Food engineering has grown to the point where food is treated as "products". Taste, feel and looks are highly engineered to optimize our sensations.

Looks: Marketing of food products use wildly unrelated items (glue to mimic cheese, shoe polish to mimic seared meat) to make the food look appetizing. This sets up for completely unrealistic standards.

Taste: Sugar has been pushed in our diet under different names (dextrose, fructose, corn syrup). Salt has been optimized to excite our senses. But the proportion is carefully controlled to ensure we never feel overwhelmed or saturated with a particular taste.

Feel: Food companies hire the best engineers to optimize surface characteristics to ensure their 'products' has great sound, great texture and so on. Pringles famously worked on double curvature for specific mechanics.

These food companies have created 'products' that are extremely far from nature. They are engineered heavily to maximize profits at the cost of consumers health.

What can you do:

1. Read labels: Most countries have food regulatory bodies that require companies to publish their nutrition info. Check the "daily value" information. Check the "serving size". DO NOT TRUST WHAT IS PRINTED ON THE FRONT. The real info is always in the back in a boring black and white table.

2. Spread awareness: Companies are betting on the fact that you are too tired, too occupied or too ignorant to care about all this. I understand you may have bigger problems. But always remember that you may have 1000 worries but when you have a health issue you only have 1 worry.

3. Reach out: If you struggle with food addiction and over consumption don't struggle alone. This battle cannot be won alone. You are fighting against an army. Join local support groups. Help yourselves to gather allies. If you know know someone who is struggling, reach out and help. Any food that you make at home ( no matter what you make) cannot possibly be as unhealthy as ultra processed crap.

Why YSK: The English Wikipedia's front page (the "main page") offers a surprisingly diverse, compact, and accessible way to find an interesting topic you might not have heard of before. This assumes you're a reader only and don't care about editing.

A lot of this is surface-level, but I'm trying not to assume anything – while hopefully giving a bit of "here's what you'll find if you click two links deeper" and professional ~~bias~~ opinion. Feel free to skip around to the sections that you find more immediately interesting, since they're largely independent.

(For accessibility, I'll be doing this with the Vector (2022) skin, the default. It's similar if you use Vector (2010) like I do, but there's a good chance this introduction isn't very useful if you do, you fucking nerd.)

I'm going to break the front page into six regions:

• Toolbar (ignoring since it's general-purpose and present on every page)
• Header
• Left/right sidebar (ignoring for the same reason as the toolbar)
• Content
• Directory

Header

The header (starting past the toolbar at the top, which appears on every page) is a little "Welcome to Wikipedia" message. Besides linking to articles like "Wikipedia" and "English language", it has the job of linking to the official introduction to Wikipedia under the text "anyone can edit" and linking to the page "Special:Statistics" when it links the numbers of editors and articles.

• The introduction to Wikipedia is designed to be helpful for editors and non-editors. The "policies and guidelines" and "navigating Wikipedia" introductions can help readers learn to identify why material is written the way it is, discern bad articles from good ones, and easily find what they're looking for. These are very short introductions but can be used as pseudo-directories to more in-depth information.
• "Special:Statistics" gives general statistics about Wikipedia (many of which, like the number of "oversighters" or "stewards" or "bureaucrats" will be gibberish to anyone who's never worked on the project) and also links to external statistics which are much more detailed.

Like every article, you can find a "Talk" page on the upper left, where people discuss the page itself. You'll also find options for:

• "Read" – Duh.
• "View Source" – Normally reserved for "Edit", but only administrators can edit the front page. (Source is normally much more readable than this; see next point.)
• "View History" – You won't find much of interest here, even if you care about the main page's history. Nearly all of the main page is transcluded from templates which are edited elsewhere. Looking back at even the past 100 edits brings us to October 2018 (average about one edit per month).

Note: Ignore the statistics like "revisions since [page creation date]", etc. That's just an extension that makes editing a bit easier.

Contents

The contents of the front page are these six boxes (from left to right):

• "Today's featured article"
• "In the news"
• "Did you know ..."
• "On this day"
• "From today's featured list"
• "Today's featured picture"

I used to ignore all of these, and I didn't appreciate them until I decided one-by-one over years to give each a fair shake by just trying them for a couple days (and not approaching them from my usual completionist mindset).

