> So this anonymous search engine stores cookies on your computer to serve you with personalized “content and ads” and it shares information about your use of the site with “advertising and analytics partners.” It then directs you to Google’s privacy policy page for information about how to opt out of Google cookies. While I struggle to see how Lukol is privacy-friendly (much less anonymous), it is a great example for why it is important to look behind catchy promises about privacy and anonymity.
It would be funny, in an ironic way, if it didn't undermine users so badly.
Article author response: I had a feeling as soon as I clicked onto the homepage that something was off. To their credit, the link to the privacy policy is on the homepage. Counter-point, the link text is "Lukol Protects Your Privacy."
Well that's the standard phrase today if you want to avoid telling people you don't give a damn.
Like when cookie banners start with "your privacy is important to us", followed by a list of 50 services that'll receive your user data from that site.
Though my favorite is the "our european visitors are important to us" banner for blocked EU users as it implies all other users are not important to the website owners due to a lack of comparable privacy laws.
Searx is great.
Every time searx results are bad to inexistent I compare with Google, and results are as bad to inexistent. This is in stark contrast to one year doing the same with DDG where !g was often the key to good results.
Ony thing is, because public instances tend to face some rate limiting about once a week, so everytime I type a long query I "CTRL A > CTRL C" it to make sure I don't lose it.
kagi.com is the best of the new searches that I've tried. My only reservation is that the planned cost when they start charging is more than I want to spend, but in the meantime, I'm really enjoying the search. It's the first non-google search engine where I'm not using !g or equivalent 20% of the time.
Bullshit, a technical term [1], is not falsehood, but words used with
complete and utter disregard as to whether they are true or false.
Corporate bullshit is the instrumental use of such words to "make the
right noises" and create some semblance of solidity from the gaseous
evacuations of "executive" types. That includes corporate mottos,
mission statements, and product descriptions, and to a large extent
privacy policies, ethics statements and corporate responsibility
pledges.
All fun and games.
The only downside is that our tolerance for such mischief has rendered
any sincere communication void. Nobody with a business that actually
wants to trade on these values has a chance.
Perhaps that is the point of this semantic spam, to discombobulate and
jam the value perceptions of the public so much that they are unable
to differentiate anything genuine from the tide spewed by the
shit-pedlars.
A tricky problem all search engines face, regardless of scale and popularity, is dealing with bot spam, of which there is a lot [1].
It's not uncommon to face quarter of a million bot-searches per day and it's really difficult to actually combat since they're on a botnet, without some sort of privacy invasion, either via cookies or something like cloudflare.
It would be funny, in an ironic way, if it didn't undermine users so badly.