- cross-posted to:
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- hackernews
- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
- hackernews
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I’ve been using search xng for about 6 months now. It’s been great
DuckDuckGo
You can also use Startpage, which copies google’s results.
deleted by creator
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
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.
They need to fix the minus syntax/feature. That’s my singular complaint.
So, you’re saying Bing got better.
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)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.
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.
I remember interviewing at Google years ago (if you’re keeping score, it was 2012/2013 just before their stock hiccupped and my onboarding was killed as I was only a 97% fit), and the guy was religious about page load times. “We cut 200 lines of code if it’ll give us a millisecond of page load speed”, that kind of thing.
How they’ve fallen.
well they don’t need to fight for new users anymore. Everyone uses it already, and children are basically indoctrinated to it: all schools have that as search engine, often they even use google classroom and drive and whatnot on the classes. if they have chromebooks, the chrome browser automatically starts after login even if you don’t want to use it, and you can’t unpin it from the taskbar either
Google sucks so bad that I switched to Bing. BING!
DuckDuckGo for day-to-day stuff, Bing for naughty content.
Duckduckgo is bing. They route their searches there afaik. It’s just a privacy layer, like startpage is a privacy layer on Google.
I don’t think that’s true. They are using the index of bing, but the search results are not. At least that’s what I heard, no idea if it’s factual or not.
👍🏻 Roger Roger thanks for the correction
Duckduckgo also has bangs, which I consider an essential feature.
Although I use SearXNG instead, since their equivalent is a lot more customisable (although less bangs out of the box).
Yep. I was using ddg but just spun up 2 sear instances for myself. (One on vpn one off)
What are your favorite searxng customizations / bangs?
What are your favorite searxng customizations / bangs?
Nothing hugely advanced. I added the NixOS wiki to !software_wikis and I also redirect the old wiki to the new wiki (since the former blocks VPNs). I also use the redirect functionality to redirect twitter/reddit etc links to FOSS frontends.
I’ve also added a bunch of stackexchange sites with their own keywords.
I’ll add you can also use duckduckgo bangs by using !! e.g. !!protondb.
FWIW you can kinda replicate bangs using Firefox using bookmark “keywords” (I think that’s what they’re called). They basically allow you to create a bang for any site using any trigger characters.
Yeah, I use those constantly. For web searching, Wikipedia, work ticket lookups, etc.
Are there any that have a top knot or fauxhawk though? Asking for a friend.
Careful saying that round these parts, you’ll summon the ducks.
quack
Google sucks so bad you switched to… microsoft? 🤔
You’d be better off selfhosting something like searxNG
fuckya life BING BONG
You’re a decade late on that, Bing isn’t good anymore
Honestly nothing is good anymore. Every search engine brings up the same SEO optimized dogshit articles. I sometimes use Arc browser but that’s not really that different than asking ChatGPT.
Yeah. Really sucks how you need to know what you’re looking for in order to get any use out of a search engine these days.
For example, if you want to find a “free online video chatroom”, you’re not going to find it by typing those words into google. You need to know, specifically, that there is a free chatroom called https://stumblechat.com/ and type that into google in order to see it.
The world is fucked.
It’s so obnoxious. I hate researching a topic only to be fed results leading to useless AI spam. The entire thing is clogged up like this. Searching on the internet absolutely sucks, now.
Recently I don’t feel that way after using Kagi. Sure, there’s still some junk, but somehow I’m finding what I’m looking for a lot easier. That search in forums toggle is magical.
I’ve read good things about kagi but haven’t tried it yet.
We really are ruled by corporations.
I guess this is why it was so important to neuter the government and public institutions. Can’t have regular people with control over their own lives.
Google begins recommending DuckDuckGo.
Or SearXNG. I run an instance, you can check it out: search.gregtech.eu
That or Startpage
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.
🥱
I fucking hate how these companies get so bloated and then start doing whatever the fuck they want.
Never use google to search. There are many other options and all of them are better than google.
I don’t know about better but people just start understanding that going to the guy with the largest market share is saying that you are satisfied with being abused by a monopoly.
There other options, use 'em
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.
Feels good not to care anymore about the unrelenting enshittification of Reddit, Twitter and Google since I switched away from them.
great!
now I can just disable JavaScript to end my dependence on their services.
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.
Cool. As if the over-promotion of AI garbage wasn’t enough of a reason to stop using it.
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
What’s the experience like when reading threaded conversations like Lemmy? Is it possible for you to post a screenshot?
May I suggest https://mojeek.com as a privacy respecting alternative that actually has its own web crawlers and indexers.
While I love the idea of Mojeek, the execution leaves a lot to be desired.
do you have any examples? they’re always useful for us when it comes to targetting improvements etc.
why no one quotes searx instances? https://searx.space/
or even paid search engines : kagi.
Kagi is good
Isnt literally the first Q&A that is REQUIRES Js?
