Google begins recommending DuckDuckGo.
That or Startpage
Or SearXNG. I run an instance, you can check it out: search.gregtech.eu
I just wish they wouldn’t use Apple Maps.
Is there a search engine where the maps tab uses Openstreetmap?While I guess I’d prefer if they used openstreetmaps, is there anything wrong with Apple Maps other than being less open?
I find it’s close to useless in comparison. It doesn’t even show house numbers on the map.
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.
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.
You didn’t switch to FF due to the manifest v3 changes? You switched search engines?
Hah yeah I guess I combined those confusingly. It was both of those things hitting around the same time, I switched to FF and DDG.
So, you’re saying Bing got better.
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.
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.
Personally I just use the better in-browser feature instead of bangs
Fair. I could with Firefox, but I’m too lazy to configure all of that for myself.
Fortunately it takes like 2 minutes.
But doesn’t work on mobile
DuckDuckGo: The coolest way to use bing and apple maps.
(I do use it though)It’s not only the results, though, but other features too
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
it still can enshittify, but we can save it with the help of git and the fork button
Unless corporations start ruling it somehow, it really can’t enshittify.
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.
So that’s “getting shittier” but not “enshittification”. The latter is explicitly a profit-motive driven phenomenon, coined by Cory Doctorow in 2023. Here’s the original post he made about it: https://doctorow.medium.com/tiktoks-enshittification-bb3f5df91979
That’s called eternal September.
That’s not enshittification. Enshiification doesn’t mean “gets shittier”.
Enshittification is this very specific thing where services are initially good to attract users, but eventually turn to making things shittier for user in pursuit of profit growth - where they can’t really grow the user base any more, so the only way to satisfy wall street’s need for exponential growth is to add user-hostile changes to squeeze more out of existing users.
That’s not a thing with Lemmy unless it goes corporate somehow.
Edit: missed that someone else already called this out
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…
Yeah, Lemmy is just a worse version of forums. The federation really hurts it
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.
They need to fix the minus syntax/feature. That’s my singular complaint.
Feels good not to care anymore about the unrelenting enshittification of Reddit, Twitter and Google since I switched away from them.
Cool. As if the over-promotion of AI garbage wasn’t enough of a reason to stop using it.
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It breaks gpt when you do that too.
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.
Yea I worded it wrong. In Firefox I turned off JavaScript.
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.
How is it dumb? Ham and hamsters are two totally different things but sound similar. Java and JavaScript are two totally different things but sound similar. It’s a way to immediately explain to a non technical person in a way they can grok.
It’s dumb because it can’t be reliably extrapolated to other instances.
It’s perfectly reasonable for someone to think Java and JavaScript are related. It’s not reasonable for people to think ham and hamsters are related.
This is a result of badly naming something because the ECMAscript creator wanted to ride the coattails of the ‘hot new thing’ at the time, which was Java.
For example, people shouldn’t immediately doubt whether Godot and GodotScipt are related because Java and Javascript are not. Your hamster analogy falls apart here because it only describes an exception, not a rule.
never submit
No reason that it should, other than businesses collectively lowering everyone’s standards.
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?
Old browsers.
Do these old browsers not support DuckDuckGo?
DuckDuckGo forces TLS while google doesn’t, so you can use IE5 or an old Safari with Google, but not with DDG.
Do you think their owners know of duckduckgo?
How many users are using browsers that are old enough they don’t even support JS? It’s one thing to disable it for security/privacy (which the OP was talking about), because those users are probably more tech savy.
Lynx is my daily driver
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.
why no one quotes searx instances? https://searx.space/
or even paid search engines : kagi.
Isnt literally the first Q&A that is REQUIRES Js?
Kagi is good
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.
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DuckDuckGo
You can also use Startpage, which copies google’s results.
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Kagi too.
I like the results, especially for research. Definitely worth it for me.
Kagi for me
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.
MetaGer
“Ehrnagawd! Meta ger!” - Slid Snack
If the British civil service, even operating under previous administrations, can put together a multi-functioning government domain that runs reasonably well without JavaScript, there’s no reason Google can’t continue to do the same with a ducking web search.
The former works better with JavaScript, that’s true, but it works OK without and that’s the point.
Then again, the civil service were ordered to do it largely out of spite because the government didn’t want to give the plebs any excuse for not being able to use the site.
I’m not sure how to get Google to lose the need for scripting in the same way.
I think this isn’t a case of if Google can, but rather of why they should. Do enough people really use the modern web without JavaScript to justify spending the resources to test and maintain functionality without JS? And they probably don’t want to let the few people that don’t have JS to open support tickets or write articles about how google.com is broken. Easier to just block it on purpose than to let it decay.
It makes more sense that a government website would support it, since they can’t let even a single person fall through the cracks, and changing laws/regulations is more difficult than making a company decision.
🥱
I fucking hate how these companies get so bloated and then start doing whatever the fuck they want.
Me, to Google right now:
the widely used programming language to make web pages interactive
I hope we aren’t talking forms and input fields, right?
