" News institutions like the New York Times, search engines like Google, and “crowdsourced” sites like Wikipedia routinely avoid linking to root documents. "
After publication my cyber-angels moved me to P2P search engine Presearch that has results like it's 2008 again and spiffy tools for tech boffins. https://presearch.io/
Boycott Google don't feed the enemy your search & user data.. it's free to boycott folks!!
It is glaringly obvious why the corporate media's product doesn't encourage links to source material. It would be near impossible for a consumer to swallow their spin and not vomit.
Excellent advice. I have been recommending this boycott to friends and clients for years, but of course people are so spoiled by habit and ‘convenience’ that it quite a chore. Still, it’s necessary.
As a computer consultant, I point out to every client that Google is curated and censored. Most don't know other search engines even exist. They're happy to let me switch their browsers to one of the alternates, of which I usually choose DuckDuckGo. Not perfect but still better than Google.
DDG is primarily driven by Bing. It's not the perfect search tool, and they've openly admitted to manually adjusting certain search results for political reasons (specifically related to the Ukraine war).
Ick. Bing is Microsoft. Ever since I learned that, I've been keeping an eye out for a replacement.
I've been an Apple person since the Apple ][, and remember the lawsuit when Microsoft stole the look-and-feel of the Mac operating system. Yeah, maybe Apple lost legally, but still, they did steal it. And not just because imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. This is one prejudice about which I remain unrepentant.
To this day whenever anything goes wrong I blame Bill Gates 😜
Smartphones existed in Japan with apps on them and literally called iSomethingorother and the iPhone was basically copying that in sleek black design. Such an amazingly perfect design that almost everyone immediately obviates it with a case, lol.
Not to mention that Apple wouldn't exist as it is today without the company-saving equity investment from Microsoft that was made when Jobs took it back over.
Your base point would deny rock and roll the chance to be advanced by emulating the blues, so there's no way I can agree with you that non-copyright-infringing imitation is at all a problem. We have a strong public interest in allowing innovation that borrows from other steps forward.
Tech is my nemesis but my some of my cyberangels help guard WikiLeaks servers and since 2015 have had me use Presearch and Firefox browser forever.. best rule for unsophisticated user is trust my infosec boffins!! <3
I'm checking out presearch. I've been using the DDG browser because it naturally suppresses a lot of ads and tracking, including on YouTube, which is really nice.
My backup browser is firefox followed by Safari. I keep chrome around for those rare occasions where I must use it.
DDG is a search engine aggregator - primarily Bing and Google. They don't do primary search themselves. Its only virtue is anonymizing your searches from Bing and Google by stripping off any identifying info from the search. So whatever biases are present in Google and Bing come through in DDG searches.
I've been using Presearch for quite awhile now. It's an open source distributed search engine network designed for privacy and transparency. It is far more likely to produce useful first page results than Google or Bing for quite awhile. They've got some kind of association with one of the crypto-currencies such that if you click on any of the relatively few ads they include on search pages, you earn credit (some kind of incentive to revenue share with them). The ad quantity (so far) is quite low. And they have to pay for the tangible overhead costs somehow. They have a phone app you can download, and you can configure your browsers so it's your primary search engine.
Google and Bing are primarily advertising search tools. If you search on virtually any noun, Google and Bing put up pages of vendors. And remember: Google owns Youtube, so giving you youtube results puts money in their pocket as well.
Here's a possibly interesting factoid: A cousin of mine has an aol mail account that goes back several decades. I had occasion to take a look at his full mail header recently (most mail clients have the option under "View"). I wanted to see where his mail server was located. Here's an excerpt from it:
"mailfrom; client-ip=66.163.188.83
helo=sonic319-21.consmr.mail.ne1.yahoo.com; "
This made sense, since Yahoo bought AOL many years ago. But when I geolocated his server IP address, I got this:
"IP: "66.163.188.83"
COUNTRY--NAME: "United States"
STATE--PROV: "New York"
DISTRICT: "Greenwich Village"
CITY: "New York"
LATITUDE: "40.73084"
LONGITUDE: "-73.99140"
GEONAME--ID: "6337341"
ISP: "Oath Holdings Inc."
ORGANIZATION: "Oath Holdings Inc.""
So, who is Oath Holdings inc.? If I had to guess, they are probably a third party vender that Yahoo farmed their legacy-AOL email accounts out to. Nothing wrong with that, I suppose. But it adds yet another level of fingers to trust.
