pryor

I have switched to using Startpage.com and vastly prefer it. for one thing, instead of displaying an "AI summary" at the top of the search results (unless you turn it off, yes I know), it displays the first paragraph of the Wikipedia article, with link, whenever it finds one that's relevant.

also a waaayyyyy better sense of design than duckduckgo

Search Engines

Infinity Search is an alternative search engine with a special focus on privacy

DuckDuckGo is a popular search engine for those who value their privacy and are put off by the thought of their every query being tracked and logged. Uses bangs, ![site] for in-page search (sells your data to microsoft and draws from fucking bing)

WolframAlpha is a privately owned search engine that allows you to “compute expert-level answers using Wolfram’s breakthrough algorithms, knowledgebase, and AI technology.” A data search engine.

Boardreader is a search engine for forums and message boards. It allows you to search forums and then filter down results by date and language.

Based in France, Qwant is a privacy-based search engine that won’t record your searches or use your personal details for advertising. Uses “&” as a bang search.

Another privacy-based search engine is Search Encrypt, which uses local encryption to ensure that users’ identifiable information cannot be tracked. Metasearch across multiple engines. 

Offering unbiased results from several sources, SearX is a metasearch engine that aims to present a free, decentralized view of the internet. Can be self-hosted. 

Gibiru’s tagline is “Unfiltered private search” and that’s exactly what it offers. Requires AnonymoX Firefox add-on for privacy. 

Disconnect allows you to conduct anonymous searches through a search engine of your choice.

Swisscows provides fully encrypted searches to protect your privacy and security. Built-in violence/porn filter cannot be overridden. 

MetaGer offers “Privacy Protected Search & Find” through its anonymised search. A plugin will allow it to be made a default.

Gigablast is a private search engine that indexes millions of websites and servers real-time information without tracking your data, keeping you hidden from marketers and spammers. Variety of filtration and refinement options for searching. 

Oscobo is a search engine that protects your privacy while you search the web. By not using any third-party tools or scripts, your data is protected from hacking and misuse. Has a Chrome extension to allow use in toolbar. 

https://search.marginalia.nu/ an independent DIY search engine that focuses on non-commercial content, and attempts to show you sites you perhaps weren't aware of in favor of the sort of sites you probably already knew existed. Use old-school searching rather than query-based for the best results. 

https://www.mojeek.com/ 

https://wiby.me/ - It’s goal is to index as many personalized websites as possible, and NOT commercial sites. 

https://4get.ca/ it works a lot like SearX, but honestly better. It doesn’t have its own index, but pulls from many others. I think it’s the best for research, since it allows you to search for answers from different indexes, is easy to configure, add free, and avoids censorship as much as it can.

https://www.searchenginemap.com/ for more on how search engines relate to each other.

https://yep.com/ is a crawler

https://www.etools.ch/ retrieves from Google, Mojeek, Bing, and Yandex, like Searx

https://www.dogpile.com/ 

https://searxng.org/ (next gen Searx)

https://luxxle.com/ - possibly conservative?

https://presearch.com/ - good for academic?

https://kagi.com/smallweb - free/randomised Kagi.

Other Searchers

www.refseek.com - Academic Resource Search. More than a billion sources: encyclopedia, monographies, magazines.

www.worldcat.org - a search for the contents of 20 thousand worldwide libraries. Find out where lies the nearest rare book you need.

https://link.springer.com - access to more than 10 million scientific documents: books, articles, research protocols.

www.bioline.org.br is a library of scientific bioscience journals published in developing countries.

http://repec.org - volunteers from 102 countries have collected almost 4 million publications on economics and related science.

www.science.gov is an American state search engine on 2200+ scientific sites. More than 200 million articles are indexed.

in this fanbase i see people make playlists for characters and on these playlists sometimes there isn’t a single song by black artists. or the playlists lack any rap or hip hop or even soul music which are generes where black artists are very prominent.

i see people make AUs or crossovers or talk about how a character would enjoy xyz movie/show/musical and i can’t think of a single time it’s been a movie or show or musical by/about black people or black characters.

and sometimes it makes me feel a little bit awkward as a black person. like there’s been times where i try to say i think a song fits a character or ship and people have just never heard of the artist or the song or “i don’t listen to that stuff” (usually rap or hip hop) or don’t seem interested in hearing it. or, to get to know people, i ask them if they’ve heard xyz artist, or seen xyz movie, or watched xyz show. they never have.

like i remember last year BEGGING people over and over to please go watch sinners because it was SO good, some people admitted they waited until it was out on streaming because they didn’t think it would be a theatre worthy watch, etc. but when movies like FNAF2 or thunderbolts came out some of them ran to see them and talked about them for weeks??? (iirc there was even a captain america movie with a black lead that came out in 2025?? and i saw marvel fans fawning over thunderbolts so much and v little talk about a black man being captain america!!!)

those are just a few examples but really i guess i just want to say that a lot of people are seizing this opportunity to attack each other and bully each other and turn the dcsowhite talk in to a competition over who supposedly cares about black people The Most but all of that support is rarely going beyond this conversation or even outside of the fanbase. some people are putting black characters above real people as a whole (which was something that was acknowledged as a point of concern amongst black people discussing the blackout and was one of the things that determined the cancellation) and w some people it feels like they’re narrowing “supporting black art” down to comic books and then berating others for not caring about black creations when there’s so much more beyond comics that they themselves do not engage with at all.

there are so many other forms of art made by black people that you should all seek out with and engage with beyond just talking about comic books and comic characters! especially if you’re looking to branch away from dc or the comic business.

And perhaps we should interrogate who that narrative is for.

Damian has literally been sent to hell. Tara has been treated like...Tara by basically every narrative she has ever been in. To this day, people still refuse to acknowledge their growth, their nuance, or the lack of agency baked into their circumstances.

But then you get a willing, spiteful mass murderer who spends five dubious minutes posing as less of an asshole, and suddenly he is the freshest, hottest concept in comics. We simply must root for him. We must celebrate his growth. We must ignore the continuity of his crimes. And if you point out that he has, in fact, done horrific things on purpose, suddenly you’re “taking comics too seriously.”

Interesting.

Redemption arcs are not the problem. Growth is not the problem. Characters with blood on their hands becoming better is not the problem.

The problem is how quickly some fans recognize humanity, nuance, pain, and potential in a violent white male power fantasy, while treating characters like Damian, Talia, Tara, and plenty of others as permanently defined by their worst context, their worst writing, or their least charitable interpretation. Even Diana suffers from this and she didn't even really do anything wrong--

What could possibly cause people to project so hard into that archetype?

In this political climate?