ThorrJo

I'd like to start a thread for people to share what they're using for search now that quality & relevance of results are in steep decline on all major search engines.

I'm doing this for selfish as well as altruistic reasons, mostly because my "stack" has gotten a lot less useful over the past year, because the search engines I use repackage Bing, whose ability to return relevant results at all seems to be cratering.

My (shitty and getting worse) solution:

• DuckDuckGo as default search engine mostly for bang commands, in my personal opinion DDG's relevance has been shit for its entire existence
• StartPage as where I direct most of my general searches (by appending !sp on DDG)
• currently attempting to tune the Ublacklist extension to remove most of the clickbait results; this works, but it's not easy to set up if you don't use Google which seems to be the main search engine the developer tests with

The problem with this approach is that increasingly, Bing simply doesn't return hits on topics I know should have plenty to choose from. Filters only solve the issue of too many hits, not too few.

BTW I tried Qwant, but their claim of having their own index seems to be bullshit, the results look like repackaged Bing to me. And, the UX is terrible in Firefox for Android.

I'd love to hear suggestions.

tl;dr pls share what you are doing for web search these days in order to work around the rapidly declining quality of major search engines

This community - !Virology@lemmy.sdf.org - is exactly what it sounds like, a place for discussing & learning all about biological viruses. Computer viruses and prions are off topic.

Expected types of content will include scientific papers, as well as articles in the lay press, videos, etc.

The rules are designed to encourage posting of content that will appeal to readers with a strong AP (accelerated high school) or undergrad interest in biological sciences. Posting of extremely involved topics which require either a PhD or deep knowledge of a highly specific sub-field to enjoy is discouraged.

This community - !ChemistryVideos@lemmy.sdf.org - is exactly what it sounds like, a place for posting general interest videos about chemistry and closely related topics.

The rules are designed to encourage posting of videos that would be interesting to a layperson with an AP (high school) or undergrad understanding of physical sciences and a strong interest in chemistry. In other words, amateur chemistry videos are strongly encouraged, while videos about very narrow topics which require a PhD to understand are not encouraged.

YouTube has a great chemistry scene. It'd be great to have something similar on PeerTube someday, but we'll start with what's available. Amateur and professional content is on topic.

If you are familiar with r/DrugNerds on reddit, this is intended to be a very similar community, albeit hopefully with a wider focus.

r/DrugNerds tends to be heavily oriented toward discussion of psychoactives and nootropics, whereas I would like !DrugNerds@lemmy.sdf.org to serve people with interests in all subfields of pharmacology.

My hope is that in coming to DrugNerds you will be just as likely to find an article about Rational Drug Design, or a paper about the discovery of a new antibiotic, or a link to an especially pithy Derek Lowe post, as you will be to see a post about a recreational drug or nootropic.

I'm looking for input on how well Lemmy responds to occasional downtime of up to a few days, specifically regarding how federation recovers after such an event.

Basically looking to know how amenable it is to selfhosting via reverse proxy from dodgy setups which are the best some of us proles can manage. I try to run some services where I can but my situation inevitably results in an event or three per year, on average, with some days down.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/42097989

tl;dw: among other issues, the network doesn't appear to store messages until they're confirmed to arrive, so it's very possible to miss incoming messages with no indication to either party