Polaris mail is also quite good. I used to pay for mail through an outfit on the East Coast (US). It didn't cost much. Then one day the guy who owned the company sent us customers an email saying he was closing down the mail service in a couple months. No explanation. I sent him back a private email asking why. He said that one of the 3-letter agencies was otherwise going to force him to provide them with back-doors into everyone's mail - essentially set it up so they could come and go through people's mailboxes as they pleased. Rather than accommodate that he shut the business down and became a consultant.
I asked him what he was going to do for mail personally. He said at this point it has to be offshore to be safe. Proton was one of his considerations. The other was Polaris. The latter is located in Montreal and is an outfit like his was, with similar ethics. And he reasoned that Canada has always been quite hostile to America's 3-letter agencies. And it's closer to home physically, so faster transit times (when your mail server is half way around the world, hitting "Check mail" can take several seconds longer).
A lot of people like protonmail. I've never felt the urge to go that far. I still use Apple's mail service. You can disparage Apple (I do frequently), and it is going downhill, but it still seems to be better in terms of privacy than most other companies.
I'm very happy with it, I have multiple addresses to use as alias. I didn't know Gmail can scan even your draft emails. Ugh. Yes, it's a pain to switch, but happy I did
Any Internet application that uses any kind of AI engine to make suggestions or help you write anything is passing what you're working on back and forth between you and their servers. It has to in order to function.
Voice command works the same way. Our phones aren't powerful enough to do voice-to-text conversions. It has to take place on distant servers.
I'm not very techy, trying to "hide" as much as possible. Don't use any voice commands, disabled that feature on my phone (but is it really disabled?) But my car "told" my dealer the tires were low...we're screwed.
Unless something has changed recently, it's a mix of Bing and Google. Someone did a bias study awhile back where they asked the same politically hot questions of six or seven search engines and compared the bias in the first page results. At that time Bing and Google were both biased (in the same way) but with some differences, which were visible in the DDG results.
The preference settings in most browsers now include a list of search engines to choose from for the default. There's some sort of contractual agreement with Google that makes it everybody's default, but it's easily changed.
I detest Google and don’t use their search engine. None I’ve found are perfect but I do like that Luxxle seems to offer a broad range and has more conservative choices. It actually allows a filter of those choices which although not perfect is better than most.
As a computer consultant, I've learned over the years that the average person doesn't even know there are other search engines. That's why people still use it. Google has some sort of contractual arrangement with the browser publishers so the browsers come with Google set as the default search engine. It's really easy to change the setting for the default search engine—but only if you know enough to do it.
The reason the NYT and CNN are mentioned so often is that many people still consider them authoritative, although that number is dwindling at a rather satisfying rate.
I've been using Presearch for a couple years now, and I've noticed it tends to list all the mainstream/legacy sources in search results first, forcing me to scroll much further down to see alternative sources, if they're listed at all. Disappointing.
Results are also highly influenced by your search terms and the more generic the words selected the more generic the results because Google still has the greatest influence in rankings.. results aren't magic, expecting page one golden sources is unrealistic but might find things on page 2 or 3 that Google has hundreds deep.
GENIUS! On whatever scale and through whatever hiccups, this is exactly what citizens need for everything, everywhere. !Primary sources! I'm just a dish-washing housewife, and even I can see that the "airwaves" are crammed with middlemen telling us 1) what was said, and 2) what it meant. I AM SO DONE WITH IT. Of course, a sprinkling of commentary from those with proven critical thinking skills and intellectual honesty can't hurt from time to time, but that's got to be a tasty side dish, not the whole damn dinner with nothing else to find without searching the house from top to bottom! PS Sorry for the gratuitous capitalizations and punctuation. (BUT THE OCCASION CALLS FOR IT!!!!!!!)
Cottonkid, some of the most intelligent, intellectually curious and just all round grand people I’ve ever known in my life may seem “just dish-washing housewives” - although if you’re reading Matt, I’m not buying that. Heh. Kudos.
Major kudos to you and your band of merry men (&women!). Those of us who seek the TRUTH, whether it supports our personal inclinations, or not, admire your tireless fight to expose the good, the bad and the ugly. Fight on, Matt!
What you could also do with is someone to build/embed an LLM AI that will scrape these sources so you can do prompts and fish out facts and figures and patterns from all these sources.
This is brilliant - thank you! This was exactly one of my frustrations during the Covid period, that everything was interpreted and slanted, and online source materials were literally disappearing overnight.
We all need at least the opportunity to make up our own minds about what is going on, and having original materials is crucial.
