Stop using Google. You can’t change them, you have to leave.
I’m using Duck Duck Go now.
I swapped to ddg about a year ago. I’ve noticed their search results are not the greatest either. There is so much spam and paid articles that make it to the top search results I often end up frustrated trying to find what I’m looking for.
The Internet really is enshittified.
To be fair I think DDG has improved marginally over the years while Google is simply shit now. I feel like spam sites are quite prevalent on Google but less so on DDG.
Is it a viable alternative? How is it going?
It’s really good these days. Kagi is still the beat, but if you want free, DDG is the way to go.
I’ll have to give this kagi a shot I never heard of it! DDG just doesn’t ever seem give me what I want and I’ve been trying it forever. It’s like I’m always playing this cat and mouse game with the search engine and it just gives me alllllmost what I want but not quite.
It’s not free, but I find it worthwhile. I really hope Apple includes it as a default engine in the next update.
Kagi doesn’t sell you shit, so if you use Google for that, you can’t get that replacement data:
I’ve been using kagi for 6 months or so.
It’s lit.
works fine for me, and their implementation of AI (only letting it use wikipedia and maybe some select other sources) is pretty nice IMO, perfect for answering questions like “how many people live in X Y Z cities in total?”.
You can also look into Ghostery private search also. I’ve been using it some and it appears to be at least as good as DDG. YMMV
I am also considering switching to Bing.
DDG drops ads in results too just not as many yet
Slight update to this comic, to call out the dangers of Google’s Sponsored Results.
Examples, for those that are not aware of this risk:
- https://www.techradar.com/avoid-google-ad-malware
- https://www.verifythis.com/article/news/verify/scams-verify/google-ads-scammers-redirect-website-url-different-search/536-4ef6c41d-087e-4db9-a281-86bcf7637c68
- https://krebsonsecurity.com/2024/01/using-google-search-to-find-software-can-be-risky/
- https://www.malwarebytes.com/blog/news/2023/01/rogue-sites-causing-trouble-in-google-advert-results
It’s disgusting that Google will happily make money from scammers while completely aware of what’s going on
That’s exactly how you make money in the search engine world - by not knowing what your paying customers do.
I rarely trust top results from google, since I’m uncertain if I somehow missed the tiny gray text saying that it’s an add.
this is wrong, because today you won’t find the thing you’re looking for at all. Just 100 results where one word of your 5 word query vaguely matches.
Stop using Google.
And Microsoft. And Apple. And Amazon. And every single corporation that cares more about money and stealing people’s privacy than serving you.
I get where you’re coming from, but I also feel like I might get kind of bored and I wonder how I’m going to get that hot sauce from Alabama that I like. I’ll give up on a lot of my ideals and trade a LOT of frustration for artisanal hot sauces.
Get to know people in the hot sauce community (it exists!) and then you can ask person-to-person!
So, do you suggest just not using computers altogether?
Getting some cheap Nokia for the cellphone and be done with it? (Ig a refurbished IBM ThinkPad with FOSS on it is also fine)
Old computers, Free OSes. No mobile devices, not even old shitphones. Bring back payphones.
Yeah no, i’d rather regulste the industry to hell and back
by using uBlock Origin, uBlacklist, and then something other than Google.
It might protect you from a lot of Google’s shit show but it won’t show you good results too.
Kagi is the only usable search engine for me right now. Yes, it’s not free. I needed a whole year to convince myself to pay for searching but I finally did it and it is absolutely worth it. I’m a SE though, so searching stuff is like half my job.
Talks about some search engine no one has heard of before that sounds Chinese or something
Yeah, nyah I think I’ll stick with DuckDuckGo, which has never failed to find me what I was searching for if it exists on the Internet, and oh by the way costs me nothing to use.
Well, sure. If it works for you then by all means keep using it.
I’m just recommending a service which I find very useful. I actually first heard about it on Lemmy and I’m grateful for the recommendation so I spread the word in hope of helping someone else.
I’m with you. At first I thought it was getting shilled, but the search results are great. I also bought a 12 month subscription to Nebula. I’m giving these services a go and see if they can replace all the enshitified services.
I thought everyone was overreacting until I used Google on the computers at my college and I realised that DDG had been insulating me from all that horror. Thank goodness I switched when I did.
until bing goes down again
butlerian jihad?
I’m honestly amazed no one’s sued google over the site telling them things like “Jump off a bridge if you’re depressed” or that products have been recalled that haven’t
Vote with your mouse-clicks and don’t use Google. Enough people leave they’ll either change or become irrelevant like so many before them.
I haven’t used Google in about 3 years. I use duckduckgo and I just eventually figured out how to use it, you have to be a little more specific but I can get what I’m looking for straight away these days. I’m aware they’re not private anymore since they got bought out but I use technology like this with the assumption any data that can be collected, is collected, and will be sold off at some point, so don’t search anything you wouldn’t want your grandmother knowing about lol.
Same with visiting almost any website.
Then
- Click on link to website.
- Read website.
Now
- Click on link to website.
- Click on Cookie options.
- Scroll down looking for ‘Reject All’.
- Discover there is no ‘Reject All’.
- Scroll back through list turning off all optional cookies.
- Scroll back to the bottom to click on ‘Confirm my choices’.
- Hunt for the close X on the ‘Subscribe to our newsletter’ pop-up.
- Click on the close X on the ‘Subscribe to our newsletter’ pop-up.
- Read the website.
- Discover the website is just more AI generated SEO garbage.
- Go outside, walk on the grass barefoot, weep for the future of humanity.
That’s the neat part, you don’t.
The top results have been useless spam for a decade or more at this point, and the only difference is Google sit there hoovering up the money instead. The money is in the way of search. Any popular search engine will end up the same way.
It’s a shite situation, but until somebody makes a non-profit search engine and filters out spammy results, we’ll continue to Google, scroll down two pages for a reddit link, and carry on.
kagi.com for me has been more than worth it for the price with unlimited searches.
I’m currently prioritizing DuckDuckGo over Google and others for a better quality of search results. There ain’t much ads to mess your attention, and the results are quite good most of the time.
I was (trying to) use AI to help me with something on my PC a few nights ago. It was telling me to go menus and choose options that literally don’t exist.
Wtf is going on with AI right now? About a year ago, I found it useful for certain things. But it seems to have totally shit itself recently, and is pretty much useless now.
Models got downgraded because they were too popular/expensive to run.
Also layers of guardrails reduce inputs and output usefulness.
Any way people could just remake ‘old Google’ that solely focuses on search and nothing else?
Part of the issue isn’t just that they added garbage, it’s that sites got better at targeting the algorithm. It’s like recipe websites that started to add stories because the algorithm prioritized that. No one was asking for it, but the algorithm was broken in unexpected ways and exploited.
So, someone could make a new search engine with a different algorithm. If it becomes successful though, it’s only a matter of time before it becomes targeted and manipulated.
Gotcha. I’m not tech-smart so that’s interesting to hear
