disguised_doge
Meta is developing its own web search engine to make itself more independent of Google and Microsoft’s Bing. The technology will primarily be used to feed the company’s own AI chatbot with up-to-date information.
More competition against Google is good, but man another AI focused search engine is not what I would be hoping for.
I can imagine that the case where one engine saves you but the other could not is infinitely small. My unprofessional and uneducated take is use what’s best for you, keep things up to date, and be careful what you click. Hope it was a good unexpected busy and not a bad unexpected busy.
Firefox has ads by pocket on your homescreen and sponsored search results to name the two that come to my mind.
Brave did the affiliate link injection in 2020, but reversed and apologized shortly after. Similar to Mozilla’s Mr robot thing, it seems to be a one off fuck up that they reversed and apologised for.
Mozilla has made donations to the Mack group who have expressed hatred towards people who are white. It’s certainly less dangerous for a minority to spread hateful rhetoric to a majority, but rasicm is still racism, which is bad.
As sad as it is, the Brave and Mozilla issues are unfortunately nearly 1:1
- Both have ads baked in. Brave turns them off by default but tries to get you to turn them on and gives you fractions of a cent in crypto if you do. Mozilla has them on by default.
- Both try to upsell you on services
- Both have bundled things in their browser. Brave it was their VPN and affiliate link scandal. Mozilla was plugins like the Mr Robot plugin and changing people’s search engines to Bing without their consent when negotiating with Google.
- Both have made fringe political donations
So now it comes down do you want Chromium to support Google’s monopoly while having better performance, compatibility, and privacy defaults. Or do you want to buck their monopoly but have more tracking (unless LibreWolf), PPA, and worse performance/compatibility.
Most are just picking what they consider the less bad for their use case.
I’m sure they are the ones who will save us from those evil corps who want our data.
Nobody’s going to save us unfortunately. Unless maybe Servo or Ladybird become a thing.
1 Get random error or have other tech issue
2 Certainly private search engines will be able to find a solution (they cannot)
3 Certainly non private search engines can find the solution (they can not)
4 “Chat GPT, the heck is this [error code or something]” Then usually I get a correct and well explained answer.
Read the article by wired previously and it rubbed me the wrong way. I don’t doubt that there are Nazis using it, but I also don’t doubt that there are Nazis driving ford cars and I know a big chunk of fediverse traffic is Nazis. Outside of the comment from the SimpleX developers there wasn’t any mention of it just being a tool, with plenty of traffic not even going through SimpleX hosted servers. Seems like it was meant to make readers think Nazi when they heard SimpleX. As apposed to reporting on Nazis moving from one tool to a better tool, e.g. Chevys got recalled so many people, some Nazis, bought fords instead.
What, disinformation from a government? I’m shocked, shocked I say.
There was already a wave of bots identified iirc. They were identified only because:
1 the bots had random letters for usernames
2 the bots did nothing but downvote, instantly downvoting every post by specific people who held specific opinions
Turned into a flamware, by the time I learned about it I think the mods had deleted a lot of the discussion. But, like the big tech platforms, the plan for bots likely is going to be “oh crap, we have no idea how to solve this issue.” I don’t intend to did the admins, bots are just a pain in the ass to stop.