This is important for getting at and maintaining the ability to discern the truth. I have my own small example. I saw recently new DNC vice chair David Hogg is raising money for his own PAC off his DNC spot and the NY Post calls him a "Parkland Survivor." I don't think David Hogg was at Parkland when the shooting happened though he claims to be in some reports. I said so to a number of people with media connections at the time. I watched CBS's "39 days" about Parkland a while ago and consider it primary source material because Hogg is on video. At 4:50 or so into it, Hogg says he rode his bike three miles to "cover it." Could it be that Hogg wasn't even at school on the day of the shooting- https://www.cbsnews.com/news/march-for-our-lives-39-days-how-parkland-students-turned-grief-into-action/
"DAVID HOGG: On the day of the shooting, I got my camera and got on my bike and road as fast as I could three miles from my house to the school to get as much video and to get as many interviews as I could because I knew that this could not be another mass shooting."
Did he go home and come back (because his earlier accounts have him there for the actual shooting)? http://time.com/5161034/florida-school-shooting-survivor/ Is there an innocent explanation? He even has video that presents as if it was immediately after the shooting - but it almost sounds like he staged it- no gunshots and a girl talking in the background in a normal voice. Was his comment selectively edited, the cuts sound like he could have been relaying what others told him. His sister was there for it for sure. So, he is treated like he was dodging bullets when by his own admission he was three miles away when it happened if you believe the CBS piece. I was a mile or so away from the Pentagon on 9/11 when the plane hit and drove by it that afternoon (and I took pictures!). Does that make me a 9/11 survivor? The point is that this all may have been whitewashed, and Hogg is treated like a hero when he wasn't even in danger ever.
I think he’s a grifter. I don’t see how anything good will come of him. As soon as he gets the votes he starts raising money for his PAC. WHAT PAC; FOR WHAT?!
I’m not saying the right’s representatives are angels - they definitely are not, but the amount of grift from the left is OUTRAGEOUS!! How about $2 BILLION to Stacey Abram’s ‘non-profit’?
Here’s a great read for anyone interested in the GREEN NEW SCAM!
Yes, the Stacy Abrams scam is mind-blowing. Thanks for the link. I often felt when Dem activists and leaders were saying that Trump would put his political opponents in prison, they were laying their foundational excuse for when Trump and his allies began exposing the misdeeds. I would bet real money Abrams says something like "this is politically motivated persecution. I am the leading truth teller opposition to Trump in Georgia, he will go after Fani Willis too, powerful black women, RACISM... blah blah..."
As far Hogg goes, I was just surprised how apparently blatant this inconsistency was. I always felt in watching the group interviews, the other kids were not fond of Hogg. He has definitely turned it into a grift. The question is was he lying about being there or was he making himself out to be this awesome reporter and trying to get a job with CBS or something along those lines. But that would not be necessary. I almost felt like someone said you ought to start telling the truth about what really happened.
It would be interesting if someone could do a more thorough review using something better than Googling sources on the internet. I actually was in a hotel on a business trip when I first saw the Parkland doc aired. I found the other stuff and sent it to a friend who was a producer for a PBS show but the powers that be there had no interest or maybe were afraid. I just think if Hogg is full of it, he should be called on it.
Stacey Abrams ALWAYS plays the race card. It’s all she’s got. Well…that and her ‘romantic novels’. 🤮
The Hogg thing is weird, wonky and doesn’t add up. I’m now of the mind to believe Occam’s Razor theory. The simplest explanation is he wasn’t there - for whatever reason. His father was FBI, for whatever that’s worth. And he just graduated from Harvard. Just connecting the dots a bit.
Isn’t it weird that he’d run to be DNC vice-chair? What makes him qualified? He set up a PAC and ask for donations right after; for why/what? He’s gotta be one of the youngest grifters of his generation.
I’m sure his family is proud.
I believe very few journalists these days. I trust Matt, Michael Shellenberger, and Jeff Childers from C&C; he’s on Substack and I HIGHLY recommend subscribing- I do for free. He’s a FL attorney who got the first mask mandate dropped in FL. He gives insights I can’t get anywhere else. 🙂
Yes, that is pretty much my list as well. I also trust Vinay Prasad, MD for healthcare related issues, and the guys on the All In podcast have some wisdom to impart as well.
Hogg's father is an FBI agent. Hogg could have gotten one of Dad's guns or some other weapon and tried to intervene, although 3 miles to the school is 8-10 minutes for a teenager. Any distraction or injury to the gunman could have thrown off his plan, he wasn't a trained soldier/terrorist. Hogg knew the layout of the school well enough to approach from behind or either side.
Hogg showing up with a camera was simply grifting off the deaths of his classmates.
