1,208 karma · joined February 19, 2020
The exceptions are Runnaroo (Google), Startpage (Google), Mojeek, and Gigablast (both use their own index).
Cloudflare also just announced yesterday a "privacy-first" focused analytics offering.
https://blog.cloudflare.com/free-privacy-first-analytics-for...
Just a quick clarification. The HTML tag doesn't charge you anything. It just indicates that the website participates in WM and provides a location on where the website can accept a payment.
You still need to subscribe to a Web Monetization provider that actually makes the payment and calculates the amount.
You have 100% control over whether you want to participate in Web Monetization or not.
I do think there is a misunderstanding of how Web Monetization currently works though.
You won't be charged anything to visit the website UNLESS you subscribe to a Web Monetization provider and wish to contribute to websites that you visit in this way. Right now, the only Web Monetization provider is Coil. Coil charges members $5 a month and handles the distribution of payments to sites that the user visits.
So unless you subscribe to Coil you wouldn't be charged anything, and even then it is capped at a pre-paid $5/month that get's distributed to all the website that you visit who participate in Web Monetization.
Your query (even without the quotes).
Stack Overflow search results are directly included on the SERP (in addition to organic web results) for programming queries. Plus the privacy aspect.
Example for "python string match": https://www.runnaroo.com/search?term=python%20string%20match
I'm the creator of Runnaroo.
I have been using it for the last 3 months and it is simple to implmentent and helps support an open standard.
The concern on basing payment on length of the site visit are valid and something I think will need to be addressed at some point. People will try to game it as it gains acceptance.
Awarding the length of visit also isn't aligned with the goal of all types of websites. My site is a web search engine, and the goal is for people to spend as little time on the site as possible because it means I sent them to where they needed to go by giving them the right result quickly.
I do hope it gains greater acceptance.
[0] https://webmonetization.org/docs/probabilistic-rev-sharing/
"Display advertising that is not provided by Microsoft on any page that displays any part of a response."
DDG is big enough that they are probably on a completely separate agreement than the standard TOS though.
[0] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/cognitive-services/bi...
See the arrow in the below: https://imgur.com/sY4qi63
Always room for improvement with it though.
1. Server rendered ads. They were there, you must have just missed them (it's on the SERP under the search bar). I don't have the search volume for context based ads (and none of the the available search ad networks are suitable), so the ads are just direct ads that display in rotation for a predetermined amount of time and do zero tracking (i.e. pay X and the ad is displayed for Y amount of time, win win for all).
2. Affiliate links. There is only one today, but I am testing it out to see if they are worth it.
3. Direct user monetization programs (i.e. Web Monetization protocol through Coil and the Brave publisher program). We are actually the first (and maybe still the only) search engine to integrate Web Monetization [0].
Over the last few months I have been working on an alternative search engine. Maybe naively, I thought the most difficult part was going to be to convince people to use it, but the real challenge if figuring out a way to monetize the service in a way that maintains privacy and respects users. The more I go down this path, the more I realize the next big search engine will be one that provides better results AND comes up with a better way for monetization.
I wrote a little about it here [0] if anyone is interested.
[0] https://coil.com/p/runnaroo/Privacy-and-Search-Engine-Moneti...
Search quality is subjective, but in this case I mean better because it respects your search terms, quotes work for phrases, and organic results are enhanced with additional data sources like Stack Overflow [0].
I am the creator of Runnaroo.
https://www.engadget.com/facebook-test-adds-wikipedia-search...
Take a look at the below search [0], it is distinctly different from the SERPs of the other search engines for the same query, but you are correct that we still focus on just listing information vs. visualizing it. Maybe something for us to explore.
From a search visualization perspective, check out Carrot2 [1] for something more innovative. Swisscows [2] also has some nice visualization elements.
[0] https://www.runnaroo.com/search?term=full+text+search+php
It is. We integrate the Google results through their web search API, and comply with their usage terms of service (as we do with all the data partners we integrate).
Not necessarily better data sources, but different data sources and a slightly different approach.
For organic results, the biggest different is that Runnaroo uses Google as the base for web results (similar to Startpage) where DDG uses Bing.
Outside of the organic results, Runnaroo's strategy is to integrate results from different vertical specific search engines who specialize in a niche topic. I call these 'Deep Searches' because they are essentially pulled from the database of the vertical source. It's the difference between getting an link to a website's home page vs. landing on the page and using their own search function to see the results.
For many queries, I believe this can provide higher quality SERP. For example, see the below results for "parkinson research" [0] or "react.js" [1]. The results are a lot more informationally dense than other search engines. Again, not necessarily better, but different.
DDG is still better for many queries(currency conversions, weather, etc), and definitely more polished, but I only launched Runnaroo a few months ago and new features and Deep Search sources are being added almost daily.
So TL;DR, Google results (with privacy) plus additional search results from relevant niche and authoritative sources.
That's actually a really interesting example. The tire sizes for a 2020 Honda Insight EX are either 215/55/16 or 215/50/17 [0].
So taken at face value, the filter bubbling was either incorrect or Google was just returning results for a very common tire size in this case.
I agree that context is important, but Google doesn't return results blindly when they are not able to do personalization. They already know the results that millions (billions?) of other people who have searched for tires have clicked and found relevant.
That might be true, but I'm not sure. Outside of local searching I am skeptical of the benefits of filter bubbling.
I think it is just as likely that you and your brother have different opinions of relevance (even if you were both returned the same exact results unrelated to past activity), and the relevance decisions Google makes more align with your brothers perspective.
I am the creator of one of the search engines [0] named in the post. It will return the same exact organic results no matter who you are or what your prior searches were. Feel free to give it a go with your brother and see how it compares for both of you. For organic results, it works like DuckDuckGo does with Bing, but the difference is the main source of our organic results are actually from Google.
It's actually pretty cool, and earnings from web monetized users now cover ~3% of the operation of the site during the first month of having it implemented.
You basically just have to add a meta tag to the site that directs to a payment pointer (you also have to sign up with one of the wallets for the payment pointer).
Definitely not getting rich from the implementation, and the earnings are much lower than if I just ran ads, but it is a nice feeling to have the users of the site directly contribute to supporting the product. Plus it is such a low barrier to set it up that there is very little downside to having it added to the site.
Any insight on what a reasonable amount of traffic amounts to based on your experience?
Also interesting, related:bing.com gives me no results.
It's a little confusing because fo how Google implemented some of the operators. The boolean + operator in many cases is used in the same way as AND, but Google originally used it to let users to force a specific word to be present in a search result.
So a search for Fish +Chips was a search for both words, but 'Chips' MUST be present. The equivalent search today is Fish "Chips". It's a little annoying because it requires typing another character, and it it is still not always respected.
The + (formerly used to force a term to be present in the result) and ~ (also find synonyms) operators have been deprecated.
Google now advises to wrap the word in quotes instead of using the +. Google will also automatically look for synonyms without the use of ~.
I have seen 'AROUND(n)' mentioned in many other places working as a proximity operator in Google, but I don't believe that is true and haven't found it to work in any logical way.
Also the use of parentheses to nest queries is not necessary in Google. It is actually required for Bing on complicated queries though.
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.
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...