From the article …
but that I have to wait for all the crap I don’t want in the first place.
It comes down to Google telling us what it thinks we’d want, vs giving us what we actually ask for, and the time wasted doing so.
That, and probably punishing people who use ad blockers.
While I agree with everything said, using Google to find out how many episodes your own podcast has just seems a bit lazy. Bookmark the page, and next time you want to do your admin work you can follow the bookmarks and be done with it. Easy fix.
Also, use DDG
in this situation the search engine DuckDuckGo is better than Google because it has an opt-in for a.i.
https://duckduckgo.com/
Then Bing it is. I switched on my daily machine and DDG has been ok. Still a lot of sponsored shit I don’t need, but better than getting a solid lie from Google
Actually true. They hooked me in the golden era of rewards points and I’ll be damned if it isn’t way better than Google now. Bing image search is especially great. Even their copilot thing (RIP Cortana) is useful.
I tried to switch my primary search engine on Firefox to DDG yesterday when I heard the news. 3 searches later, I switched back. I don’t like Google, but damned if I’m not used to it.
If you use ddg you can redirect any search to google by adding a space ans !g to the end of the search term.
Annoyingly, but works on the cases where google does better.
Lots of other places too (13.5k of them), they’re called ‘!bangs’. !w Wikipedia !r spezit etc.
Full list here https://duckduckgo.com/bangs
I haven’t seen any AI results yet, wonder if you have to be logged in for that.
Deliberate vandalism of the commons needs to actually be made illegal. This would include the entire field of “search engine optimization” which is simply a misnomer made of weasel words, which actually mean they’ll hide the results you want behind an ever increasing amount of plain old grifter-ass crap sold by the same three old assholes who bought everything and think that means it’s actually theirs, even as they dilute the concept of ownership for the rest of us.
The whole idea needs to die.