Great idea! Preserving sources and truth is already difficult and will become more so as we go more and more online where it is all too easy for books, documents, articles, and other materials to be disappeared. It is much more difficult to disappear actual printed materials, but they also have inherently limited distribution. What do you mean by storing "hardcopy" that is accessible? Paper? I think a secure archive of locked PDF files (blockchain to verify?) could be constructed and made available on multiple servers hosted by different entities, so that again it would be difficult for a bad actor to track down and destroy every copy. And some of the materials produced in our digital age will not actually transfer to plain paper very readily. But this is an idea that needs to be debated and discussed, the right path forward will emerge from multiple viewpoints and inputs.
I’m a retired librarian who applauds your efforts and wishes you luck in your new endeavor. These days it’s not as easy to access what we used to call “authoritative sources”.
That's because it's a new game now. Forget facts, evidence, reasoning, experience... All you need is to become "authoritative" somehow. This is how scientists who had never heard of Covid-19 just the year before were suddenly dictating what you had to do. They were "authoritative" sources, you see.
So put all your resources into obtaining Authoritative Status. You don't need to actually know anything.
It’s all about emotions! It’s not even authoritative. If you can rile the left up about ANYTHING they take it as gospel. Like how crazy they were about abortion when it went back to the states but they thought Trump would sign a federal abortion ban.
The crazier the left can make a story, the more their followers love it and go crazy. COVID was about emotion with tyrannical restrictions and the left made themselves the ‘COVID police’. I still see people walking around with masks in Florida. It’s crazy!
This. This right here is why the internet and the World Wide Web were invented. The internet as an interference resistant network. The web as a place to share information riding on top of that network.
My contribution is as a consumer and fan; the appearance you and Walter Kirn put in on Megyn Kelly's podcast was stellar. Even a novice like myself could appreciate the craftsman-like journalistic skills the trio of you brought to the conversation. Megyn is hyperbolic and excitable and Walter as animated as I've seen him, but you were in complete command of the facts and the context. My paltry contribution to the outlets I support are very well spent at Racket News! Keep up the great work Matt Taibbi.
I’ve had a hard time finding information to verify or contradict articles. It is increasingly worse in printed media. WSJ, NYT, EPOCH Times all have slants that should be questioned, must be questioned, but without reference material, especially that which is quashed by search engines, has become difficult. Thank you for this- and yes, we badly need an alternative to Wikipedia. I don’t want to read opinions as “facts”. I want the facts to back up or decry opinions now packaged as journalism. .
Yes!!! All power to your elbow as you build a team - this is a Herculean task. Welcome, Kathleen, and thank you for your service to our country.
It's long been obvious that reference info has become a battleground. In my small corner of the world several of us are building small libraries to preserve "old" ways of thinking and "old" info in hopes of making truthful and wise book learning available to the next generation through private lending libraries. What you are doing is on a mindblowingly larger scale. God bless your efforts!
" News institutions like the New York Times, search engines like Google, and “crowdsourced” sites like Wikipedia routinely avoid linking to root documents. "
Everyone needs to read Julian Assange's 2014 When Google Met WikiLeaks. https://orbooks.com/catalog/when-google-met-wikileaks/
After publication my cyber-angels moved me to P2P search engine Presearch that has results like it's 2008 again and spiffy tools for tech boffins. https://presearch.io/
Boycott Google don't feed the enemy your search & user data.. it's free to boycott folks!!
It is glaringly obvious why the corporate media's product doesn't encourage links to source material. It would be near impossible for a consumer to swallow their spin and not vomit.
Excellent advice. I have been recommending this boycott to friends and clients for years, but of course people are so spoiled by habit and ‘convenience’ that it quite a chore. Still, it’s necessary.
As a computer consultant, I point out to every client that Google is curated and censored. Most don't know other search engines even exist. They're happy to let me switch their browsers to one of the alternates, of which I usually choose DuckDuckGo. Not perfect but still better than Google.
I started to use Brave browser after a Congressional hearing on privacy. I switched to Protonmail for the same reason
I've been using the Brave search engine, but I'm not too happy with it. . .
I do like Protonmail, though.
Thanks! I’ve been on DDGo forever. I still hear rumors that it’s linked to Google. Do you have any ideas about this?
DDG is primarily driven by Bing. It's not the perfect search tool, and they've openly admitted to manually adjusting certain search results for political reasons (specifically related to the Ukraine war).
It's still probably the least bad search engine.
Ick. Bing is Microsoft. Ever since I learned that, I've been keeping an eye out for a replacement.
I've been an Apple person since the Apple ][, and remember the lawsuit when Microsoft stole the look-and-feel of the Mac operating system. Yeah, maybe Apple lost legally, but still, they did steal it. And not just because imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. This is one prejudice about which I remain unrepentant.
