Infinity: open-source search engine
infinitysearch.co
infinitysearch.co
This makes me wonder - what ads would be acceptable in the eyes of privacy focused developers? Any?
And i don't mean UX - i mean, what ads would you, a privacy focused developer, recommend i install on my site. Assuming i want to fully respect by users privacy, while still attempting to pay for the server costs.
Maybe this warrants a AskHN, but it seems relevant here as they're implementing this exact concept. Thoughts?
Ads that:
- don't track you.
- Are either textual or images (non-animated)
- Are clearly marked as adverts and don't try to blend into the page
I think it's a pretty straight-forward and easy answer.
Don't put ads that breach user privacy. Just use context-based advertisements.
If your ads are asking about my canvas size, mouse position, etc. or otherwise are attempting to track me from website to website, I'm not cool with that and will block it whatever way possible. Other dark patterns (blending in to website e.g. Reddit's sponsored posts) are also terrible, but not necessarily related to your question re: privacy.
If I know a website is using context-based advertisements with no tracking, I allow the ads and sometimes even follow them if I need whatever is being advertised.
(I'm not sure what's up with the number of responses to the question, "what ads would you [...] recommend i install on my site [a]ssuming i want to fully respect [m]y users privacy", with answers such as, "Don't put ads that breach user privacy".)
Even if they said "What specific & exact ad service would you recommend", a reply of "Any ad service that doesn't do tracking -- consider contextual based ads" is still a valid one, no?
> Even if they said [...]
We don't have to imagine anything. We can look at what was written (and I quoted it again above). No matter what a person has in mind when writing out, "Don't put ads that breach user privacy", it's not a meaningful reply to the question that was actually asked.
You started with "OP seems [...]", which sort of implies you are interpreting as well...
Whatever, I'll stand corrected I guess. My (and everyone else except you!) reply is not meaningful.
Edit to add: If I ask for a product that does X and respects Y, and someone says "Here are the criteria I use to make sure any product respects your Y requirement", I would accept that as a valid and helpful reply. Maybe it's just me.
I edited that in to soften the message. It's like the approach of phrasing things to avoid use of "you" when addressing a topic, to prevent people from getting defensive—which I also do a lot and did here. Clearly that effort was wasted.
If you're going to resort to personal attacks, I have some thoughts of my own.
> You started with "OP seems [...]"
1. And I'm not talking about intent here (in the case of either remark—mine or yours). "You're really convinced about being right" is undeniably ad hominem.
Generally I would classify neither of our posts as attacks. I'm not sure why you're reacting so strongly to mine.
It's a bad idea to call other people wrong if you're going to react so strongly to being called wrong yourself.
Here's the thing:
Wiktionary tersely describes "ad hominem" as "A personal attack", so the number of people in disagreement includes: me, the person(s) who wrote that (who is not me), and then the multiple not-mes who have agreed to let it stand. Let's say that's beside the point and somehow flawed.
There's the matter of your last message, where you said it wasn't ad hominem. You have changed tactics to move away from the term "ad hominem" and focus on the phrasing of "personal attack". Is it ad hominem but not a personal attack, or is it not ad hominem?
> it's the exact equivalent of how you just said "you're wrong"
Sorry, no. At best, you're arguing that rightness or wrongness in the case of the original comment is either unknowable or unknown. That's uncertainty. Asserting that a case of ad hominem is not ad hominem isn't a matter of uncertainty. Whether it's true is knowable and known. It's known to be wrong.
> It's a bad idea to call other people wrong if you're going to react so strongly to being called wrong yourself.
This is a straightforward example of ad hominem, FWIW. And I'm not "reacting strongly to be called wrong". Separately from that, even if I were, that would not make it a "bad idea to call other people wrong" (nor would it put those people into a state of being not wrong).
It's very slightly rude, but so is telling someone that you only used the word "seems" to soften to blow of telling them they are 'objectively' wrong, and you didn't actually mean "seems". If you don't think your comment was a personal attack, then neither was mine.
> This is a straightforward example of ad hominem, FWIW.
Sure, that is. But it's friendly advice separate from the logical argument. And it's not ad hominem fallacy.
