This is such an apt analogy. I only use it because I have a couple hundred tabs open in Chrome and I am too lazy to port them all over to FF. Even then, I usually have to be really manipulative to the search algorithm to get what I want from general searches and heaven forbid I want to find something that is even the least but taboo. I just use DuckDuckGo for those searches, though it struggles sometimes too.
I know I need to swap over to FF entirely, but there is just so much, from shifting my PW bank to the hundreds of tabs and thousands of bookmarks. Does anyone know of any FOSS or FF extensions that can smooth that process?
Firefox doesn’t need extensions to handle the password and bookmark imports, it can do those automatically. I saw someone suggest you create a folder in your bookmarks that is your open tabs, bookmark each tab as you close them, import passwords and bookmarks, and open that folder for a relatively painless migration.
Do not rely on the built-in password managers to keep your passwords safe. Use a purpose-built one like Bitwarden to generate unique ones, save and complete them, agnostic to the browser. Virtually every stealer out there can easily grab the built-in password db’s content.
Bit-warden for password manager, FOSS cross platform. FF should import all the bookmarks. I’d save all open tabs to a new bookmark folder before transfer then open that folder after.
I use Google search when I want to buy something, for some reason, it gets good résultats when I want to buy from my country. but if you want reliable results for a product review, you have to look elsewhere.
I’ve used Startpage for a year or more on my main computer and it works okay.
But if anyone has any tips for a search engine that actually supports queries with boolean logic and such, I’d be all for it. Lately they all seem to just not do that anymore.
I vastly prefer a search engine in the EU, that respects the privacy laws here.
PS: Not disgussing ddg / ddg onion too much, basically because ddg is the long-time default search engine of TB. Most TB users assume ddg is a decent, standard, generic option, esp. its non-JS version.
Yeah, If the search is about something relatively obscure then 50% of the links are random letters and numbers or worse, believable looking links that are riddled with viruses.
What if these are primary places where user generated content lives now? Independent blogs are as good as dead, and social networks are walled gardens, sometimes populated by self regurgitating robots.
What if these are primary places where user generated content lives now?
Plenty of high quality user generated content live on Discord, Slack, and other semi-private information exchanges that aren’t as easy to parse and scrape. Places like Reddit and Stack Exchange and DeviantArt are just the prior-gen iteration of hosting for those conversations. But they’re being overwhelmed with bots, marketing teams, special interest mods, and ideologues to the point that they can only deliver a very niche set of content catering to whomever “owns” the space.
It used to be, I’d start at DDG andwhen I didn’t find my results, I’d switch to Goog. Now I do this, but when I find even worse results on Google, I switch back to DuckDuck because query wrangling on DDG is more worthwhile. The starting results may not always be good on DDG, but they’re often better than Google.
However, very recently I’ve been starting on Searx on doing follow-up checks on Bing, and this has been working pretty well. I know DDG has to show ads, but lately they seem to take up the better part of the first page and aren’t helpful.
Google is completely out of the picture. Their results are just bad.
I have no idea why the best search engine is not mentioned in any of these comments. Maybe it is the same reason why I am not going to mention it either, to stop normies from ruining it.
A hint: they are the only major search engine to not give a flying fuck about DMCA and USA laws. This is also the reason why it is the undisputed king.
It’s not really the ads on Google Search itself that break it.
It’s that almost every result is some automatically generated spam created entirely in response to Google’s algorithms. And it’s those pages that are covered in ads. Google broke the internet.
You can still get what you’re looking for, but I home in on results that look like forums or other actual user generated content. Didn’t even realise I was doing it tbh. I just mentally filter out most of the shit.
yup, nowadays if you don’t add “@r*ddit” to a tech related search in google you’ll get 10 seemingly copy pasted results that look like “1. download our drivers updater :))) 2. if you don’t want to do that, just give up lol”
Everything is a bot that gives you four paragraphs of text about how they’re a certified Microsoft Windows professional technician, but all they ever do is tell you to run sfc /scannow.
Same here. I almost responded asking what the issue is when I realized I query Google Search with specific keywords and cheats, ignoring all the bs in the list. At some point I just adapted and didn’t notice.
Now that I think about it there have been a few times where I’ve had to struggle to find something, especially if it is medical related. Gotta give old Reddit this: It’s been around so long with so much activity that you can at least get pointed in the right direction by throwing it into a search and hitting enter.
I feel like 90+% of the time I use Google, it’s just because it’s more convenient than going to the actual website I want. Like if I want a Wikipedia article about a movie, it turns out it’s faster to type in the movie name in Google and click than go to Wikipedia and search the movie.
I used to do that to but then it started giving me info adjacent to what I was searching or a broader answer. Just got fed with that and the amount of sponsored search results.
I had not so good experiences with Contabo lately. Lot of outages and they withdrew 2 more month after the end of my subscription. Ionos had no outtages so far (5th month). In addition their web interface is better than Contabos.
There is actually a lot more search engines that you might think, plus there are privacy frontends for them you can aggregate.
Edit: Also the main poin’t of searxng is to use it as a proxy for them which hepps if you use an instance with multiple users, or host an instance for you and your friends for example.
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