To this day whenever anything goes wrong I blame Bill Gates 😜
It's always a good day to blame Bill Gates... for anything.
Smartphones existed in Japan with apps on them and literally called iSomethingorother and the iPhone was basically copying that in sleek black design. Such an amazingly perfect design that almost everyone immediately obviates it with a case, lol.
Not to mention that Apple wouldn't exist as it is today without the company-saving equity investment from Microsoft that was made when Jobs took it back over.
Your base point would deny rock and roll the chance to be advanced by emulating the blues, so there's no way I can agree with you that non-copyright-infringing imitation is at all a problem. We have a strong public interest in allowing innovation that borrows from other steps forward.
Tech is my nemesis but my some of my cyberangels help guard WikiLeaks servers and since 2015 have had me use Presearch and Firefox browser forever.. best rule for unsophisticated user is trust my infosec boffins!! <3
I'm checking out presearch. I've been using the DDG browser because it naturally suppresses a lot of ads and tracking, including on YouTube, which is really nice.
My backup browser is firefox followed by Safari. I keep chrome around for those rare occasions where I must use it.
DDG is a search engine aggregator - primarily Bing and Google. They don't do primary search themselves. Its only virtue is anonymizing your searches from Bing and Google by stripping off any identifying info from the search. So whatever biases are present in Google and Bing come through in DDG searches.
I've been using Presearch for quite awhile now. It's an open source distributed search engine network designed for privacy and transparency. It is far more likely to produce useful first page results than Google or Bing for quite awhile. They've got some kind of association with one of the crypto-currencies such that if you click on any of the relatively few ads they include on search pages, you earn credit (some kind of incentive to revenue share with them). The ad quantity (so far) is quite low. And they have to pay for the tangible overhead costs somehow. They have a phone app you can download, and you can configure your browsers so it's your primary search engine.
Google and Bing are primarily advertising search tools. If you search on virtually any noun, Google and Bing put up pages of vendors. And remember: Google owns Youtube, so giving you youtube results puts money in their pocket as well.
I use DDGo as well…
You are google's product; not its customer.
Is protonmail a good switch to get off of Gmail? I currently use brave as a new search engine
As far as mainstream providers, Protonmail is definitely the best. Leagues better than Google.
*Anything* is better than Google, except for yahoo and AOL ;)
Here's a possibly interesting factoid: A cousin of mine has an aol mail account that goes back several decades. I had occasion to take a look at his full mail header recently (most mail clients have the option under "View"). I wanted to see where his mail server was located. Here's an excerpt from it:
"mailfrom; client-ip=66.163.188.83
helo=sonic319-21.consmr.mail.ne1.yahoo.com; "
This made sense, since Yahoo bought AOL many years ago. But when I geolocated his server IP address, I got this:
"IP: "66.163.188.83"
COUNTRY--NAME: "United States"
STATE--PROV: "New York"
DISTRICT: "Greenwich Village"
CITY: "New York"
LATITUDE: "40.73084"
LONGITUDE: "-73.99140"
GEONAME--ID: "6337341"
ISP: "Oath Holdings Inc."
ORGANIZATION: "Oath Holdings Inc.""
So, who is Oath Holdings inc.? If I had to guess, they are probably a third party vender that Yahoo farmed their legacy-AOL email accounts out to. Nothing wrong with that, I suppose. But it adds yet another level of fingers to trust.
Polaris mail is also quite good. I used to pay for mail through an outfit on the East Coast (US). It didn't cost much. Then one day the guy who owned the company sent us customers an email saying he was closing down the mail service in a couple months. No explanation. I sent him back a private email asking why. He said that one of the 3-letter agencies was otherwise going to force him to provide them with back-doors into everyone's mail - essentially set it up so they could come and go through people's mailboxes as they pleased. Rather than accommodate that he shut the business down and became a consultant.
I asked him what he was going to do for mail personally. He said at this point it has to be offshore to be safe. Proton was one of his considerations. The other was Polaris. The latter is located in Montreal and is an outfit like his was, with similar ethics. And he reasoned that Canada has always been quite hostile to America's 3-letter agencies. And it's closer to home physically, so faster transit times (when your mail server is half way around the world, hitting "Check mail" can take several seconds longer).
'And he reasoned that Canada has always been quite hostile to America's 3-letter agencies.'
But isn't Canada a member of Five Eyes?
A lot of people like protonmail. I've never felt the urge to go that far. I still use Apple's mail service. You can disparage Apple (I do frequently), and it is going downhill, but it still seems to be better in terms of privacy than most other companies.
