Science Memes
Welcome to c/science_memes @ Mander.xyz!
A place for majestic STEMLORD peacocking, as well as memes about the realities of working in a lab.
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- Don't throw mud. Behave like an intellectual and remember the human.
- Keep it rooted (on topic).
- No spam.
- Infographics welcome, get schooled.
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Memes
Miscellaneous
Is there any good search engines? I mean I've tried searching recently for a solution I referenced 3 months ago and it's disappeared from Google and Bing.
Shit, even looking up repair information for a household appliance if can't find the model before the newest and it all points to a sale page for the newest version.
Maybe AkJeeves!?
Kagi is meant to be okay, but it’s paid.
There’s also SearX which you could self host.
I second Kagi with the additional mention of their "lens" feature that allows results to be restricted to scholarly sources which is very relevant to the meme's search needs.
& that pdf search after.
Plus forum search so you never have to add "reddit" or "lemmy" to your search phrase again.
https://scholar.google.com/ hasn't been quite as enshittified
I've been using DuckDuckGo for a few years now, and I never went back to Google. Maybe give it a try !
My understanding is that duckduckgo is just Bing without tracking, I also have used it for a few years to decent success but figure it's worth noting
I use duck duck go but sometimes I just have to use google.
Use same search terms etc and can't get what I want.
The problem is that humanity now has an incentive to produce spam content (ad money) and programs that can meticulously craft spam content to look like it's written by a human (LLMs).
I have to assume that the result is tons of spam content, which the traditional search engines have to sift through.
If they'd present you with all that spam content, you wouldn't find anything useful.
So, they try to filter out that spam content, but because it looks like it's written by a human, they're going to accidentally filter out useful content, too.
There's also at least some measurements, that search results are decidedly getting worse: https://www.theregister.com/2024/01/17/google_search_results_spam/
So, yeah, I think, all traditional search engines are massively struggling with this. Maybe something can be done with only indexing known-good sites, but for specialty information, like the repair information of your household appliance, that will probably be worse...
The only way crystals can heal you is if that crystal is salt and your illness is a salt deficiency.
Presenting to the emergency room with hyponatremia, from hypo meaning low, natron meaning sodium, and hemia meaning presence in blood. Low sodium presence in blood !
What if I'm bleeding out from a gunshot wound and I have a crystal that is sufficient diameter to plug said gunshot wound?
Helps not die. Not so much heal.
Not dying helps heal.
I remain skeptical. But you do you.
scholar.google.com is where you want to go.
Also, in my Google-fu experience technical terms work well for finding better scholarly results.
Same experience I have had. Swapping to scholar gets me relevant results that aren't filled with ai gibberish and backwater Hokum. Still have to be careful about study sizes and sigma values and applicability, but miles ahead for at least getting to that being my issue.
Your scholarly ways are not safe from AI gibberish.
Yes this is absurd, but it's a (serious) scientific community issue, not a search engine issue.
Putting scientific in the search criteria should redirect there then.
At the very least, it might be nice if they ask you if you want to go there instead.
On the other hand, I'm just happy that Google Scholar hasn't gotten completely destroyed by SEO yet.
I don't even get "did you mean" anymore. Just, we found more examples of this, so this must be what you meant.
Even DuckDuckGo straight-up tells you "we didn't find many results containing [blank]." Yeah. That's why I wrote [blank.]
"There are a lot of results that aren't what you're looking for."
Okay, great?
Ever died from smallpox while holding a healing crystal?
Didn’t fucking think so 😎
For those looking for some Google alternatives:
- Qwant has a custom indexing strategy and is okay
- Brave Search ~uses Google and Bing~ EDIT: they use a custom index too
- Startpage uses Google and Bing and it’s prettier than Brave IMO
- SearX is ugly but has a lot of sources
- Perplexity AI tracks the shit out of you but it’s decent
- Kagi is customizable but it costs you
Feel free to add on any I missed or opinions on these; I haven’t used any extensively
EDIT: Ecosia for trees and DDG for Bing without ads
Brave uses its own index. It used to be supplemented with results from other engines but I believe they have now phased that out.
Brave is the best of the free options in my experience, and it supports "bangs" which let's you send your querry to a different engine (typing "how far is it to the sun !g" will pass the search to google. Duckduckgo also supports bangs), this is especially helpful for image searches (!gi for google images) since braves image search sucks dogshit 😅
Quant seemed like the second best free option in my experience. Some people don't like brave as a company for various reasons, so quant may be a good option for those folks. Its my understanding that Mozilla has worked with quant in some way, which is kinda neat.
Both have their own index making them a sustainable/viable option going forward, where meta search engines that use other engine's results are at the whim of those they fetch the results from (but may provide better results by piggybacking off a larger successful engine)
MetaGer is a metasearch engine focused on protecting users' privacy. Based in Germany, and hosted as a cooperation between the German NGO 'SUMA-EV - Association for Free Access to Knowledge' and the University of Hannover, the system is built on 24 small-scale web crawlers under MetaGer's own control. In September 2013, MetaGer launched MetaGer.net, an English-language version of their search engine.
Source: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/MetaGer
It currently supports the following languages/regions:
Dansk (Danmark)
Deutsch (Österreich/Schweiz/Deutschland)
English (Great Britain/Ireland/Malaysia/USA)
Español (España/México)
Suomalainen (Suomi)
Français (Canada/France)
Italiano (Italia)
Nederlands (Nederland)
Polski (Polska)
Svenska (Sverige)
Source: https://metager.org/lang
There is a TOR-hidden service too:
It is open source:
https://gitlab.metager.de/open-source/MetaGer
And has other useful features, for example:
[...] you can hide yourself behind our proxyserver just by opening the result anonymously? Use "OPEN ANONYMOUSLY"; this also affects the following links.
Source: https://metager.org/tips
Alternatively I use some SearxNG-instances, preferably hosted in the EU:
Ecosia uses the money they generate with ads to plant trees 🌿 (I think it's bing on the backend)
I'm not sure what exactly you're typing into the search field, but I don't anything like this. The top 3 sites I get for a search of "minerals" are wikipedia, australian museum, and britannica. Typing in "crystals" gets me a healthline article debunking crystal healing, but the following results are some woman's personal store and amazon. Lastly, being direct about wanting scientific articles gets me said articles...
Side note: Why are there so many people pushing for kagi in this thread and skipping over the fact that duckduckgo exists? It's kinda bizarre to see.
Hell, typing in "scientific data about minerals" gets me a bunch of university geology department websites.
Why not just use Google scholar?
This scene live rent free in my head. Also fuckin Crystal Healing types make me look bad when I just think pretty rocks look nice
I know right? Completely ruin geology.
Aaaaannd this is why I use Kagi. The site ranking feature let's me block or down rank sketchy sites. (And lets you boost credible sites.)
As a gem and mineral collecting hobbyist I feel this pain so, so much.
It looks like OP tried to write $99.99 but got drunk and wrote it backwards
Could be Québécois . They put the dollar sign after the number, rather than before if I recall.
Or from a country that uses a currency that puts their sign afterwards so not that familiar with dollars
It makes sense to put then sign after
We say 99.99 dollars not dollars 99.99
God I had this issue looking for used wheels for my car. Like, actual wheels to use for a track day, but results showed nothing but simracing threads for used STEERING wheels.
Like multivitamins? (Also contains minerals!)