Today's featured article

"Featured article" is the highest status an article can attain, and it means it meets strict, heavily scrutinized criteria. A featured article has undergone an open peer-review process where, at minimum, several very experienced editors attempt over a lengthy discussion to find any possible flaws. In total, these represent about 0.09% of all articles, and there's an ongoing drive to reexamine old ones to make sure they still hold up.

"Today's featured article" (TFA) is a daily slot chosen via editors nominating articles already with featured status and other editors discussing, so it's selection after an already-selective process. They are well worth your time if you have any interest in the subject, and they're simply better than what you'll find in a professional publication like Britannica.

The content itself consists of a link to the article (in bold) a short introduction (usually a trimmed version of the article's lead section), an image of or representing the subject, "recently featured" articles (in descending chronological order), an "Archive" of all the TFAs, "By email" for a subscription, "More featured articles" to see all the featured articles grouped by subject matter, and "About" for basically what I just said in fewer words.

In the news

Wikipedia is not the news, but Wikipedia often documents breaking news when its subject obviously has more than passing notability. Typically, "in the news" (ITN) consists of four to five bullet points of news stories in descending chronological order. Each story gets a single-sentence description (a "blurb") along with a link to the event itself (in bold) and links to subjects involved. One story gets its own picture, although this isn't always the top one.

There are criteria for these, but as these are current events, the standards only enforce a baseline level of quality. The section is surprisingly globally representative. It will also usually safely cover blatantly major news stories, like: "Mojtaba Khamenei is elected Supreme Leader of Iran following the assassination of his father, Ali Khamenei." However, it isn't a replacement for news publications because 1) it will miss most of your local and regional stories, 2) it only covers five-ish events at a time, and 3) there is latency.

The "Ongoing" list covers current events which have either been ongoing for a long time or which will foreseeably continue for a long time. Especially for protracted events, there'll be a separate "timeline" article so readers can catch up.

"Recent deaths" does what it says on the tin: it lists people (with Wikipedia articles of some baseline quality) who usually died within the last couple weeks-ish. The quality ranges anywhere from "fine" to "excellent", typically more toward the former.

"More current events" takes you to the current events portal (see 'content portals' later under 'Other areas of Wikipedia') which has muuuuuuuch more coverage of current events. "Nominate an article" is kind of inviting you to do so, but it's also inviting you to watch the shitshow that goes on behind the scenes.

Did you know ...

"Did you know ..." (DYK) is a trivia section that's mainly designed as a hook to several articles (one of which gets an image). Like the previous two, it's done via a nomination process; an article can only be nominated seven days after it’s created, expanded by 5x, or promoted to Good Article status* (these are the formal rules). Often, you’ll find a niche subject that someone very recently put a ton of passion into researching and writing about.

The hook is supposed to be "likely to be perceived as unusual or intriguing by readers with no special knowledge or interest" (if it's about a creative work, it must be about a real-world fact). The subjects for DYK are usually extremely random, and the order doesn't represent quality. I think reading one per day is a lot of fun.

The "Archive" section lists every DYK, "Start a new article" takes you to a page which introduces writing an article from scratch,** and "Nominate an article" shows you all the behind-the-scenes goodness that goes into getting these selected.

* "Good article" status is a rung down from "featured article" status (discussed above). It's peer-reviewed by exactly one editor against less stringent criteria. Still considered quite good.

** If you're considering creating an article, please don't unless you've done some editing, and please read this page in its entirety first; it's extremely concise relative to how much you should know by the time you create an article.

On this day

"On this day" is one for the history buffs. Underappreciated, I think, is that it links to the day itself – Wikipedia maintains an article for all 366 calendar days, each of which documents events, births, deaths, and holidays. If there's a holiday of any reasonable import, it'll be shown alongside the date in "On this day".

There'll normally be 4 or 5 historical events on a bulleted list in ascending chronological order. Because a specific date needs to be known, these are typically distributed from about 1500 onward, but there are plenty much older than that. Each event will have the year linked, which Wikipedia also keeps articles on. Because there's such a deep pool to choose from, these articles are normally quite high-quality. Although an article can be about an event from any year, even in the 21st century, diversity is prioritized.

