🥱
I fucking hate how these companies get so bloated and then start doing whatever the fuck they want.
Yacy Run your own alternative. With the possibility p2p that others find your crawled pages the other way around. Screwed in p2p that you only get results from others but don’t share any yourself. Complete island mode - no p2p takes place and can also be operated offline locally. You control the crawler, the results well just anything.
You can also use Startpage, which copies google’s results.
May I suggest https://mojeek.com/ as a privacy respecting alternative that actually has its own web crawlers and indexers.
While I love the idea of Mojeek, the execution leaves a lot to be desired.
Doing this to combat bots like they aren’t also using bots to scrape data from the internet is interesting.
I wonder how this affects modified/custom search engines (like udm14).
Udm14 is just a query parameter to open google with the “web” results tab. Still works.
I know, but I have it set as a custom search engine and what I’m saying is, if someone were to use it in chrome would it still require them to enable java. I think that answer is that it would. I don’t use chrome so I’m not gonna test it.
I remember interviewing at Google years ago (if you’re keeping score, it was 2012/2013 just before their stock hiccupped and my onboarding was killed as I was only a 97% fit), and the guy was religious about page load times. “We cut 200 lines of code if it’ll give us a millisecond of page load speed”, that kind of thing.
How they’ve fallen.
well they don’t need to fight for new users anymore. Everyone uses it already, and children are basically indoctrinated to it: all schools have that as search engine, often they even use google classroom and drive and whatnot on the classes. if they have chromebooks, the chrome browser automatically starts after login even if you don’t want to use it, and you can’t unpin it from the taskbar either
We really are ruled by corporations.
I guess this is why it was so important to neuter the government and public institutions. Can’t have regular people with control over their own lives.
Google sucks so bad that I switched to Bing. BING!
Google sucks so bad you switched to… microsoft? 🤔
You’d be better off selfhosting something like searxNG
fuckya life BING BONG
DuckDuckGo for day-to-day stuff, Bing for naughty content.
Duckduckgo is bing. They route their searches there afaik. It’s just a privacy layer, like startpage is a privacy layer on Google.
I don’t think that’s true. They are using the index of bing, but the search results are not. At least that’s what I heard, no idea if it’s factual or not.
Duckduckgo also has bangs, which I consider an essential feature.
Although I use SearXNG instead, since their equivalent is a lot more customisable (although less bangs out of the box).
Are there any that have a top knot or fauxhawk though? Asking for a friend.
You’re a decade late on that, Bing isn’t good anymore
Honestly nothing is good anymore. Every search engine brings up the same SEO optimized dogshit articles. I sometimes use Arc browser but that’s not really that different than asking ChatGPT.
Yeah. Really sucks how you need to know what you’re looking for in order to get any use out of a search engine these days.
For example, if you want to find a “free online video chatroom”, you’re not going to find it by typing those words into google. You need to know, specifically, that there is a free chatroom called https://stumblechat.com/ and type that into google in order to see it.
The world is fucked.
It’s so obnoxious. I hate researching a topic only to be fed results leading to useless AI spam. The entire thing is clogged up like this. Searching on the internet absolutely sucks, now.
Careful saying that round these parts, you’ll summon the ducks.
quack
the widely used programming language to make web pages interactive
I hope we aren’t talking forms and input fields, right?
great!
now I can just disable JavaScript to end my dependence on their services.
It breaks gpt when you do that too.
No reason that it should, other than businesses collectively lowering everyone’s standards.
This keeps getting better! Tell me more!
All I know is that when I disabled java in Firefox:config
It loaded the gpt.com page or whatever it is and you can type but never submit anything.
Java isn’t JavaScript in the same way that Ham isn’t a Hamster.
Java isn’t Javascript, but that ham analogy is dumb as fuck and I feel bad for anyone who internalizes it after hearing it from someone else.
never submit
At this point I’ve been using DDG for 7 years as my main search engine. It’s gotten better while Google has become a joke.
Can confirm. I didn’t think it’d be like that but it do be like that. DDG gang, where you at.
So, you’re saying Bing got better.
DDG does add their own spice on to – or so they claim, and Bing doesn’t have bangs so I’d never want to use it.
I don’t know the full story about how Microsoft is developing Bing, but I do know that Google made a conscious decision to make their search results worse, simply so that you’d search more times, which for them translates to additional ad revenue. But, my sense is Bing hasn’t gone this far yet.
It’s not only the results, though, but other features too
I switched to DDG recently due to the manifest v3 changes and AI junk and have been really liking it. It feels like what Google used to be when it was good.
Can’t wait until they enshittify, the way I see it, everything will eventually, even Lemmy. It’s up to us to not settle too hard in one place
The fact Lemmy is open source and federated makes it almost impossible to enshittify. What are you gonna do, show ads? Third party clients are first class citizens here
They get a large enough audience for disinformation campaigns
Once you see people start defending Russia it’s over
Once you see people start defending Russia it’s over
If that’s what you are looking for, the .ml server has you covered already…
One scenario is that normies join en masse and influencers/marketers follow them, and the quality of conversation goes to zero like on all big platforms. You can’t solve this with software.
That’s called eternal September.
it still can enshittify, but we can save it with the help of git and the fork button
No, I don’t think that’s sustainable, nor is it sustainable to act as if it were true. Given the lack of resources we have compared to Google or Meta et al., the only way to make it work is to stick with something for the long run, and bake in protections in both the technology and the organisational structure. Being opensource and federated goes a long way there, there’s no real reason why something not for profit would have to enshittify. But people won’t put in the effort to keep building it if they think that’s inevitable.
The core of what you’re saying has been my approach for many years. Never go “all in” on anything.
Convenience is one thing (to me, but it’s everything to so many), but it’s just one factor. And if it means I am (or my data is) the product, it costs too much.
Google begins recommending DuckDuckGo.
That or Startpage
I didn’t know they allowed you to search without JS before. If you’re at the point of disabling JS, presumably for security or privacy reasons, why not just use DDG which works perfectly well without JS?
Just makes me realize that I haven’t used Google search in like over a year now because I use Kagi. Even before that i was using searx-ng.
Me, to Google right now:
deleted by creator
Honestly, JS is such a core part of the web, I’m surprised it took this long.
One logo, one input field, one button, nothing requires JS. They could have kept a simple solution for disabled people but they don’t even care about that.
Search suggestions require JS. Also, why would Google spend the resources supporting the 5 people that block JS when virtually all websites and users rely on JS. This is a nothingburger of a story.
who the fuck needs google’s suggestions? It’s not a necessity