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Cake day: July 23rd, 2023

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  • Remember when google was beloved by everyone back then when they’re still have “don’t be evil” motto? Cloudflare right now is like google back then: super useful, provides a lot of free services that would be expensive on other providers. But unlike google, if cloudflare go full evil in the future, the impact will be much larger because they’re an mitm proxy capable of seeing unencrypted traffics across all websites under their wing. Right now they’re serving ~30% of top 10,000 websites and growing.














  • Marginalia is interesting because it attempt to search non-commercial contents. this might unearth some contents you can’t find on google. If you search something on google and the result is full of spam or ecommerce product pages, try the same keyword on marginalia. Unlike google, it’s a keyword search engine, so keep in mind not to ask question in it, but put the keyword that might be included in the content you want to search.

    Kagi is a paid search engine. it does use data from other big search engines, but apply its own weighting and filtering and unearth contents normally buried on the big search engines. There is a free trial account if you want to test it yourself to see if it’s better than google for your use case.

    There are also various searxng instances. searxng is an opensource meta search engines, which uses data from other search engine. Each instances may be configured differently, so you might want to test some of them to decide which instance works the best for your use case.

    Some interesting comparison: https://danluu.com/seo-spam/


  • In the March 2019 core update to search, which happened about a week before the end of the code yellow, was expected to be “one of the largest updates to search in a very long time. Yet when it launched, many found that the update mostly rolled back changes, and traffic was increasing to sites that had previously been suppressed by Google Search’s “Penguin” update from 2012 that specifically targeted spammy search results, as well as those hit by an update from an August 1, 2018, a few months after Gomes became Head of Search.

    Search engagement is declining, so the obvious fix is to make the search result worse which means people have to search more to find what they need. Engagement metrics went through the roof! Crisis averted!

    Thanks to this fuck up, competition is a thing again in search engine space. Other search engines are getting better and start to capture the fleeing users.