Irrelevant. It wouldn't matter if you were being rude or not, nor did I claim it was rude. Your comment is an ad hominem as a consequence of what what the definition of ad hominem is—not because of the tone or tenor of what you're saying. You shifted the focus from the argument towards extraneous remarks (untrue or not; could be true, even—doesn't matter) about the person you're responding to. That's ad hominem.
> telling someone that you only used the word "seems" to soften to blow of telling them they are 'objectively' wrong, and you didn't actually mean "seems"
The problem now is that you're making things up.
Once again, my actual comment about softening the message was a direct response to my use of "OP seems [...]" being called into question. It's so far the opposite of a personal attack. It's the consequence of having been proactively conscious about the way the message would read to the point of having tried to spare someone's feelings (even when it shouldn't have been necessary).
I didn't do that in my initial comment, the one you originally accused of having ad hominem.
I was using the mention of "you're really convinced" as a reference point to say that I disagreed, and nothing else. That post was entirely about your logical argument, and not about you as a person.
> Once again, my actual comment about softening the message was a direct response to my use of "OP seems [...]" being called into question. It's so far the opposite of a personal attack. It's the consequence of having been proactively conscious about the way the message would read to the point of having tried to spare someone's feelings (even when it shouldn't have been necessary).
Saying "actually, I was just being polite, I didn't mean that word you based your argument on" is rude even though it's honest.
The combination of misleading someone and then harshly pulling the rug out from under them, then saying "clearly that effort was wasted", is not "the opposite" of a personal attack. I wouldn't say it's rude enough to count as a personal attack, but it's definitely going in that direction, and higher than 0.
> It wouldn't matter if you were being rude or not, nor did I claim it was rude.
Are personal attacks not a subset of rude? You said it was a personal attack.
I don't know what comment you think I'm referring to other than the first, nor why or how you can think that the ad hominem in that comment isn't in it.
> Saying "actually, I was just being polite, I didn't mean that word you based your argument on" is rude even though it's honest.
First of all, manufacturing quotes is an offense both in life and by HN's moderation policy.
Secondly, rude-but-honest is a real thing, but this is not an instance of it. You're confusing someone being wounded with whether it happened because another actor was rude. Rudeness is not a necessary precondition to emotional wounds.
If I don't like you and decline your offer to have lunch together, and then at the end of the day you confront me about why it was that we didn't have lunch, and I succinctly explain it and that I'm unlikely to ever agree to have lunch, then it's a very realistic possibility that that's something you feel wounded by. But it's not evidence of me being rude; it's a consequence of you putting yourself in a position where the inevitable result is discovering information that leads to you feeling that way.
The problem with the original commenter's remark goes beyond even that.
The problem was both to question the intent of my wording (which is sufficient alone to give a direct response—no malice necessary), and then to tie that in to their argument as well. My options were to answer the question truthfully, or to let their comments stand, both sacrificing the truth and ceding to what was an unsound argument. It might be accurate to call it rude if it were somehow immaterial and unprovoked (like "pulling the rug out from under" someone), but it wasn't that; to repeat myself now for something like the third time: my comment was a direct response to the person calling attention to the matter. They put themselves in a position to hear the answer they were seeking, and it doesn't require rudeness to have given the response they got.
> The combination of misleading someone and then harshly pulling the rug out from under them
Harshly pulling the rug out from under someone is being a dick. Responding directly to someone with an answer that may upset them is not. And there was no misleading, unlike...
> Are personal attacks not a subset of rude? You said it was a personal attack.
Not interested in the least in litigating this kind of misdirection. In fact, communicating this was the exact intent of the part of my response that you're replying to here: It wouldn't matter if you were being rude or not, nor did I claim it was rude.
I've noticed it blocks carbonads, ethicalads and even ads on DDG.
I turned it off on DDG and notepad++ sites, to let ads through. If you want you can too.
I whitelist specific sites (some sites I like, and reddit)
The main factor determining your options is whether you are comfortable having a 3rd party ad provider have access to the IP, user agent (and potentially search term in some cases) of your users.
If that is not a dealbreaker for your use case then there are a lot of different options, including EthicalAds which I believe is a great service.