Below the events is a list of births and deaths, mixed together and in ascending chronological order. These have the same quality standards as the events list. If you're looking for biographies, these are more likely to be high-quality than the "Recent deaths" under "In the news".

"More anniversaries" just gives you the Wikipedia articles for yesterday, today, and tomorrow. "Archive" gives you the "On this day" for all 366 calendar days. This section doesn't technically rotate every year. Rather, these are pages that can be changed at any time. So the "March 13" page in 2027 could theoretically be the same as today. By convention, though, they're changed to avoid repetition.

* Pope Francis got mentioned today in both DYK and OTD. I promise Wikipedia isn't obsessed with Pope Francis.

Today's featured list

Much of the information on featured articles (above) applies here. Wikipedia categorizes lists separately from articles due to their major difference in format and function. Featured lists (of which there are about 4750) aren't just bulleted lists of the material or summaries of each item. Instead, they start with prose which introduces the subject and information you may need to understand the list.

The list is normally presented as a table with an image of and relevant information about each item. For lists with especially many items (e.g. list of California tornadoes), the table is usually dropped in favor of a bulleted list with summaries, but even in that example, you get statistics and graphics to summarize the items. All of the information is as well-cited as it would be in a featured article.

Featured lists are great unto themselves, and, in most cases, they also act as a great directory by linking to the article for each item, so you can use it as a way to find one that interests you and read specifically about it.

Today's featured list is chosen similar to today's featured article. The section has a summary of the overall subject being listed, an image of a representative of the list (including a link to that item's article), and recently featured lists (in descending chronological order).

The "Archive" is a list of all TFLs, and "More featured lists" has all the featured lists grouped by subject matter.

Today's featured picture

(Also called "photo of the day")

Most of Wikipedia's media is pulled from Wikimedia Commons, and a featured picture is normally a picture that's been uploaded to Commons and then uploaded separately to Wikipedia to receive featured image status there. Don't ask me; I don't know. Contrary to their name, they're sometimes videos rather than still images.

Bottom line is that these are really good free media which capture a specific subject very well. If you're solely interested in the eye candy, I recommend featured pictures on Commons, but these are nicer to me overall because they have an accompanying article. The article quality itself will range from "fine" to "excellent", because the image is the focus, but an image, to me, is still more enriching with context.

Unlike TFA and TFL, although images need featured status, there isn't a second nomination process; instead, they get a spot on the main page in roughly the order they were first considered featured (looks like about 2 years' delay right now).

The section on the main page will have the image, a short summary of the subject's article (like TFA and TFL), a link to said article (in bold), image credit, "Recently featured" pictures (in descending chronological order), an "Archive" of all the past today's featured pictures, and "More featured pictures" with every featured picture grouped by subject matter.

Directory

The directory after "Today's featured picture" is pretty much static.

Other areas of Wikipedia

"Other areas of Wikipedia" gives you reasonable descriptions of the items it lists, but I'll try to add something.

• Community portal – Just a big fuck-off list of things that editors might find useful or interesting, but some of it can be useful to the curious non-editor, which I guess I can describe (I'll skip the ones I think are pretty much only of use to editors).
  • The Teahouse (listed separately in "Other areas of Wikipedia") is a friendly place where newcomers can get help; usually this help concerns non-technical editing, but anything you'd want to do as a reader is covered there too.
  • The Reference Desk isn't just for editors. Obviously we massively appreciate if you contribute what you learn in your research to the encyclopedia (if it's applicable), but if you're really struggling to find a source for something, the reference desk is theoretically open to anybody.
  • WikiProjects. It's kind of wild to claim non-editors might be interested in this, but seeing the inner workings of some fields can, in my insanely ~~biased~~ seasoned opinion, be interesting. "Women in Red" is one that comes to mind.
  • The Signpost is Wikipedia's newspaper about itself. It's well-written and often surprisingly critical, and like usual, anyone can contribute.
  • "Newest featured content" shows the newest of the best of the best Wikipedia has to offer, namely featured articles, lists, topics (a collection of articles/lists around one subject), and pictures.
• Village pump – For technical stuff; no non-editor will ever need to be here.
• Site news – Nothing of importance to non-editors that The Signpost doesn't cover.
• Teahouse – See point in 'Community portal'.
• Help desk – Nominally different from the Teahouse (the latter is "for beginners"), but I don't think so in practice. Either way, non-editing questions are probably basic enough for the Teahouse.
• Reference desk – See point in 'Community portal'.
• Content portals – These are actually really cool and don't get nearly enough love. Portals are functionally topic-specific front pages to Wikipedia. So for example, the volcanoes portal is the front page of Wikipedia if you want to use it as an encyclopedia of volcanology.

