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will overwhelm you with spam about the covid vax. But if you search
on Twitter, limiting the date range to summer 2019, you will get
precisely the consensus that existed at the time, and nothing else.
There's no contamination, because no one can fake a summer 2019
Tweet. If the Tweet is dated June, July or August 2019, then that's
when it was published, and its content is what it contained back
then. This is very different from the output of web search engines,
where random third parties control the information sources, and you
have all manner of people manipulating both post content and post
dates in a bid to win traffic.
BUSTIN' MYTHS
=============
The value of being able to filter spam chronologically is immense,
and it can completely demolish virtually any myth built by the
information machine. In the 2010s I got curious as to the origins of
the Twitter hashtag. I wanted to know who invented the idea.
Wikipedia and a clutch of other sites assured me it was Chris
Messina. How predictable, I thought. Twitter hashtag invented by a
high-profile, privileged dude with connections galore. But my life
experience told me that *well-connected dudes with high public
profiles are much better associated with taking credit for inventions
than actually inventing them*. So I decided to check out the story on
Twitter itself.
Because of Twitter's chronological integrity and the fact that I
could restrict the period of investigation to a time before Messina's
claim, I was able to establish that Messina did not in fact invent
the Twitter hashtag. I wrote a post documenting the truth back in
2016. Sadly, it's been one of the least visited posts I've ever
written. The search engines are quite happy with wall to wall
regurgitations of the Wikipedia line. But the post does demonstrate
how much more accurate Twitter can be as an information source than a
typical web search engine. And whilst single Tweets are limited (by
character-count) in their ability to elaborate on a story,
collectively they can prove extremely thorough in the picture they
provide.
> These obscure search engines are incredibly refreshing to use,
> because they deliberately punish the exact, cash-crazed ideology
> that Google goes out of its way to reward.
Twitter also affords us a directional filter on information. By
default, we only really see what influential voices are saying. But
we can filter a Twitter Advanced Search to show only the replies TO
those influential voices. That directional filter can serve as an
ideological filter and quickly take us to the opposing views which a
web search engine can easily hide.
This works brilliantly where marketing or propaganda is strong. For
example, a brand is only ever going to tell you what it gets right.
Never what it gets wrong. The brand will typically use SEO strategies
with web search engines, to ensure that its official messaging
occupies the whole front page, and that the more negative feedback is
buried under a continuous spew of marketing. But using Twitter Search
we can completely filter out the brand's own messaging and search
only the replies to it. This gives a much truer picture of the
brand's performance, and we additionally get to see whether the brand
addresses issues raised by members of the public, or simply ignores
them.
> It's no longer about the consumer. It's 50% an elitist closed shop
> in which Amazon, eBay, YouTube and Co. win by default, and 50% a
> "which established e-corp can bribe the most PR7s and pump the most
> elaborate data graph into Silicon Valley?" contest.
CUSTOMISED SEARCH
=================
Instances of the decentralised search engine Searx (listed here--page
requires JavaScript) are often recommended as an alternative to
bigger web search engines. But it's rarely explained how the search
capabilities offered by Searx can be rigorously customised to focus
on the best sources of information for a given subject.
Searx is all about metasearch. That is, compiling results from a
variety of different search indexes. But with Searx, you can choose
which indexes you want to query. If you've explored and tested
various instances of Searx, you've probably noticed that the search
results can be vastly different from one instance to the next. That's
because each one is set up by its administrator to query a different
selection of indexes. But the range of sources a Searx instance
queries is also open to user-customisation. By going into the
*Preferences*, you can define exactly whose results you want, and
whose you don't.
I'll use Searx Belgium as an example, because I've found it to be
reliable. There are tabs along the top of the results page that
denote categories of search. Once you've entered a search term and
have a results list on screen, you'll see that the results list is
headed with horizontal selection options such as General, Images,
Videos, News, etc. Unlike with Google, you can simultaneously choose
as many or as few of these search categories as you like. Just select
the tab or tabs you want and then re-click the Start Search button.
> The Searx Preferences page illustrates just how many different
> search resources there are, and names them so we can investigate
> them in their own right.
Let's say you de-selected the *General* tab--which is selected by
default--and instead selected the *Social Media* tab. You'll see a
dramatic change in the results. Rather than being sourced from
Google, Wikipedia, etc (which are Searx Belgium's default sources for
General search), the results are now solely coming from Reddit (which
is Searx Belgium's default source for Social Media).
I really like having the option to get a selection of results solely
from Reddit, because community Q&A discussion is broadly a lot more
genuine than the output of some listicle merchant whose real goal is
not to help you solve a problem, but to pocket some commission from
Amazon. Even if the contributors on Reddit are not experts (and
sometimes they are), collectively they're likely to get you closer to
a real solution than an expert blogger who isn't even trying to help.
True, we could confine Google or DuckDuckGo search results to Reddit
by prefixing our search term with *site:reddit.com*--and this is one
of the only really reliable techniques left of filtering out the
annoying spam on major web search engines. But we've come to expect
greater convenience than having to type a website domain into a
search box, and that's what the tab system on Searx gives us.
Out of the box, the Searx instance in our example already offers some
easy ways to customise the search results for specific needs. But by
pitching into the *Preferences*, we can further tailor the sources
for each of those category tabs. For example, we could restrict the
image search sources solely to Unsplash, or Flickr. Then we filter
out all of the news site spam and very predominantly find photography
enthusiasts instead.
> Independence from major web search is something we can, and should,
> try to build progressively.
Incidentally, if you do make any changes in Searx *Preferences*,
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--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)
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