Understandably, the main reasons for this are because the ad networks need to prevent fraud, and the ad sponsors usually want some kind of measurable metric to determine ROI.
If you are not comfortable with the above compromise then your options for contextual advertising are significantly limited with the only real option being to sell direct ads to companies.
[0] https://coil.com/p/runnaroo/Privacy-and-Search-Engine-Moneti...
Maybe I don't understand the complexity behind the ad-network curtain today, but direct ad sales worked fine pre-internet. Serve the ads from the same domain as your content and you can prevent ad blocking. Sounds like a win-win to me.
Yeah, I agree. The challenging is finding the relevant companies who wish to advertise and the ad 'sales' process. It's significantly more work than just plugging in an existing ad network who has a ready supply of ads, and it requires a slightly different skillset that's not necessarily a core competency. I'm going through the process right now of reaching out to relevant companies with an aligned privacy focused and it is a mixed bag of results.
Having said that, I think it is worth it in the long term because it makes you less reliant on other companies, but it is a tremendous amount of work upfront.
- Intrusive Ads that either demand attention or mask themselves as something else
- Ads that are based on targeted information pulled from other sources, such as other websites.
- Ads that are just completely off topic. I'm fine with general targeting. "male" "computer science" "linux" stuff like that
Personally I am against tracking and unethical ads[0] but I think purely contextual ads can be OK:
- ycombinator ads on news.ycombinator.com: OK with me even if they blend in, it is part of what I want to see when I am here
- Webstorm/IntelliJ/upcoming programming conference ads on developer blogs: Smashing
- "Sponsored by" ads on Open Source projects (as long as they aren't bad[1]): fine with me
[0][1]: like pushing payday loans to poor, gambling to addicts, cheating sites etc
Yep, this is me (although I'm not at all 'high profile'). Specifically, I'm against all push advertising, where ads are being served to a user when they are not actively looking for product/service information. If it's a site that is all advertising or nearly all advertising with some filler editorial then I'm fine with that because obviously a user is not going to go to that site unless they want to be marketed too and are actively looking for product/service information (including about products/services of which they were previously unaware).
I'd argue that most newspapers and magazines that ran advertising were toxic too and played a large part in promoting the consumer culture that took hold in the 20th century and helped to push harmful products that would not have been taken up nearly as widely without huge advertising spends (cigarettes, sugary breakfast cereals, soft drinks, etc). But with a printed product sold as a bundled package of editorial and advertising it was hard for the consumer to protect themselves from the harmful advertising. Now, when content is delivered digitally and we have the means to screen out the unwanted advertising we'd be fools to not do so (and fools to be convinced by a bogus argument that we need to pollute our brains as our part of a supposed 'deal').
> We believe good advertising should _compliment_ content and never get in the way. That's why we built a network that complies with AcceptableAds, BetterAds, and DoNotTrack.
Complement, not compliment.
- what other mechanisms can server the same utility as advertising for businesses?
- what other mechanisms can support viable business models.
What is strange about advertising is that it enjoys a bizzare outsized role in determining social norms that is never questioned. Sure, businesses need to advertise their services and goods but at the cost of even destroying privacy? I find it strange.
If your ads play loud songs, pop up a dozen (non-tracking) windows or flash annoying animations over the page, I'm not going to block those, I'm just going to not visit your site.
Also if one more site tells me to "disable my ad blocker" when I'm running privacy badger, I'm going to scream. I'm not blocking advertising, at least how it is understood in the general sense. If a newspaper contained an eye-tracker that measured my engagement and I put a piece of tape over the lens, no reasonable person would call that "ad blocking".
You can't know my wants if you don't build a profile of me. To do that you need to track me and my browsing behaviour. That is unacceptable. But if you don't you'll be throwing a lot of things with none of them sticking. So how can this work?
Edit: this is what they say (https://www.ethicalads.io/advertisers.html>
"When you run a campaign with us, your ad only appears on developer and technical websites. This drives your business results and respects our audience without having to resort to programmatic ad buys"
Well, good luck lads, I hope you succeed. If I can offer a small hint, never try to get my attention with any kind of animation. Images from your entire domain will be blocked instantly (whether it be ethicalads.io or if they're self-hosted on pqrs.com, then pqrs.com. I repeat - don't try to draw my attention).