Wikipedia's sister projects

The "Wikipedia's sister projects" section lists all of the sister projects under the Wikimedia Foundation. Yes, these exist; yes, they have a ton of work put into them. They have varying levels of "usefulness", ranging from what I would consider "just hanging on" for Wikinews to "fun curiosity" like Wikivoyage to "occassionally practical" like Wikiquote to "a serious public good" like Wikimedia Commons to "I use this at least once a day" like Wiktionary to "probably as used societally as Wikipedia" like Wikidata. I highly recommend looking at at least one of them; their contributors work just as hard as Wikipedia's, if not moreso.

Other Wikipedias

Lastly, you'll see non-English Wikipedias. A lot of these are very robust, and if you're curious about a more niche language, there's a dropdown on the bottom-right that lets you select from 346 languages. If you're trying to learn about something fairly regional and can translate, the corresponding Wikipedia's article is often better than the English Wikipedia's (or even exists, for that matter). If you're reading an article about a subject from a non-English region, you can always check the sidebar and see what it looks like in that language too. Keep in mind different languages have different editorial standards.

Follow-up questions welcome; I tried and probably failed to overcome nose blindness when considering relevant information.

Now you don't need expensive equipment to debunk flat earthers!

I'm sure you've seen it if you subscribe to satellite TV, or if you watch local channels (either over the air, or if you follow them on social media, or get your news at their website).

It usually starts with the local station. They will run a story disguised as news saying that one of the big satellite providers is threatening to take them off the air, and they will give you a number to call. They may also suggest you cancel your service and sign up with the competition.

The local station may be the loudest, but they are not necessarily at fault! Though they do own some of the fault.

The satellite provider will typically react by taking the station offline... that is, they will take them out of their channel lineup. (They are still broadcasting over cable, and over the satellite provider they aren't beefing with, and over the air.) They will replace the station with a similar but opposite notice about how the local channel demanded too much money and they could not afford to keep the channel without raising your rates.

So who do you believe? Truth is... both of them. Neither of them.

The way local channels work is, they have their OTA (over the air) business. They sell ad time to local businesses. They also do fluff pieces promoting local businesses, or naming segments after local businesses (or national ones whose chains want more exposure). Aside from that, they also license their content to cable and satellite providers. This is important because people who pay for cable and satellite still want local news, and no one can be arsed to spend $20-50 on an OTA receiver (an antenna, but they're flat now, you tape them to a wall and run a cable to your antenna, now you get free TV as long as you're within 10 miles or so (don't believe them when they say they go further, this is always limited by physics, and digital is kind of "all or nothing"). With cable providers, they generally look at how many subscribers the cable provider has and go from there. Satellite is different because DirecTV and Dish Network are basically "everywhere". So they do business differently. They work with all the local channels everywhere, so they have these deals in place that last for so many months or years.

When these terms come up, both sides tend to negotiate better rates, so that's when you see them threaten each other. They both want you to call and complain to soften the other side. If a deal is reached, the issue is dropped until next time. If not... then the channel is removed from the lineup and the channel blasts the satellite provider on social media and their site.

Basically, the local channel wants more money for the contract because they have ongoing expenses. Especially with everything going up, they want to pay people more, pay competitive wages and whatnot, so they ask for more money, year after year. And mostly, they get it. Local channels not being on satellite is not a big problem and when it is, it doesn't last long.

As for satellite, they want to pay less money, and their argument is that they serve more customers, so they are in fact bringing more eyes to those local ads.

In the United Kingdom, Parliament has basically said if you have a TV, you gotta pay the Beeb — the BBC. British Broadcasting Corporation. The people who make Dr Who, and they also have a pretty awesome news network. (Seriously, you should bookmark them.) Typically you can't watch the BBC on TV outside the UK, but you can access it online just fine, and there are services that carry its programming. In the US, there's really no such rule. Anyone can get local channels OTA for free. If you use cable or satellite, there is no set value for each viewer that needs to be met, it's all up for negotiation, and the customers lose.

