You must log in or register to comment.
I’m glad to contribute to that metric.
Nice to see this choice is making an actual difference.
Yandex is better than any American service by far imo.
Yandex LLC is a Russian technology company that
…
I abandoned Google when they started throwing shopping links at the top of every search, even when searching for things that have no relevance to shopping, and they started artificially promoting scams and paid material above actual results.
Google Search was best around 10-15 years ago when their only focus was providing the best results they could (remember when you could actually click the top result and you would be taken to the most applicable page instead of some unrelated ad or scam?). Now their focus is on providing the best product possible for their actual customers (paid advertisers) even when it means trashing their own product in the process.
they also ruined their own platform by creating and encouraging an entire business around gaming search results.
15+ years ago you could search for an error code, or an error message, or a part number and actually find it.
Ditched Google for DuckDuckGo in like 2019 and used that for a long time until Kagi came out and now I use that and I’m quite happy with it.
I almost never use them now.
Its been degrading as time has gone on. The other search engines (like all of them) are getting or surpassing google in certain subjects. AI has really made them look like fools in all of this. Their AI sucks for results and (while I dont like it) others are using chatgpt for search results.
I would say it is just the opposite. Google used to be good before they tried to post-process results in this extreme way and AI is just an even more extreme way to do that. ChatGPT and all the other LLMs just increase the noise to signal ratio (noise coming first because there is so much more of it than signal these days).
I actually agree. Others use chatgpt for just about everything. I dont like it for many…many reasons.
Google was much better pre-2020.
Google was best in the 2000s, but things were different back then. They were still a young company trying to improve the world, SEO spam wasn’t really a thing yet, there were far fewer websites, and most online discussions were archived and searchable (compared to today where there’s platforms like Discord that aren’t indexable in search engines at all).
People use chat gpt to tell them what to buy. We are doomed. Our brains are about to shrink to the size of a pea in 10 years. All is going to plan for the elite.
Its funny because you can totally run good LLMs on local systems but people are just going to chat because its what they know and its easy to work with. Like I get it, but they are starting to put ads in the prompts now.
You’re even a verified user. So you must be right. 😝
Didn’t think Lemmy had such a concept.
It was just a joke, because of his avatar.
Everybody is using ai of course.
Been using Ecosia for up to a year now probably. I like it and I don’t need anything else.
Is Ecosia any good for the privacy-minded folks among us?
It’s more privacy focussed than Google, but less than others. Personally I use Ecosia at work and Qwant at home.
For a growing number of users, we can provide search results and ads from Google. For the eligible users, we will provide Google results by default. When your search results and ads are provided by Google, Google will use essential cookies and local storage to help defend against fraudulent traffic. Beyond this, the cookies Google uses will depend on where you are searching from: If you search from the EU, UK or certain US states (for example California), Google will not set additional cookies without your consent. If you search from elsewhere, Google may place additional cookies and the functionality of these cookies will depend on whether you have a Google account
Seems like using Ecosia is about as private as using Google directly.
Google’s been garbage for years now, I kind of miss Coppernic Pro which is what I used before Google it searched all the search engines available and combined and resorted all the results.
If you’re tech savvy, look into selfhosting SearXNG.
I think there are public instances as well.
Would it run on a Raspberry pi 5?
Yeah it doesn’t use many resources.
I’m running one on pi5 with no issue. It takes less than 5 minutes to install one under docker.
No effing way! I got a 16gb model, doing this right………now.
I switched when the answers I got started to become bullshit. I’d google a simple question just to double check if it was correct, but it gave me something completely different. Something so out of the realm of possibility that I was baffled.
I check the sources for the answer and they were not even related. After that I started paying more attention to how messed up google had become, and I had enough.
Google scholar however is still something I need… even though I dislike American corporations.
It’s kind of unreal that they took something that worked perfectly well for 25 years and then fucked it up entirely overnight, for no good reason.
Stick in bike spokes meme.
They did that to drive up short term ad revenue and it worked, and joy was in their greedy little hearts. They also did figure out that poisoning search results drives away users, and that search is kinda the fastest gateway drug to their entire ecosystem.
But they’re stuck. Fixing search would lower their ad revenue, and stock holders would kill them for that.