Obviously one data point but I searched few more things that I didn't include. Google is better for the same query.
Now that I think about it, google's best strength is their crawler and cache infrastructure. I never find latest and up-to date content with the same speed on other search engines.
They don't seem to modify results from bing.
Hey, duck this query
DDG also owns ddg.gg
Yandex _might_ be another option (haven’t looked) or even Baidu. Of course there are unofficial ways to scrape Google but you can’t build a legit business on that.
Side note: a far simpler first step than trying to break up Google would be requiring them to have a search API and contractual obligations that enable others to do business on top of it.
Because yes, the ability to use a single protocol for cross-service messaging, with E2E by default, disappearing messages, and text (or presumably email) fallback would actually be spectacular. But as a spec.
Hell, as a spec, this would create an argument to migrate toward a user@service model and finally start relegating phone numbers to legacy status.
Maybe the latter should be a search server?
This project is useless for people who have their own private text to search.
https://twitter.com/paraschopra/status/1284801028676653060
(and this is how to prime it:
https://twitter.com/vybhavram/status/1284803750146617344)
The main problem is that GPT3 has a free will of a creative but delusional person and will distort facts as it pleases to maximize its output function score.
So, similar to evening news.
And where's the source ? could i create search plugins just for my own use ? because that would be a killer feature.
So it's only technically open-source, it uses Bing's API probably for their "web" tab.[1]
Their "infinity tab" doesn't give good results at all, currently. This is what may run on their own system. Maybe.
[1]"How It Works For the web application, we use Flask. For the search results, we use the Microsoft Cognitive Services Search API and the DuckDuckGo Instant Answers API. We will have more detailed information about how our system works in the future."
-- from their source : https://gitlab.com/infinitysearch/infinity-search
> The whole Infinity Search system is open source and the code can be found at https://gitlab.com/infinitysearch.
From the FAQ here: https://infinitysearch.co/why
Really? Or you could fix your site.
There should be NO ads. period.
I would go so far to say that ALL ads are a distraction.
You're supposed to be an open source privacy focused search engine, not a surveillance capitalist serving search ads like Google, this is NOT OK.
This would be an interesting ethical discussion if it weren't predicated on a conversation every parent has with their 14 year old.
Yes, I know you want this thing, but things don't just magically appear. It all takes effort. Are you going to contribute? Or do you just expect other people to do stuff for you or you'll throw a tantrum? You are getting older now and this is not acceptable behavior.
The problem is not ads. The problem is that people want things for free. If you get things for free you're not a customer. If you're neither the customer or the vendor in the transaction, then you are the product. Ads are by far the most obvious form of this but there are others actors who would be much, much worse if they were the customer. If 'somebody worse than ads' are the only customers, then they will just get more brazen. Like loan shark brazen, or possibly police state brazen.
We need a way to pay for things that's not a paywall, and not a surveillance state. Given the other conversations in this thread, this company is trying to be neither. Whether they succeed or have ulterior motives I have no way of knowing.
If you have the name recognition of Wikipedia or PBS, you can to a fund raising campaign every year. You can seek funding from a foundation of some sort. If you're just a few people with an MVP? Neither of those will work for you. (I suppose maybe GoFundMe might, but I wouldn't count on it.)
What it's essentially saying is that the publisher should be able to continue to act unethically in polluting minds by pushing ads but also collect extra money from people who object to their pollution. IOW, "I'm going to keep polluting but if you pay me then I won't pollute in your personal space." Well actually, I care about your society wide pollution too. Just stop polluting.
On principle I will never give money to a website that runs this sort of policy.
Never attribute to malice that which…
> there have always been business models to support publishing and providing services that do not rely on adverstising and these models are well known
I am sure that these models exist, I just don't know about them because I haven't done the research. It would be easier for everyone if you just listed a few viable funding models for a search giant.
> Push advertising is unethical and culturally toxic
That is your opinion, and not one that most people share — most people think that advertising is an acceptable trade-off for good search results. If you want to persuade people of anything, you'll have to meet them where they're at, either by convincing us first that advertising is "unethical and culturally toxic", or by using some other argument.