I'm very happy with it, I have multiple addresses to use as alias. I didn't know Gmail can scan even your draft emails. Ugh. Yes, it's a pain to switch, but happy I did
Any Internet application that uses any kind of AI engine to make suggestions or help you write anything is passing what you're working on back and forth between you and their servers. It has to in order to function.
Voice command works the same way. Our phones aren't powerful enough to do voice-to-text conversions. It has to take place on distant servers.
I'm not very techy, trying to "hide" as much as possible. Don't use any voice commands, disabled that feature on my phone (but is it really disabled?) But my car "told" my dealer the tires were low...we're screwed.
Apple's MacOS Dictation has a local option that doesn't go to the servers. I don't currently use it, but I've tried it.
But doesn't Duck Duck Go also rely partially on Google?
People are saying it's Bing, which is Microsoft. Of course who knows what kind of canoodling Microsoft and Google are doing behind the scenes.
I never knew they were canoodling. . .
You’re a good source, Tardigrade.
Thanks!
I have no idea if they're canoodling. I wouldn't put it past them, but that's just my cynicism talking.
Unless something has changed recently, it's a mix of Bing and Google. Someone did a bias study awhile back where they asked the same politically hot questions of six or seven search engines and compared the bias in the first page results. At that time Bing and Google were both biased (in the same way) but with some differences, which were visible in the DDG results.
The preference settings in most browsers now include a list of search engines to choose from for the default. There's some sort of contractual agreement with Google that makes it everybody's default, but it's easily changed.
And you can add more to the list. At least on Firefox you can.
Safari uses Google which is disappointing
All the big browsers come with Google as the default, but as I said, it's very easy to change.
Same. It's so frustrating!
I detest Google and don’t use their search engine. None I’ve found are perfect but I do like that Luxxle seems to offer a broad range and has more conservative choices. It actually allows a filter of those choices which although not perfect is better than most.
https://luxxle.com/
FIF,
Thank you for the recommendation. I’m going to look into Luxxle. 🙂
I quit using Google for searches years ago. Currently using DuckDuckGo, but I will definitely check out the one you recommend.
Yeah, I also bailed on Go-ogle years and I am somewhat baffled that anybody still uses it.
Then again, I'm also somewhat baffled anytime somebody (e.g., even Matt Taibbi) still mentions the likes of the NY Times or CNN.
Sometimes it feels like the whole world is living 10 years behind me.
As a computer consultant, I've learned over the years that the average person doesn't even know there are other search engines. That's why people still use it. Google has some sort of contractual arrangement with the browser publishers so the browsers come with Google set as the default search engine. It's really easy to change the setting for the default search engine—but only if you know enough to do it.
The reason the NYT and CNN are mentioned so often is that many people still consider them authoritative, although that number is dwindling at a rather satisfying rate.
Haven't used Google for actual search in years, but somehow, still use "google" as a verb.
Thanks!
I have stopped using the word 'google' as a verb. Does that count?
Absolutely worth a star on the fridge!
😆 good one
Pamela,
Thank you for the recommendation for the book. I just got it and will read it.
I have been using Yandex.com. Google is all propaganda when searching for everyday things.
I’m looking into presearch.io and see if it’s better than Yandex.
Thanks again!
I've also been using presearch and am not happy with it. I was happy to find https://luxxle.com/ recommended here and am going to give it a try.
I've been using Presearch for a couple years now, and I've noticed it tends to list all the mainstream/legacy sources in search results first, forcing me to scroll much further down to see alternative sources, if they're listed at all. Disappointing.
Me too! Changing now to try this one someone above recommended - https://luxxle.com/
I also have been using Presearch for several years. But I've had the opposite experience - less commercial results and more specific results. Curious.
Results are also highly influenced by your search terms and the more generic the words selected the more generic the results because Google still has the greatest influence in rankings.. results aren't magic, expecting page one golden sources is unrealistic but might find things on page 2 or 3 that Google has hundreds deep.
GENIUS! On whatever scale and through whatever hiccups, this is exactly what citizens need for everything, everywhere. !Primary sources! I'm just a dish-washing housewife, and even I can see that the "airwaves" are crammed with middlemen telling us 1) what was said, and 2) what it meant. I AM SO DONE WITH IT. Of course, a sprinkling of commentary from those with proven critical thinking skills and intellectual honesty can't hurt from time to time, but that's got to be a tasty side dish, not the whole damn dinner with nothing else to find without searching the house from top to bottom! PS Sorry for the gratuitous capitalizations and punctuation. (BUT THE OCCASION CALLS FOR IT!!!!!!!)
