God every new computer… the stupid ai bullshit at the top of my results before I remember to change my search engine
I don’t know how any puts up with it
I just use my phone so I don’t have to use a computer.
I certainly don’t like putting up with it, and for the most part try to avoid it.
Let me just sneak a tracking device on you too this will let anyone who pays me know where you are and where you’ve been and what you’ve looked at and your name and height and family members and friends and where you work and we’re working on finding out what you had for dinner last night too
Oh, that’s kind of helpful. I can never remember what I had for dinner last night
It was six square pounds of cheesepork steak and a rotund helping of smashing pickled potatoes, with a side of malt jezzebees, you sick fiend. That amnesia ish won’t work on the judge.
And what your eyes are doing. I’ll tell them about your eyeballsssss
I’ve used DDG on and off for years but switched to it full time when google started pushing their AI bullshit.
The ONLY thing I miss is google maps when I search for a particular business or something - but pulling up maps when needed is just one extra step. No problem.
I changed all of my browser search engines to this and it’s been great!
Yeah Duck Duck Go is my default on my browser at home.
I have also stumbled across alltheinternet.com and it has become my favorite. It feels like searching on Google 20 years ago, and I actually get unique, relevant results that Google and DDG don’t always give me.
Why is all the news from Fox?
Edit: oh, if you hit the little gear you can change the source of the headlines.
After running a few test searches: I like it. Searching for “pickles” did not try to sell me pickles immediately. I’ll try it some more on my desktop at home.
I used to use the internet, but that’s just a trend. Now I send all my emails by fax. Way more efficient, and better for the environment with all this AI chacosta going on.
I had the f12 developer console thing open recently when I went to do a Google search and was blown away that a basic Google search has over 12 megabytes of network traffic flying around. My ad blockers and such blocked most of it, so it’s clearly not required.
Last night I just wanted a list of Marx Brothers movies and got a pop up of “Heyyyyy… why don’t you tell us what streaming services you subscribe to so we can help you better.”
“Why don’t you fuck right off with that shit?”
I mean, there’s definitely a certain merit in helping to answer the question “Which service do I currently subscribe to that hosts the movies I want to watch?” I would go even further and suggest a digital tool that toggles subscriptions on/off based on the movie you want to watch tonight and its availability would be a helpful gadget.
But all of this is downwind of a digital service setup that is constantly shifting and hiding content behind different payment plans. And using the revenue from those plans to undermine public libraries, open source digital repositories, and a free globally accessible internet. That’s the really annoying bit.
google was a perfect product. I’m talking early 2000s.
If it wasn’t for the need for endless growth it would have remained extremely profitable and competitive. but every quarter they have to show growth. Either buy making bs services they later kill, or buying profitable businesses then enshitifying them.
What’s the current product half-life? 10 years before enshittification starts or something like that.
Yeah, for a while there was really good progress on search results serving up the things you’re looking for, and not just by Google. I remember how impressed I used to be by the Amazon search engine. I could put a description of something that I didn’t know the name of into the search box and the first result was usually what I wanted. I could sort by user rating and usually get the best one on top.
Now there are pages of sponsored products that keep getting shown if you keep scrolling. The search engine has become completely enshitified, and so many bots have created positive and negative reviews that the ratings are way less useful.
also the bigger problem that the Internet is now a handful of websites. so search results are basically using Google to find a reddit thread.
google was a perfect product.
No it wasn’t. It was the best in a bad batch of half-conceived search engines. And this was only true for a relative window of time in the '10s, when they hadn’t quite cornered the market on search and hadn’t fully optimized how to maximize their ad revenues.
Google was a massive conflux of investor capital that produced a better-than-average set of tools as loss-leaders to hook you into their Walled Garden. Once you were inside the Walled Garden, what you discovered was Microsoft 2: Electric Boogaloo.
maybe not perfect perfect, just a good useable product that was way better than current Google.
What’s that? You want a program that’ll run AI slop lovally on your machine if you use our browser?
What’s that? You want our reCAPTCHA program that will force you to verify you’re using a closed-source Android OS to even look at a fucking website?
Google,can you find me my legal pornographic addictions? Alexa killed herself after I got to fetish number 6c-d. I can’t get enough pleated cankles, I tell ya…
I always just scoot right by that AI at the top, when searching. I wish I could make it go away.
You can: https://udm14.com/
I’ve been using uBlock to get rid of it.
At some point the provided AI blocklist didn’t work, but element picker took care of that fairly easily.
I’m paying for kagi exactly because of all this BS. Results tend to be decent for the most part.
Results are okay, better than google by far. I found i have to block sites frequently to keep things relevant, but im no longer starting each search with an angry crash out dealing with the site and crappy results like i was with google/duckduck.
The date filter is also nice for finding recipes published before 2020.
Iv tried kagi twice. It was the most worthless fucking experience of a search engine iv ever seen. I rather use Yahoo.
Would have been perfect if the last panel didn’t have the original web results anymore.
You can also use DDG, Startpage, spin up a SearX instance, or a number of other options.
And a whole stack of the exact same wrong answers despite you asking the question five times with the “-“ modifier to eliminate those wrong answers.
