Petal Search, an English search-engine by China’s Huawei and apparently with its own index. After cleaning all the unwanted cruft off the front-page with uBlock, it can be made nicely minimalist…

Images seemed the most useful. But it turns out the ‘HD’ filter is puny, regarding a mere 900 x 1200 as ‘high’. Still it’s possibly useful as a third-opinion on images, as it gives very different results than DuckDuckGo Images or Google Images.

News feels like Bing, but without the extreme timeliness and with a whole lot of local British news seeming to be filtered through a cheesy relayer called dailyadvent.com rather than going directly. At a guess that may be to comply with Chinese government requirements?

The main search is sprinkled with ad-cards, but these are easily removed with uBlock. Definitely not as good as Google for the first page. I suspect the problem is in running weaker semantics on the query rather than in the index.

One thing it is is fast. Very fast. They’ll be using their own ‘special’ routers, no doubt.

After automated robo-students on online classes, now there are robo-petitions with automatic signing, and (apparently) made such that… “it lets a person submit multiple signatures”.

I’m guessing that there may also be a further risk, in future, such that simply opening a similar “signature form” petition could cause your Google account to automatically “sign” it.

“Presumed predatory journals are abundant in oral health”, Journal of Evidence Based Dental Practice, March 2021.

From the 580 potentially eligible journals, 431 dental journals were included [and] 226 PP (52%) [i.e. were PP, “presumed predatory”]

Mention or reporting to be indexed in the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) database and a journal website with distorted or blurry images were the most influential variables for accurate classification into a predatory category or not.

Slightly badly phrased, on that last quote. The authors seem to want to state DOAJ listing = OK (if the link works and the journal’s DOAJ page can be found), while the inability to resize a logo picture correctly = dodgy. But their abstract’s sentence implies the reverse.

But yes, I’d agree that there does seem to be a curious and innate inability among makers of predatory journals to resize pictures correctly, though my eyes are perhaps better at spotting the subtleties of such things than many. Artists and designers tend to forget how dull most eyes are, in terms of not being able to see such details at a glance. Actually, I guess you might even bypass that problem — by training an AI to search for predatory journals through looking for logos and other images with incorrect proportions (squashed, stretched), or prestigious logos that are blurry when they should be crisp, or which have subtly colour-shifted. Bad use of naff fonts is also a tell-tale, I’d suggest, though that would be more difficult to train an AI for. But even just trawling for the DOAJ logo and a couple of other common logos would be an interesting experiment.

Metaforecast is a new search tool that aggregates various forecasts about the future, as mooted and evaluated on forecasting platforms…

we track ~2100 active forecasting questions, ~1200 (~55%) of which are on Metaculus. There are also 17,000 public models from Guesstimate.

As such Metaforecast can’t do what would be really useful. To track media pundits and university press releases, pinpoint and summarise their various claims about the future, and then over time tell us who is the New Paul Erlich and who the New Arthur C. Clarke.

Record company bosses want ISPs to block websites that offer to download YouTube videos as a local file. Such a pity the download can’t be done locally, with simple freeware. Oh, wait…

List updated, May 2021.

The Tucows site has closed its doors and shipped the famous cows off to the local burger-flipping joint. In the early years of the broadband Internet the Tucows site was a go-to-place for desktop PC freeware for Windows, and well-known for its “two cows” graphic logo.

Key ongoing alternatives for users of desktop PCs and classic Windows freeware in 2021 are…

Softpedia. The usual go-to, found from a general shallow-search search-engine such as DuckDuckGo. Mixes trials with well-documented freeware, but it’s obvious which is which.

Lo4D, I rarely use it, but it’s useful if you want a second opinion on a Softpedia find.

MajorGeeks. The best for tracking freeware on a daily or weekly basis, re: what’s new or updated. Also very comprehensive, to the point of including selected trialware and shareware. Just avoid the scattered text ads for downloads of the Malwarebytes software, which is ‘limpet-ware’ — it does what it says, but is a lead-in to a purchase and I found it to be extremely difficult to remove once installed.

Filepanda.cc is a possible fallback.

OldApps is also useful if you need a specific older version. Despite the name, it’s classic Windows desktop software and not mobile apps. Here you find software from more than about five years ago, it seems. It also has some Mac pages, and useful forums.

GitHub Search can be useful, if you know what functionality you’re looking for and the precise terminology. Such as Scan Tailor Experimental 2015 for automatic de-curving of photos of opened book pages.

A final backstop is The Internet Archive Software Collection which has all sorts of golden oldies for Windows. Such as a 2020 version of the avast_free_antivirus_setup_offline.exe installer — to run on an older Windows 7 PC offline server for some special academic use. Later 2021 versions of this leading freeware anti-virus refused to install on old Windows 7 PCs. Archive.org also has ISOs of old magazine cover-CDs and DVDs. You’ll need a freeware tool to mount the ISO, such as Daemon Tools Lite or WinCDEmu. The latter can mount ISOs without needing a special driver, which can be useful on persnickety workstation PCs.

Being a bit of a connoisseur of rare or overlooked graphics and utility freeware for the Windows desktop, I also know that many nice bits of freeware never reach such sites, and reside on the maker site or some specialist software-specific directory like Paint.NET Plugins Index. Sometimes the latest updates from a solo maker are only ever posted on forum threads, with Dropbox links, and that’s the last you hear of him. In such cases, a search with a deep-search engine such as Google is often needed, as such recent or forum-buried things are usually not highly ranked by the search-engines. Yippy can also be useful for finding free scripts. (Yippy now dead).

Finally, avoid sites like FileHippo, which used to be good but have turned to the dark side.

Update: Filehorse is a new major one in early summer 2021. Seems to be legit.