kestrell: (Default)
[personal profile] kestrell
Yesterday during a meeting the question came up of how to find out which urgent care options are near you, as an alternative to using the E/R, which my insurance company is making an active effort to discourage.

Aside from my pointing out various reasons why this is a much more complex issue than the insurance company thought, it occurred to me to wonder how well Alexa and Siri could provide answers to the question of where I could go for urgent care.

Alexa gave three answers, all more than a mile away, and prompted me to respond whether I wanted more information about any of them.

Siri, however, really blew Alexa out of the water on this one: Siri gave three options, and two were much closer, including the Codman Square Health Clinic which is only a few blocks away, and my actual PCP. Siri's farthest away option was the same as Alexa's closest option.

Siri also prompted me to respond whether I wanted to call any of these options.

This got me thinking about my default search habits, and how I should be experimenting more. Also, I want to investigate what Siri is using for searches.

Well, lately my Internet wishes keep coming true, so this morning there was an email update from MakeUseOf listing 12 alternatives to Google. The second link with a similar title showed up in my search engine (still Google at this point) while I was trying to find out the direct link to the MakeUseOf article.

12 Search Engines that Find What Google Can't from MakeUseOf
https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/13-alternative-search-engines-that-find-what-google-cant/

12 Google Alternatives: Best Search Engines to Use in 2020
https://fossbytes.com/google-alternative-best-search-engine/

Date: 2020-09-18 07:21 pm (UTC)
jesse_the_k: USB jump drive pointing into my left ear (JK data in ear)
From: [personal profile] jesse_the_k

I love my DuckDuckGo!

  • Doesn't track my searches so I'm not confronted with infinite ads for things I looked up last year
  • Stores search settings (font styles, open links in new tab) in an anonymous cookie
  • Doesn't attempt to answer the question, just offers results
  • Lets me deploy the same search to Google, but anonymously, using bangs -- it's a command line for search!

The thangs search engine for 3D prints looks highly relevant to our assistive tech interests.

Date: 2020-09-18 09:31 pm (UTC)
dewline: Text - "On the DEWLine" (Default)
From: [personal profile] dewline
Okay, this is going to be useful from here onwards. Thank you kindly!

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