs, find candidates" - that's the idea
In this video, product designer Seth Cottle shares why he switched to Kagi, how it changed the way he uses the web, and the features that keep him a member:
#Victoria #police expand #warrantless #search powers over large parts of #Melbourne with no reason given.
Victoria police has declared the entirety of #MelbourneCBD and large parts of East and South Melbourne as a “designated area” for six months, which provides officers with greater search powers without a warrant.
The declaration makes it an offence for anyone to stop or resist police from conducting “pat down” searches, or removing “items of of outer clothing such as headwear, scarves, jackets, etc”:
It is an offence under the Act to obstruct or hinder a police officer or protective service officer in the exercise of a power to stop and search a person or vehicle or to fail to comply with a direction to leave the designated area.
The announcement also gives police the power to demand people remove face masks that may allow them to conceal their identity or protect themselves “from the effects of crowd-controlling substances”, such as pepper spray:
A police officer may also exercise their power under the Act to direct you to leave the designated area if you refuse to remove a face covering.
Designated areas are often declared to allow police to deal with major planned protests or demonstrations. In this case, the declaration has been made from 30 November to 29 May, 2026.
A reason for the six-month period has so far not been provided by Victoria Police.
The force has the power to make designated area declarations under section 10D (1) of the Control of Weapons Act 1990.
Microsoft has announced it is to retire access to its Bing Search APIs for must users on 11th August.
Comment from #DuckDuckGo, @brave @MetaGer and @Mojeek on Microsoft’s sudden move
Google is innovating search in an amazing and yet predictable way — it’s removing the search results. There will only be the “AI Overview,” much loved by nobody.From https://circumstances.run/users/davidgerard/statuses/114122009704468173You might think the point of search was to find a thing, then go to it. But then Google doesn’t make enough ad money. Trying to wheedle an answer out of a hallucinating robot might keep you on the page longer.
Edit: Reading the Google blog post about this change more carefully (thanks @picklish@weirder.earth ), it seems more of an experimental feature than a default. I think the worry that Google will eventually make "AI overview" the default is a real and valid one, but I don't it's the case right now. If it ever does happen we will need to stop using the word "Google" as a synonym for "search" and declare RIP Google, 1998 - 2025
#IR #InformationRetrieval #search #Google #RIPGoogle #AISlop