I stopped using Google at the same time I closed my accounts with Facebook, instagram, Reddit and Amazon. Currently I’m using Ecosia which I think is German. I’m dumping all the US companies I can based on all the Trump crap. It is taking time and effort but I should be able to actually close the Google account soon and I replaced windows with Linux on all but one of my PCs.
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I wouldn’t say dogshit, I would say the results are good enough for most purposes, not great, my priority just as the moment is dumping USA based companies and I thought Ecosia planting trees was a nice touch. Although as someone else pointed out it is still possibly using crawlers from google and bing in the background. I’m still keen to try out other search engines.
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These numbers underline the current trend to choose European services instead of American ones, which followed the trend to deGoogle.
[the chart shows stats for American Google, American Bing, Russian Yandex, American Yahoo!, American DuckDuckGo, and Other]
Yeah, that statement wasn’t supported by the data at all. It seemed to only be included as a way to link to their other articles about European alternatives and de-Googling.
Russian Yandex
Exceptionally good at finding torrent sites and other piracy outlets, because they aren’t working hand-in-glove with American broadcasters to censor and shadowban these links. Google, Bing, DDG, and the other American mainline search sites all focus on feeding end-users into a discrete set of Web2 mega-site sponsors. Yandex uses the older web crawlers and indexing tools, so it gives more honest (abet fuzzier and less reliable) results. And since nobody really gives a shit about Yandex, the efforts to game its algorithm have been comparatively minimal.
Yandex also has the benefit of being relatively English-friendly, while other popular non-English search sites like Baidu, Qwant, and Naver don’t cater too quite so freely.
And they have really good products - the Navigator is great, and Yandex Music was better than Spotify (until the war started and a lot of labels/artists disappeared).
I’m not using their products now as I don’t want to feed the government, but they do(did?) some great stuff.Who still uses search engines to find torrent, though?
Sites periodically get taken down or rendered less than useful. Especially for live streaming.
Yandex was invaluable when I was looking for Olympics streams, for instance. Also really depends on which communities are hosting to which torrent sites. I found nyaa.si off Yandex, because I couldn’t find the anime I was looking for on 1337x.to.
What would be a good EU alternative?
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the discussion is about search engines, not browsers.
I switched when the answers I got started to become bullshit. I’d google a simple question just to double check if it was correct, but it gave me something completely different. Something so out of the realm of possibility that I was baffled.
I check the sources for the answer and they were not even related. After that I started paying more attention to how messed up google had become, and I had enough.
Google scholar however is still something I need… even though I dislike American corporations.
Why would I google something when the first answer is an inferior AI to chatgpt. I’ll just use a better AI.
I abandoned Google when they started throwing shopping links at the top of every search, even when searching for things that have no relevance to shopping, and they started artificially promoting scams and paid material above actual results.
Google Search was best around 10-15 years ago when their only focus was providing the best results they could (remember when you could actually click the top result and you would be taken to the most applicable page instead of some unrelated ad or scam?). Now their focus is on providing the best product possible for their actual customers (paid advertisers) even when it means trashing their own product in the process.
15+ years ago you could search for an error code, or an error message, or a part number and actually find it.
they also ruined their own platform by creating and encouraging an entire business around gaming search results.
I almost never use them now.
Google been degrading as time has gone on. The other search engines (like all of them) are getting or surpassing google in certain subjects. AI has really made them look like fools in all of this. Googles AI sucks for results and (while I dont like it) others are using chatgpt for search results.
I would say it is just the opposite. Google used to be good before they tried to post-process results in this extreme way and AI is just an even more extreme way to do that. ChatGPT and all the other LLMs just increase the noise to signal ratio (noise coming first because there is so much more of it than signal these days).
I actually agree. Others use chatgpt for just about everything. I dont like it for many…many reasons.
Google was much better pre-2020.
People use chat gpt to tell them what to buy. We are doomed. Our brains are about to shrink to the size of a pea in 10 years. All is going to plan for the elite.
Its funny because you can totally run good LLMs on local systems but people are just going to chat because its what they know and its easy to work with. Like I get it, but they are starting to put ads in the prompts now.
I’m glad to contribute to that metric.
!lemmysilver
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Nice to see this choice is making an actual difference.
I still include Google results in my Searx.
Definitely miss the good ol’ days where it was optimized to give the best results. Same goes for Netflix recommendations back in the the DVD mailer days…
I ditched it around 2014 when I noticed it had effectively become the yellow pages. Its pretending to be one thing to the ‘user’ when its actually serving someone else. This is transparent of course but the balance/compromise or tradeoff of it still providing some utility to the user despite this is what may vary for different people. My threshold was low. That and the privacy violations. Unfortunately its a corporation.
Consider Kagi far superior.
I ditched Google and Gmail.
Best AI models from OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta, Google - included in one $25/mo subscription with our Ultimate plan.
Same trash.
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Privacy company offers privacy focused LLMs for users that would’ve otherwise paid for ChatGPT. Unbelievable
Did you actually ever try Kagi or do you just want to spit uninformed delusions?
Those LLMs can never be privacy focused when they are still trained in stolen data, stolen art, stolen research and stolen models.
Every. Single. One.
You are confusing morality and copyright with user privacy.
You also failed to access if you’ve actually tried the search engine that you are no quick to spit nonsense about.
Ok so what’s your alternative then?
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I ended up having to install a CalDAV client on my other people’s Android phone.
Ditched Google for DuckDuckGo in like 2019 and used that for a long time until Kagi came out and now I use that and I’m quite happy with it.
ohthankgod!
Yandex is better than any American service by far imo.
