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Cake day: June 25th, 2023

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  • asdfasdfasdf@lemmy.worldtoTechnology@lemmy.world*Permanently Deleted*
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    5 days ago

    I tried SearXNG but the UI/UX was so shitty that I’d honestly rather pay for Kagi. Lots of people love it because it’s open source and are willing to 100% look past all UI/UX problems, which is a very common problem with open source in general.

    Also, the actual quality of the results was garbage compared to Kagi.
















  • This isn’t accurate. The issue is that part of that open source software is using non-open source APIs which are paid for by the WordPress Foundation. Making money off open source software is harmless and AFAIK he has no issues with that. However, using an enormous amount of resources where your foundation needs to pay $$$$$ for without contributing anything is what this is about.

    The same issue is with Linux, for example. The OS is open source, but the repositories are hosted be e.g. Canonical, which needs to pay to maintain them and for the enormous amount of bandwidth and usage from people updating their packages. That isn’t free.

    It’s very common for companies which fork Ubuntu / Debian to contribute back in some meaningful way, whether that’s source code or donations.

    WP Engine doesn’t contribute anything.


  • The search engine magic isn’t just about caching pages. It’s also extremely expensive / complex to:

    • maintain an index of all the websites in the world. This is an extremely high cost
    • refresh that index in almost real time. How long will your self hosted crawler take to find new content for every website in the world?
    • there’s also the algorithm for weighing results. The order of results and their relevance is not easy at all. How many times a word appears on a page is a terrible metric.

    A hosted search is also a lot more environmentally friendly - that gigantic search index and all the energy poured into the work is something that can be shared by everyone. If everyone did that themselves at home, you spend that same amount of energy for every single household.