Also, the way SEO is gamed, it’s really hard to unenshittify the internet. It’s not just their ads, it’s everyone making fake bullshit that pulls the right levers to get to the top of a search.
and the nature of their 1000s of experiments going at the same time isn’t methodical at all. they don’t actually know what iteration of google search was the best and most useful one. there’s no going back to what worked because at no point did they ever know what worked. the modern shitty google search is the best version we will ever get to use again.
google embedded them as a core piece of information infrastructure and then demolished themselves. now our information networks fundamentally do not work anymore
I’m not going to defend google, but it’s important to understand the nature of the beast. It’s not possible to simply revert back to an older version of search ranking because it is a constant cat-and-mouse game between google developers and malicious actors trying to game the system with their shitty websites.
Enshitification.
Why would I google something when the first answer is an inferior AI to chatgpt. I’ll just use a better AI.
!lemmysilver
Thank you for voting. You can vote again in 24 hours. leaderboard
Who knew if your product was mostly shit people would stop using it?
77% still using it though
This might be very non-linear, like ice breaking under your feet.
Sure, but this is a process that takes time; that said, he trend is downward and that will likely continue unless things improve.
And if tech people are no longer recommending it, or actively recommending against it, it is possible to get people to start switching. This is largely how chrome became so popular in the first place, and that required getting people to change from the default option.
The recent duckduckgo ad campaign will surely help rescue googlers and so does my mission to ensure everyone I know doesn’t use google search.
Fair point, but I refer you to my previous comment with the addendum that, unless things improve, Google results are increasingly likely to be removed from other services/features as time progresses.
Didn’t read the article but use Qwant since Trump.
Or Ecosia
I work in an education setting and in the last month, Google started preloading the contents of other sites directly on the search page. It is wreaking havoc when combined with our blocking tools because kids will do a Google search for something innocuous and the page will immediately get blocked because it tried to load a result from Reddit or coursehero or something else we have blocked.
It’s incredibly frustrating.
the page will immediately get blocked because it tried to load a result from Reddit or coursehero or something
Does that mean any search (AI insight notwithstanding) will get blocked if it includes a Reddit, Coursera or something on the blocklist result at all?
Because if yes, that’s much more than just asinine. It’s basically blocking entire search topics due to the sheer fact that Reddit will appear on the furst page of Google a lot.
That is exactly what is happening. They type in the search query on their Chromebook (for example, “why do dry erase markers float”, the results page flashes for a second and then the “this page is blocked” screen comes up saying they were blocked from Reddit, et al. Without them clicking on any search results.
And 2 kids can do the exact same search at the same time and get blocked for different sites or only one will get blocked.
Somewhat OT but why do you block coursera?
We have a different person that manages our block list so I don’t know the reason for all the blocks. That said, we block https://www.coursehero.com/ not https://www.coursera.org/
Oh I thought it was a typo. I have no idea what coursehero is.
I will say coursera is awesome for their calculus classes. (Or they were like 10+ years ago anyway.) Which caught me up after a long hiatus from college when I returned to finish.
To be fair, I don’t know that we don’t block coursera as well but the block I specifically saw was for a course hero. And some of the blocks that we have on are for security reasons over reliability reasons. We have to be hyper cautious about the students leaking any potentially PHI and some of the Google sign in setups are less secure than others.
time to switch to Qwant, ecosia, or duckduckgo
If you have to stick with google, you can use udm=14. https://tedium.co/2024/05/17/google-web-search-make-default/ You can set it as default search provider.
This is available in the UI too - there’s a tab labeled “Web”. Sometimes it’s hiding under “More”.
Adding it to the search provider URL is a good idea though.
Amazing, thank you!
Does that work in Firefox? Seems like I don’t have the ability to edit the address.
Yeah, even on mobile you can do it.
Thanks for the tip
Google search has sucked for a couple years now. DuckDuckGo is better for everything except maps.
Thats because for some ungodly reason they use Apple Maps. Not sure why they dont integrat with an OpenStreetMaps like service. At least that way users can start contributing to fill the gaps
Mapy is also a great European alternative, based on OpenStreetMaps
That’s been my go to since they started. There is/was a challenge using them when we evaluated them a while back with forcing safe search reliability if I recall the reason.
