be careful out there
https://mastodon.social/@kaia@brotka.st/115764825679889140
Fr. Sometimes I use the associated Wikipedia page to find the official site.
this post was submitted on 22 Dec 2025
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This is the way.
absolutely shameful that this is what we have to resort to, but for a couple piracy sites I have done the same.
In this case it's just the german thunderbird community
!w prefix (at least in DuckDuckGo) searches directly to Wikipedia
i use firefox's @ to select searcg engine
I remember getting pissed that they (Bing, Google, doesn't matter) put one "sponsored" link as the first result. It got me a few times before I started double checking URLs. Now the first page of results is practically useless ads not even related to the query most of the time. Fucking infuriating. Even Qwant will put multiple ads in if you search for a thing. I'm not biting the bullet for another subscription just yet, but paid Kagi lookin' finer by the day.
I will never use Kagi because requiring an account makes associating search queries with you trivial, though I don't doubt it is a useful service.
Mullvad Leta was nice while it lasted, but an easy replacement is DuckDuckGo HTML. As the name suggests, it doesn't require JS, reducing the attack surface and routes of browser fingerprinting. I do acknowledge that the search results suck about as much as Google, so I need to be creative with search queries.
A better option is a self hosted meta search engine like SearXNG or 4get. I get that the branding of 4get is off-putting, but it doesn't require JS for frontend and is much simpler/leaner/reliable than SearXNG. Self hosted search engines are also only useful (imho) if used by a large group (as a public instance) to blend in, or behind a VPN that rotates frequently. This is to avoid association to you.
Kagi optionally offers something called privacy pass where they can verify that the user is authorised to access it, but not which user it is: https://blog.kagi.com/kagi-privacy-pass
DDG is just Bing
but at least it allows me to disable ads and allegedly opt out of tracking
Main reason I like DDG is that it acts as a proxy (meaning I blend into crowd of all DDG users) and the HTML frontend doesn't require JS or ads.
It uses Bing, when you use a search engine through an API you get more levers and dials to play with than an end user normally has
I did a side-by-side comparison with Bing from the browser and got identical results.
Agreed, just started using Kagi last week
The AI stuff is putting me off though. I didn't see an option to not subscribe to that. Hell, I'd pay the same rate just without the AI parts if I could.
I was more annoyed by their base tier having such a low monthly search count. It feels low to purposefully push people to their higher tier.
Long term, if you want good privacy respecting services, you will need to pay for them directly. Free anything is not sustainable unless they monetize it by selling your data or serving you advertisements, which will lead to selling your data. If their revenue is dependent on you believing that the service is worth paying for, then they are incentivized to improve their service and maintain your trust.
The free tier high enough that you can get an idea of how well it works, but of course you're not meant to stay on the free tier, it's a trial.
I’m not talking about the free tier, I’m saying 300 searches a month for 5 bucks wasn’t worth it to me. I’m not willing to pay 120 a year for a search engine. One cent a search and they would have my five a month.
Oh yeah I didn't even consider the base tier, I'd blow through the searches inside of a week.
For my part, it's just enforcing something I'd do anyway, I've got monthly recurring donations of $5-10 for a bunch of open source projects that I find useful, particularly ones by solo devs, so, it's not much of a stretch for me.
I’ve used kagi’s ai stuff like… twice, maybe. They are fully opt-in and unobtrusive. For reference, this is their ai philosophy: https://help.kagi.com/kagi/why-kagi/ai-philosophy.html
This seems reasonable to me, though perhaps not perfect. If you don’t want your money going towards ai development at all… IDK. I don’t think they train their own models for what it’s worth, so I think you can avoid paying ai companies by simply not using the ai parts of kagi.
This is like not using Proton mail because they have VPN and office and drive and whatever else.
You don’t need to use any of it and it stays out of the way.
ddg + adblock
you can disable ads in duckduckgo. it's probably not the safest, but muscle memory is a bitch
I just checked the page and it's just a German Thunderbird community. Downloads just redirect to the official Thunderbird. Unfortunate that it's higher in the results but not malicious
My ex once almost payed for downloading Firefox because she used the ad link instead of the top result. Good thing she asked me instead.
VLC Media Player got a problem with a bunch of scam domains too, they mimick the original, usually appear in the first slot and outright install malware on your device... sad
k-lite codec pack ftw.
... Not really related to the scummy search results, but...
my first search result for vlc is videolan.org. I thought that was correct, but now I'm doubting
I believe that's the right one (although I'm not sure). On Google, my first result is vlc.de which definitely is a scam domain that by default gets blocked by my VPN
God bless Linux package managers
sudo aptitude install thunderbird
sudo pacman -S thunderbird
I use Arch, by the way.
Yay
doas emerge --ask mail-client/thunderbird
something something
{ pkgs, ... }:
{ whatever.i want these installed = [ pkgs.thunderbird ]; }
Don't you mean
home.programs.thunderbird.enable = true;
?
i wouldn't know correct nixos syntax or for that matter idiomatic usage when multiple paths are available if they kicked me in the balls
Nah, both ways are fine. The first one just installs the package, the second one enables the module, which installs the package + does a bunch of additional setup and gives you super convenient configuration options (like setting up mail accounts declaratively from nix)
The more I learn about nix the more I think I use arch btw is out of date as fuck.
It should be I use nix btw.
Idk. With Arch I felt like I constantly had to be on top of things. With nix, everything is rock solid and stable, and if I want to change or add something, I do that, once, and then it's also rock solid until all eternity and across all my machines.
In total I might have spent more time interacting with nix already, but it feels less like "work" than with arch. Higher setup burden, almost zero maintenance burden and zero mental overhead.
Happy holidays btw
Edit: forgot to include the context. For the Thunderbird example, I have spent 1-2 hours once, 2 years ago, converting all the Thunderbird config options to nix, and adding my mail accounts through nix. I have not had to go into the Thunderbird settings since, and after doing a fresh install on a new machine, my accounts are already THERE on first boot. A lot of things are tedious in nix, but you do them ONCE.
Read about black hat SEO and spamdexing / link farming. Prepare to be extremely frustrated and exasperated. Even the most benevolent and well-designed search engines struggle against the masses of (now AI-empowered) spammers and scammers out there.
This is why we can’t have nice things.
As usual linux is just better and doesn't have that problem. Microsoft could just make a simple GUI for winget to benefit the users, but they don't. They have to make more money so they make it into a garbage store full of shovelware so nobody wants to use it.
I remember when there were ads for Firefox at the top of the search results. Many companies I've worked at clicked that link instead of the first result and they wound up with a German Firefox (we were in the UK).
That wasn't the main issue though. It wasn't till a lot of time/companies have passed until the latest IT department I worked for flagged that Firefox version as being spyware.
Kagi is bae.
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