I generally side with the local stations, but I will not sit here and tell you they're blameless. Both sides are bullshitting you, and neither side respects you enough to spell out the actual issues. They don't trust you, and that sucks. It's expected of DirecTV and Dish Network and the cable companies, we know they're shitty people. Or at least at the top. But your local news? You're supposed to trust them. So yeah, it sucks, but if I gotta pick a side, I'm going local every time. As should you, IMHO.

Satellite sucks, but it's a necessity for many. If you can get Internet, you can often do better with streaming than you can with traditional cable or satellite TV. The idea of 50,000 channels with nothing on is a Boomer dream, and even as a Gen-X'er pushing 50, I got no interest in those. Plus, they're close to 1/3 advertising these days. A show in a 60 minute time slot is 42 minutes of the show, and 18 minutes of ads. If it were 20/40 it would be exactly 1/3 advertising. It's not quite there yet. You want an actual number? Fine. The common denominator between 60 and 100 is 5, so... I'm just gonna google it... it's an even 30%. Now look at your cable or satellite bill. Are those advertisers paying 30% of your bill? Fuck no, they're not! But they expect you to buy from them.

My advice for so many fucked up situations is eat local, drink local, buy local. Whenever you can. Shop with local businesses. Go to craft faires and support local artists. (Disclaimer of bias: my wife is a local artist.) Contribute to people directly whenever possible by buying locally. Try to keep your money in your local community when and where you can. Support the people who support you. Local news is telling you what's happening where you live. Support their advertisers. If satellite tells you to call them, call them! And tell them to keep fighting the good fight. Tell them you have their back. And maybe ask them to be a little transparent about their side. We know they're holding out for more money. Tell them they deserve it. They're working for you every day.

This may be US-specific, and if it doesn't apply to your area, sorry. I just wanna spread information on what I know. If I haven't been to your state or country or province or whatever, sorry — I've been around a bit, but I don't really travel these days.

Around January 11, 2026, archive.today (aka archive.is, archive.md, etc) started using its users as proxies to conduct a distributed denial of service (DDOS) attack against Gyrovague, my personal blog. All users encountering archive.today's CAPTCHA page currently load and execute the following Javascript: setInterval(function() { fetch("https://gyrovague.com/?s" + Math.random().toString(36).substring(2, 3 + Math.random() * 8), { referrerPolicy: "no-referrer",…

Far too many netizens still try to ignore this or even come up with reasons why gyrovague is the bad guy here.

Alternative archive pages:

archive.org
ghostarchive.org
archivebox.io (self-hosted)

But how else to bypass a paywall?

I've read relevant articles and clicked old links - they all seem to be history. The only ones that still work just look for the article in various archives - the subject of this post always amongst them. The same applies to this article, but there's still some good tips.

Here is the original article from 2023: https://gyrovague.com/2023/08/05/archive-today-on-the-trail-of-the-mysterious-guerrilla-archivist-of-the-internet/ and what Patakallio has to say about it today:

The post mentions three names/aliases linked to the site, but all of them had been dug up by previous sleuths and the blog post also concludes that they are all most likely aliases, so as far as “doxxing” goes, this wasn’t terribly effective.

Here is a relevant ArsTechnica article: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/02/wikipedia-bans-archive-today-after-site-executed-ddos-and-altered-web-captures/

Wikipedia editors discovered that the archive site altered snapshots of webpages to insert the name of the blogger who was targeted by the DDoS.

archive.today (.ph, .is, .md, .fo, .li, .vn) also loads a pixel and javascript from mail.ru. The script mentions lamoda.ru, kommersant.ru, dzen.ru, ad.mail.ru, vk.com, vkontakte.ru, ok.ru, odnoklasseniki.ru. I haven't researched this further, but I think one can assume that your IP address will be spread across all relevant Russian websites. 10 years ago I would have said "so what? The Russians have social media too" but today you can safely assume that all this data is available to the government itself and is actively contributing to the hybrid war.

All in all, archive.today has always been in the "too good to be true" category. Call me suspicious.