Cottonkid, some of the most intelligent, intellectually curious and just all round grand people I’ve ever known in my life may seem “just dish-washing housewives” - although if you’re reading Matt, I’m not buying that. Heh. Kudos.
Major kudos to you and your band of merry men (&women!). Those of us who seek the TRUTH, whether it supports our personal inclinations, or not, admire your tireless fight to expose the good, the bad and the ugly. Fight on, Matt!
Much needed! Will contribute to this effort in my area of expertise.
I'm a librarian by trade. I'll do what I can.
What you could also do with is someone to build/embed an LLM AI that will scrape these sources so you can do prompts and fish out facts and figures and patterns from all these sources.
The reason the legacy media doesn't provide a link to primary material is that they want to misrepresent the content.
This is brilliant - thank you! This was exactly one of my frustrations during the Covid period, that everything was interpreted and slanted, and online source materials were literally disappearing overnight.
We all need at least the opportunity to make up our own minds about what is going on, and having original materials is crucial.
This is important for getting at and maintaining the ability to discern the truth. I have my own small example. I saw recently new DNC vice chair David Hogg is raising money for his own PAC off his DNC spot and the NY Post calls him a "Parkland Survivor." I don't think David Hogg was at Parkland when the shooting happened though he claims to be in some reports. I said so to a number of people with media connections at the time. I watched CBS's "39 days" about Parkland a while ago and consider it primary source material because Hogg is on video. At 4:50 or so into it, Hogg says he rode his bike three miles to "cover it." Could it be that Hogg wasn't even at school on the day of the shooting- https://www.cbsnews.com/news/march-for-our-lives-39-days-how-parkland-students-turned-grief-into-action/
"DAVID HOGG: On the day of the shooting, I got my camera and got on my bike and road as fast as I could three miles from my house to the school to get as much video and to get as many interviews as I could because I knew that this could not be another mass shooting."
Did he go home and come back (because his earlier accounts have him there for the actual shooting)? http://time.com/5161034/florida-school-shooting-survivor/ Is there an innocent explanation? He even has video that presents as if it was immediately after the shooting - but it almost sounds like he staged it- no gunshots and a girl talking in the background in a normal voice. Was his comment selectively edited, the cuts sound like he could have been relaying what others told him. His sister was there for it for sure. So, he is treated like he was dodging bullets when by his own admission he was three miles away when it happened if you believe the CBS piece. I was a mile or so away from the Pentagon on 9/11 when the plane hit and drove by it that afternoon (and I took pictures!). Does that make me a 9/11 survivor? The point is that this all may have been whitewashed, and Hogg is treated like a hero when he wasn't even in danger ever.
K,
I 100% agree with you.
I think he’s a grifter. I don’t see how anything good will come of him. As soon as he gets the votes he starts raising money for his PAC. WHAT PAC; FOR WHAT?!
I’m not saying the right’s representatives are angels - they definitely are not, but the amount of grift from the left is OUTRAGEOUS!! How about $2 BILLION to Stacey Abram’s ‘non-profit’?
Here’s a great read for anyone interested in the GREEN NEW SCAM!
https://freebeacon.com/energy/activist-slush-fund-biden-epa-official-steered-5b-to-his-former-employer/
Yes, the Stacy Abrams scam is mind-blowing. Thanks for the link. I often felt when Dem activists and leaders were saying that Trump would put his political opponents in prison, they were laying their foundational excuse for when Trump and his allies began exposing the misdeeds. I would bet real money Abrams says something like "this is politically motivated persecution. I am the leading truth teller opposition to Trump in Georgia, he will go after Fani Willis too, powerful black women, RACISM... blah blah..."
As far Hogg goes, I was just surprised how apparently blatant this inconsistency was. I always felt in watching the group interviews, the other kids were not fond of Hogg. He has definitely turned it into a grift. The question is was he lying about being there or was he making himself out to be this awesome reporter and trying to get a job with CBS or something along those lines. But that would not be necessary. I almost felt like someone said you ought to start telling the truth about what really happened.
It would be interesting if someone could do a more thorough review using something better than Googling sources on the internet. I actually was in a hotel on a business trip when I first saw the Parkland doc aired. I found the other stuff and sent it to a friend who was a producer for a PBS show but the powers that be there had no interest or maybe were afraid. I just think if Hogg is full of it, he should be called on it.
