This post but replace google search with the general internet.
Nearly every place that feels like the old internet is not as popular.
I used to think that was a bad thing, I’m starting to think maybe I’ve just been pushing aside the reality that when the internet was good, it wasn’t as popular.
Not popular- commercial. The early internet had effectively no profit motive. As it aged there was a modicum of balance between use and profit - a good site drives customers. Now there are a preponderance of sites which exist only to scrape pennies off advertisers and have no useful content except that which is required to garner a click from a search engine in hopes you will accidentally create an advertising impression.
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.
People aren’t comparing it to alternatives, they’re comparing it to Google 5-10 years ago.
Google used to be astoundingly good at figuring out what it was you wanted, and finding out for you. Now there’s a lot more SEO garbage and meaningless fluff clogging every results page, and if your search could even remotely be related to buying something, it’s only products and ads.
Dude, I switched from Google for the first time in my life a couple months ago because I couldn’t take it anymore.
Ads, ads, ads, ads, ads, ads, ads
Ai articles, Ai articles, Ai articles, Ai articles, Ai articles
The fact that google has a built-in graphing calculator just isn’t worth it.
I won’t forget this, actually: I was looking up what to do next in a game I was playing—very deliberately, I care a lot about spoilers—and the “people also ask” section implied, for no reason, this had nothing to do with what I wanted to know, that a character who died really early on apparently has things to say in chapter 9.
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.
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.
Any discussion on search on Lemmy will bring up Kagi as it has been here already. I will just mention that. A. You can cheat and just keep using a bunch of email accounts to get free trials from them B. If you do that long enough you’ll realize their 300 search plan is pretty fair and having saved preferences is worth a membership and they have an option where you can use crypto to pay your fees and remain anonymous (this is very important to me as the only thing more evil than Google would be to have all your search data, your full name and your credit card info - I strongly recommend the crypto pay option and create a dedicated email address. For Kagi membership).
Fantastic. I left some other comments on here but I switched within days of doing the trial and I haven’t gone back at all. I think the total number of times I’ve used Google search since then is 3. Yes 3 total searches on Google in the past six months. None of those searches gave me what I wanted, but those were the times i couldn’t find what I needed with kagi. So 3 kagi failures in 6 months and Google wasn’t helpful either.
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 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.
I’ve been using Kagi for a few months and it has been exponentially better than Google. I wouldn’t have known about it if it weren’t for people talking about it on Lemmy, actually.
if you’re willing to help at all we’re always looking for feedback on specific results, and also have this page for testing staging algorithms, there’s a big change on there currently. No bother if not.
Add comment