And once again because it's important:

The Wikipedia guidance points out that the Internet Archive and its website, Archive.org, are “uninvolved with and entirely separate from archive.today.”

The idea of the lizard brain first emerged and rose to popularity in the 1960s and 1970s, based on comparative anatomical studies. Parts of the mammalian brain, neuroscientist Paul MacLean noticed, were very similar to parts of the reptilian brain. This led him to the conclusion that the brain had evolved in stages, after life moved to land.

First, according to MacLean's model, came the reptilian brain, defined as the basal ganglia. Then came the limbic system – the hippocampus, the amygdala, and the hypothalamus. Finally, the neocortex arose in primates.

Under the triune brain model, each of these sections is responsible for different functions; the more basal parts of the brain, for example, were supposedly more concerned with primal responses – like basic instincts for survival.

However, neuroscientists have been decrying the model for decades. The brain just doesn't work like that, in discrete sections that each play a separate part. Brain regions, anatomically distinct as they are, are highly interconnected, a web of humming neural networks. And with the advent of new techniques, we can start to better understand how brains evolved.

In a new study, a team of researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Brain Research turned to actual lizard brains to investigate, publishing their findings in a paper led by neuroscience graduate students David Hain and Tatiana Gallego-Flores.

[article written in 2022]

You should know this because one of the reasons Trump's been trying to use to justify this war is that Iran never said they wouldn't pursue nuclear weapons.

You could say the fatwa is just talk but there's a strategic argument for Iran to not get nuclear weapons besides the moral case. Iran doesn't want to get nukes and become a pariah state like North Korea and cut itself off from global trade, they're a Petro state they need trade. At the same time they don't want Israel and the US to be able to bomb them with impunity. So their best strategy is to remain close to building a bomb, that way they can get sanctions relief while being able to dash for a bomb and nuclear deterrence in the case of a war.

Crossposted from https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/64470729

It’s called Evil Autism, because it’s a space based on the old subreddit that was so fun back in the day. Please join and help make this new space feel like another safe space for those of who are ND. I hope to see you there!

https://matrix.to/#/#evil-autism:matrix.org

Marion Nestle is a true hero. This woman spent her entire career fighting against food companies making people sick

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marion_Nestle

She eats mostly veggies, nuts and fruits.

Corporations HATE her.

She just published a new book and gives regular interviews:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kE9XeUEJV7o

She also runs a personal blog called Food Politics

https://www.foodpolitics.com/

Yesterday while cooking I set off the smoke detector, no I did not burn anything. They go off when I cook over a high heat. And yesterday once they started going off they would not stop. I ended up having to disconnect them all (they are hard wired with an interconnect) and I replaced them this morning. Aaaaaaaand let me tell you, I had a sleepless night last night knowing there were no detectors installed.

https://www.southernliving.com/how-often-should-you-replace-smoke-detectors-8774122

Why YSK:

Despite choking being an emergency, until recently there has been limited high-quality evidence to guide bystanders on the most effective way to help. Techniques like abdominal thrusts (formerly known as the Heimlich maneuver), back blows and chest compressions or thrusts have existed since the mid-1900s but, until recently, recommendations were largely based on case reports rather than rigorous scientific data. This evidence gap is dangerous.

Bystander response is the primary driver of a choking person’s outcome, so ensuring people know the safest and most effective way to care for a choking person can save lives.

Please see the article for the full piece, it's not long.

Article authors:

• Cody Dunne - Emergency Medicine Physician and PhD Candidate, University of Calgary
• Andrew McRae - Associate Professor, Departments of Emergency Medicine and Community Health Sciences, University of Calgary
• Khara Sauro - Associate professor, Cumming School of Medicine, Department of Surgery, University of Calgary

If you need more motivation to open the article, here is an interesting fact:

New research suggests back blows cleared choking obstructions in 72 per cent of cases, superior to both abdominal thrusts (59 per cent) and chest thrusts (27 per cent).

The simple math of the Yard-Sale Model shows that if everybody started out with equal money in a fair economy, the outcome tends toward one person holding all of the money. The cool graphical simulations on this page demonstrate why.