K,
Stacey Abrams ALWAYS plays the race card. It’s all she’s got. Well…that and her ‘romantic novels’. 🤮
The Hogg thing is weird, wonky and doesn’t add up. I’m now of the mind to believe Occam’s Razor theory. The simplest explanation is he wasn’t there - for whatever reason. His father was FBI, for whatever that’s worth. And he just graduated from Harvard. Just connecting the dots a bit.
Isn’t it weird that he’d run to be DNC vice-chair? What makes him qualified? He set up a PAC and ask for donations right after; for why/what? He’s gotta be one of the youngest grifters of his generation.
I’m sure his family is proud.
I believe very few journalists these days. I trust Matt, Michael Shellenberger, and Jeff Childers from C&C; he’s on Substack and I HIGHLY recommend subscribing- I do for free. He’s a FL attorney who got the first mask mandate dropped in FL. He gives insights I can’t get anywhere else. 🙂
Yes, that is pretty much my list as well. I also trust Vinay Prasad, MD for healthcare related issues, and the guys on the All In podcast have some wisdom to impart as well.
Hogg's father is an FBI agent. Hogg could have gotten one of Dad's guns or some other weapon and tried to intervene, although 3 miles to the school is 8-10 minutes for a teenager. Any distraction or injury to the gunman could have thrown off his plan, he wasn't a trained soldier/terrorist. Hogg knew the layout of the school well enough to approach from behind or either side.
Hogg showing up with a camera was simply grifting off the deaths of his classmates.
Great idea! Preserving sources and truth is already difficult and will become more so as we go more and more online where it is all too easy for books, documents, articles, and other materials to be disappeared. It is much more difficult to disappear actual printed materials, but they also have inherently limited distribution. What do you mean by storing "hardcopy" that is accessible? Paper? I think a secure archive of locked PDF files (blockchain to verify?) could be constructed and made available on multiple servers hosted by different entities, so that again it would be difficult for a bad actor to track down and destroy every copy. And some of the materials produced in our digital age will not actually transfer to plain paper very readily. But this is an idea that needs to be debated and discussed, the right path forward will emerge from multiple viewpoints and inputs.
I wonder if an app could be built on top of Nostr to provide a secure distributed storage utility. Any Nostr experts here?
I did a quick spot check of Nostr, andI think you'd probably be better off looking at something like LBRY or IPFS.
Very interesting. Thanks for the pointers.
I’m a retired librarian who applauds your efforts and wishes you luck in your new endeavor. These days it’s not as easy to access what we used to call “authoritative sources”.
That's because it's a new game now. Forget facts, evidence, reasoning, experience... All you need is to become "authoritative" somehow. This is how scientists who had never heard of Covid-19 just the year before were suddenly dictating what you had to do. They were "authoritative" sources, you see.
So put all your resources into obtaining Authoritative Status. You don't need to actually know anything.
GH,
It’s all about emotions! It’s not even authoritative. If you can rile the left up about ANYTHING they take it as gospel. Like how crazy they were about abortion when it went back to the states but they thought Trump would sign a federal abortion ban.
The crazier the left can make a story, the more their followers love it and go crazy. COVID was about emotion with tyrannical restrictions and the left made themselves the ‘COVID police’. I still see people walking around with masks in Florida. It’s crazy!
How scary & damning
This. This right here is why the internet and the World Wide Web were invented. The internet as an interference resistant network. The web as a place to share information riding on top of that network.
My contribution is as a consumer and fan; the appearance you and Walter Kirn put in on Megyn Kelly's podcast was stellar. Even a novice like myself could appreciate the craftsman-like journalistic skills the trio of you brought to the conversation. Megyn is hyperbolic and excitable and Walter as animated as I've seen him, but you were in complete command of the facts and the context. My paltry contribution to the outlets I support are very well spent at Racket News! Keep up the great work Matt Taibbi.
Great idea! Thanks!
Thanks Matt.
It’s badly needed.
I’ve had a hard time finding information to verify or contradict articles. It is increasingly worse in printed media. WSJ, NYT, EPOCH Times all have slants that should be questioned, must be questioned, but without reference material, especially that which is quashed by search engines, has become difficult. Thank you for this- and yes, we badly need an alternative to Wikipedia. I don’t want to read opinions as “facts”. I want the facts to back up or decry opinions now packaged as journalism. .
Thank you for doing this! You will never do anything more important.
Yes!!! All power to your elbow as you build a team - this is a Herculean task. Welcome, Kathleen, and thank you for your service to our country.
It's long been obvious that reference info has become a battleground. In my small corner of the world several of us are building small libraries to preserve "old" ways of thinking and "old" info in hopes of making truthful and wise book learning available to the next generation through private lending libraries. What you are doing is on a mindblowingly larger scale. God bless your efforts!