I think a click stream isn't necessary, but Kagi is not a good basis for the argument in my opinion.
Kagi is a primarily meta search engine. The click stream exists on their sources (Bing, Google, Yandex, Marginalia, not sure if they use Brave). They do have Teclis which is their own index that they use, and their systems for reordering the page of results such as downranking heavy ad pages, and based upon user preferences (which I love).
I was tempted not to respond, but honestly this comment makes me slightly angry. As someone who is young, and works on software this comment does not seem very worldly to me. Have you seen the US government, Japan, and other places struggling to still switch away from antiquated technologies? Yes, they are partially incompetent, but also there is a certain level of justifiable trust in the system working in its current form.
> Grandpa also needs to do his banking online, his taxes, needs to manage his online identity, car registration, medical things.
No, they don't. They can use paper, phone, and fax still (at least in the USA). One of my grandparent's did this until very recently (when they sadly passed away) for most things. I was at one point told by the same grandparent that the "the familiar 'red yellow green blue'" you so describe they suspected was a virus and they don't understand how it appeared on their computer. Another grandparent struggled with the concept of folders (as in file explorers), and when they first received their a phone would shut it down and then was confused on why it wouldn't receive phone calls. These people were successful and educated (they had gone to college and used their degrees in their professional life). They just don't care about technology and when Apple makes a choice for them on the default browser they are happy.
I don't know how it is in USA, but in EU, if you don't know how to use a phone as 2FA you are basically out of almost every bank. And more and more apps are adding it. TRy to login to gapps/gmail and you get a question if you want to setup a passkey or something like that.
I don't see any ads outside of the app store on Android (and obviously the web browser). Microsoft puts them in the start menu which seems very different to me (I would be very angry if Android put them in the launcher). I do customise my set up a great deal so I am curious to know if your experience matches mine.
Slack still has .deb files you just need to scroll down and find the small button for it. https://slack.com/intl/en-gb/downloads/linux search for "Download .DEB app". Last I checked they also have an Ubuntu only dependency that has a Debian equivalent but they don't list it so it won't install unless you modify the dependency list. I used the following script to do so, but I haven't updated in a while.
#!/bin/sh
if [ "$#" -eq 1 ]; then\
tmp_dir="$(mktemp -d)"
dpkg-deb -R "$1" "${tmp_dir}" && sed -i 's/libappindicator3-1/libayatana-appindicator3-1/g' "${tmp_dir}/DEBIAN/control" && dpkg-deb -b "${tmp_dir}" slack-fixed.deb
else
echo "Read it"
fi
T-Mobile has open ports on IPv6 (at least as of a few months ago). I was curious, and tried hosting a web site from my phone, and it worked flawlessly (assuming you are willing to abandon IPv4).
I was trying to learn more about the ranking algorithm that Alexandria uses, and I was a bit confused by the documentation on Github for it. Would I be correct in that it uses "Harmonic Centrality" (http://vigna.di.unimi.it/ftp/papers/AxiomsForCentrality.pdf) at least for part of the algorithm?
Yes our documentation is probably pretty confusing. It works like this, the base score for all URLs to a specific domain is the harmonic centrality (hc).
Then we have two indexes, one with URLs and one with links (we index the link text).
Then we first make a search on the links, then on the URLs. We then update the score of the urls based on the links with this formula:
domain_score = expm1(5 * link.m_score) + 0.1;
url_score = expm1(10 * link.m_score) + 0.1;
then we add the domain and url score to url.m_score
where link.m_score is the HC of the source domain.
The main scoring function seems to be index_builder<data_record>::calculate_score_for_record() in line 296 of https://github.com/alexandria-org/alexandria/blob/main/src/i..., and it mentions support for BM25 (Spärck Jones, Walker and Robertson, 1976) and TFIDF (Spärck Jones, 1972) term weighting, pointing to the respective Wikipedia pages.
I suppose you don't call removal of LGBTP+ elements from the media released in Russia/China/MENA "censorship" either, just private companies exercising their rights, right?
> I suppose you don't call removal of LGBTP+ elements from the media released in Russia/China/MENA "censorship" either, just private companies exercising their rights, right?
I would call it censorship. But in those examples you listed, I would attribute it to the government and not the company. Because by removing those elements, they are not "exercising their rights to do so", they are "complying with local laws and regulations by doing so".
For a specific example: in Russia, "propaganda of homosexualty" (which includes something as trivial as explicitly acknowledging that one of the main characters is attracted to a person, or people in general, of the same sex) is against the law and is heavily punished.
So in reality, those companies only have two options: sell their product with those elements removed for that specific market or become unable to legally sell their product in that market at all.
Is it censorship? I would argue "yes", but I wouldn't say that the censorship is done by the company. If that action was required in order to be in compliance with local laws and regulations, I would call it for what it actually is - government censorship. After all, they are the ones making those laws and regulations that decide what is allowed and what needs to be removed.
Google can censor. Censorship is necessarily performed by an entity with the power to restrict information conveyance, but it is not necessary for them to be a government.
It is true that it is impossible for Google to violate the 1st Amendment (unless they were nationalized first).
And how exactly is Google prohibited from censoring? By definition?
They're a private company. They can do whatever they want within the limits of the law. And the law doesn't say anything about not publishing something. Which can be done for purposes of censorship.
>And how exactly is Google prohibited from censoring? By definition?
They're not a publisher. You have zero ability to post anything to Google, so there is nobody to be censored. They're an aggregator, and any aggregator can display whatever information they want.
Kagi is a primarily meta search engine. The click stream exists on their sources (Bing, Google, Yandex, Marginalia, not sure if they use Brave). They do have Teclis which is their own index that they use, and their systems for reordering the page of results such as downranking heavy ad pages, and based upon user preferences (which I love).
https://seirdy.one/posts/2021/03/10/search-engines-with-own-... is a source I would recommend checking out if you are curious.