All info pulled from here https://stopgenai.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/10/Search-Engine-analysis-Dally.pdf

The description for each services is mostly copied verbatim, but I think this post is formatted better for anybody to just get started.

https://www.searchenginemap.com/

See where search engines feed from

Independent Indexes (no genAI user experience, no genAI footprint– hit and miss results)

https://marginalia-search.com/

Marginalia Search is a particularly unique engine. It notes in its About page that it doesn’t believe
itself a full replacement for the big three but rather “complementary” to what already exists. Some
general queries return pretty standard gossip pages, which isn’t an experience out of the realm of
expectation! Other results are a bit dated, but still pan out. Overall, this is a solid place to issue
general queries and can get you something similar to what you’re seeking.

https://rightdao.com/ (seems down)

Another engine that’s got the same sort of “browsy” approach to the internet is Right Dao. Its General
Mission Explanation specifically takes aim at Big Tech and cites the team’s goal as a reason for
building their independent index. Silly searches return a lot of pages that no longer exist and some
social media sites appear fully censored. It’s a small but strong start and probably better used
when you don’t have a clear direction, are wanting to learn more about a general topic, or need
information that isn’t time or region specific

https://stract.com/ (seems defunct)

The most developed search engine on this list has got to be Stract. It focuses heavily on
transparency and its open source model, encouraging users to customize their experience on the
engine. This is by far and away the most interesting non GBY search engine: it received a grant for
its work towards an independent internet and has, as a result, been able to expand its services
accordingly. Silly searches don’t return the greatest content. I’d also note that sometimes, it seems to
simply freeze and stop returning results. There isn’t a noted rhyme or reason, and it got frustrating to
repeatedly try looking things up. Nonetheless, when it’s functioning smoothly, it’s a great starting place
for queries that don’t have a narrow scope and aren’t time-sensitive (due to the fact that sometimes it
simply won’t return results).

https://yep.com/

Other independent run indexes such as Yep! seem great on the surface but spend a massive amount
of resources to build their own LLMs. This is a step in the wrong direction– it’s not what users want,
and it’s not how to keep the internet a free and fair space for all users equally. Some indexes could be
useful in the future but are still developing English databases, and simply won’t meet user needs. I’ll
include them in the sources for this video nonetheless for anyone interested

GBY-Tangential Searches (limited genAI user experience, minor genAI footprint)

https://udm14.com/

People created an entire webpage that does a Google for you, sans the shit: udm=14. Simply set this
as your homepage and issue all your queries through the search function directly on the page. It’s a
quick, easy way to see the Google you know and love without the AI slop ruining the experience

https://duckduckgo.com/

allows disallowing any AI results (pretty useless if browsing in private window, but as shared by @ep1cfac3pa1m@lemmy.world there is https://noai.duckduckgo.com/)

https://www.mojeek.com/

One bright light seems to be Mojeek. True, their team “both sides” generative AI as a whole. But
when it comes to search engines, they argued in just September of 2025 that Generative AI is not
the answer for search engines. Their explicit Privacy primer has a host of blog posts that discuss
the dangers of the internet becoming a monoculture. They also pretty reliably return decent results for
even mundane queries ("Jason Statham height" search).

https://www.lilo.org/qui-est-lilo/

Another search engine that deserves a shout out is French-based Lilo (fed primarily by Bing). Its main
mission is focused on funding a variety of projects put forth by users. The searches initiated on Lilo
build up in the form of “water drops”, which are stored only if you choose to create an account. The
Privacy Charter lays out exactly when and how data about you is stored. It’s quite popular in France,
and well-regarded in anti-AI circles. Qwant recently purchased Lilo, though, so tread carefully in the
coming months as they likely integrate their in-house “AI solutions” to the recent acquisition.

see also:

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monuments_in_the_United_States_to_Nazi_collaborators
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memorials_in_Canada_to_Nazis_and_Nazi_collaborators

Thus, when you're tempted to share a Politico article, please look instead for an article from a different source.

(Also, if you're wondering, know that Axel Springer, the mass media company, has nothing to do with Springer, the science publisher (the one with the chess knight logo; it's named after Julius Springer; it deserves criticism of its own, but a different kind.)

Why do this? Because surveillance capitalism wants you to be less free. It wants you to be glued to the screen. It wants you to buy whatever advertisers want you to buy. But you can fight back by deliberately poisoning your data.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/42987384