How many websites do you browse with links to truly illegal content?

If you live in a country with truly abysmal human rights, definitely don’t bother with this plugin, but in most cases you should be fine on the illegal side.

Even if somehow the website you’re browsing has some super sketchy ad to buyillegaldrugshere.com or whatever, to get in trouble with the law in most civilized places you’d have to actually buy the illegal drugs, not just ping the illegal drugs IP. Especially since you can pretty easily prove to a judge that your system fetches ad links automatically and without further engagement.

Not saying it can’t happen, just that it’s really unlikely you would be served an ad for something so illegal just clicking on it is a liability. The literally only case I can think of coming close is CSAM, but even then, if you’re regularly browsing websites that advertise CSAM, maybe find other websites to occupy your time? And I can just about guarantee any website serving CSAM ads is already doing illegal shit, so you should probably be more worried about that than an ad-click…

Start the campaign now for President in 2256. Wouldn’t want the judges to look politically biased, they’ll have to hold off on sentencing until after the election.

Came over during the great 3rd party app API debacle. It didn’t even make the list. Am I old now?

And the people in the chat who have the authority to declassify information declared it to be a declassified chat, so IDK what more permission he needed to share what was freely given to him

For those who maybe breeze past it in the article linked, here’s an unofficial tool for searching all of the zillions of Kagi bangs: https://kbe.smaertness.net/

They have all the usual, !g for Google, !gi Google Images, !b Bing, !ddg, !brave, etc, plus like a billion niche ones.

Unlike free search where there’s definitely no incentive to sell your data to keep the lights on, right?

Get dat flatpak.

In addition to a comically large bill to pay, Saudi Arabia has a pretty significant issue with attracting outside investors / tourism. I’m guessing most people visiting this thread can’t name the capital of SA (hint, it’s not Dubai… That’s not even in the right country)

No one wants to visit because they’re actively hostile towards even the slightest imposition on their beliefs. It’s hard to justify going somewhere where you could get locked up for what would elsewhere be considered a minor faux pas.

Good luck justifying a $9T vanity project that will only be visited / populated by citizen oil workers, assuming they will even still have jobs in a few decades.

SA needs to undergo some pretty significant cultural shifts before even considering dropping a few trilly on some new digs.

Anyone know the path to hitting them with CCPA info/take down requests?

If that’s true, why bother “monitoring” a search engine? This whole list screams of somebody who knows nothing about tech put out a vague RFP and a contractor pulled a list of “top sites” and used it to justify an egregious proposal cost.

DOGE, if you’re looking for waste and fraud, perhaps here’s a good source.

I think one big issue is much of the cheap debt is loans people have defaulted on. So you have to stop paying the debt, hope for minimal ramifications before it hits the open market, then buy it back up at a discount, assuming you have the funds laying around to afford the discounted rate.

Loans backed by property (e.g., home, car) which can be repossessed tend to not be as heavily discounted. So its really just if you have massive credit card, student loan, or medical debt, and are willing to put up with harassment from debt collectors on the hope that it’ll be bundled into something worth less than your individual debt

You have my phone number? Then why do you never call?

In terms of result quality? In my opinion, based on my particular search habits:

Kagi > SearXNG > Brave > Startpage/Google > DDG/Ecosia/Bing

Everyone is going to have their own opinions on each of those companies, but from a results lens, that’s what I find to be most/least effective.

Like all Google products, they will still make a halfhearted attempt to make it as useful as they can before absolutely destroying it with ads

Guessing Edge by default sent you to Bing, no surprise the DDG results look similar, given that they use Bing under he hood. They shuffle rankings slightly, but it’s the same index.

You can also use Ecosia, if your prefer a different shade of lipstick on your pig search results.

There’s not really a strong player in the open source search space.

Mwmbl exists, but per their own readme:

The quality is a long way’s off from matching the commercial engines at the moment

Kagi provides the source code for many of their services, but is not truly open source, especially because at its core, it relies on applying its own rankings to other’s indexes.

That said, search is a space where the old adage rings true:

If you’re not paying for it; you are the product!

For what it’s worth, I find value in my Kagi subscription.

That’s probably $5/yr, most domains are renewed annually, and the more mundane TLDs, like .com are $12-15/yr (hence $1/mo)

Personally, my wife and I each have a version of firstname@fundomain.vanitytld, as well as a shared house@fundomain.vanitytld where all of our bills and shared expenses go to.

For some modicum of privacy, we also have a forwarding domain connected to SimpleLogin that allows us to do website.catchall@forwardingdomain.com for each website where we have little trust in the owner respecting our privacy.