And it fucking blows now. You don’t get shit but ads.
They’re somehow WORSE than duckduckgo nowadays like how? You were the search leader, people used DDG for privacy reasons but they passed you??? Did you forget why you’re a company? It’s because you were the best fucking search engine ever and you decided to sell that title for ads or some shit. Incredible how Google fell off the fucking side of a mountain they themselves built!
And DuckDuckGo lacks basic stuff such as keyword exclusion. (It’s my main search engine for the last few years after Startpage got bought, but lacking keyword exclusion sucks!)
you can -something , but it isn’t full exclusion. It’s generally been good enough for me. I agree the full fat version would be nice.
Is ddg actually good now? I remember it feeling nearly useless waay back when it was first hitting the scene. Might have to give it a shot again
You actually get the results you are looking for without the sponsored links. Sometimes you end up searching for reddit results but that’s every search engine.
the auto predictions always give me more words than i need, so i have to type normally, like it wasn’t there, or select, hope it doesn’t load, and delete the extra words
And when i go to click on an auto prediction it changes it at the last damn second too. That drives me mad
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
I dunno on one side we have Google trying to wreck the entire internet and have their ads in your face 95 percent of the time.
On the other side is Microsoft who won’t leave you the hell alone when pushing they’re shit tiers programs and steal defaults on a weekly basis.
To me the only solution is ruling both companies monopolys and fining them to hell and breaking them up. Both are out of control and ruining computing and the Internet.
Google could be broken up into
- search
- chrome / gsuite
- YouTube
- gcloud
- ads
- android. And I’m sure more
MS
- windows / office
- azure
- xbox
- bing
…I’m too tired to keep going lol
If those had to all survive independently and couldn’t leech off profits of the parent organization we could have true competition. Instead you just need one super-profitable arm of a company than loss-lead your way into other verticals and out-compete everyone else because you don’t have to turn a profit, at least while the competition is still clinging on.
Ads are a core component of how search makes money. They’re also a core component of how YouTube makes money.
A lot of those are still too big - Google ads basically just compete with facebooks. The two control the marketplace between ad buyers and sellers - too much power
YouTube itself is far too powerful too - it’s one of the biggest platforms on top of the default video hosting service, giving them far too much control via the algorithm
Microsoft’s Xbox isn’t a big deal, but the sheer number of publishers again gives them control over a marketplace
What we need is to force them to rent out the network at cost, the way we do with cell phone providers. Force them to host buy/sell offers at cost, and serve ads with a limited amount of profit
Plus, they’re too big even then - companies with that much money or control over discourse are a threat to democracy, full stop
It’s a very messy situation we find ourselves in, but it’s only going to get worse the longer we let it fester
They should have invested in their potential, their search engines. It’s getting shittier almost daily.
Makes you wonder if they just stopped paying they’d have 23 billion more and I wonder what they’d lose in market share. If it is less than 23 bil it makes sense to just not pay.
*To stifle competition FTFY
Relying on people’s apathy is a business model with eras of success. Most people have never changed a setting other than dark mode, and even then that’s probably your average superuser.
