Been using Ecosia for months now. DuckDuckGo and Startpage before that. I'm pretty happy with Ecosia search results, can't complain.
this post was submitted on 05 Mar 2025
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I don't need to care. I stopped using Google search months ago.
Ok, but why should I go to Google for ai answers when I can get the same from openai, other models or even local installations without all the ads?
Unfortunately this isn’t about you, but the 90% of people who don’t understand what AI is at all and don’t give a shit where the responses come from as long as “scorpio dream meaning high school teacher truck” and “can you gregnant with cousin?” Give them answers they like
/s to an extent, but here we are
PREGANANANT
Which is EXACTLY why I just moved to using Vivaldi browser and StartPage as a search engine. Fuck these guys.
Kagi. But you free loaders would have to pay for something.
I was with kagi for a year.
It was fine.
Their CEO is an asshole though. There was that thing where he went a bit nutty over some mild criticism. I don't remember the details.
Anyhoo. Searx is nice for the moment.
The weirdest thing about switching to kagi was learning that the first few results have a good chance of being relevant. I got so used to scrolling down after a search. It was just weird to have the useful results on top. Similarly, learning that search syntax is actually meaningful and respected by the search engine (for the majority of cases).
I'm interested, but a bit reluctant. I find DuckDuckGo quite adequate for most things, except shopping online, something that I have to rely on for certain categories of items. How is Kagi on shopping?
I don't really use it.
They have a free trial, no cc needed.
AI is over hyped and doesn’t need to be shoved in our faces. Ugh.
It’s another tech bubble like the dot com bubble. But at this point, the AI bubble, the crypto bubble, and the capitalism bubble will all crash at the same time as the world economy falls apart and we end up in another global war. I guess the accelerationists that survive will get their wish and see what remains and if it’s the neofuedalist white supremacy utopia they dream of
Sounds cool, can’t wait!
Microsoft doesn't want to end up like Google. Fuck that company! One way you can tell is on outlook...which I use with a proper 10' pole on my work computer only. Fuck no, never at home ever ever.... Have you ever received an email on outlook and just saw the title or maybe you read halfway through and got interrupted?.... Where the fuck is it now? Its gone! Sure you could go email by email and try to be your own search engine. But its no use, whatever Tim was talking about with the over pressured valve at the Central boiler, blah blah you should let people know to exit the blah blah, otherwise 3rd degree bur...yeah that shit's gone. Might as well write your own email to finish the story. See, Microsoft doesn't want to be like Google at all. On my 14.9992G full gmail, I was always able to go find out what Amazon offer I got 8 years ago. Look 404! Yeah that's it! 404! With Gemini spying on my every move that's gotta stop. It's gonna try to learn my porn habits. I'm gonna go search for all the wrong porn on purpose.
Stick to SEARCH, not making shit up (euphemistically called "hallucinating").
The future is coming and it sure looks like garbage. I have long since left Google behind.
It’s been a long time I use DuckDuckGo as my default search engine for basic stuff (which let’s be honest, more than 80% is just a simple query to find a certain area of some website, like “Firefox download Windows”, “Discord site status”, “Microsoft office pricing” etc.). If I want to search something more related to my own language or recent events in my county, Google is a must, but that’s like 10% of all my search engine usage. I don’t really need Google to know about the other 90%.
Yeah I think most of my searches start with the name of the site I want results from.
Yup, this was all the motivation I needed to jump ship from Google, fuck those clowns.
I am no longer feeling lucky
I noticed today that UDM mode for Google is displaying sponsored results now, too...
yeah udm14 getting pretty bad lately. That is why I moved to startpage which is same Google services without AI and sponsored contents
https://www.google.com/search?q=drp&udm=14 still works for me....
It's never not worked, but they're running sponsored links now. I've hit them 3 times today out of maybe 50 searches. But they're there.
Does EVERY axis in life have to be fucked up at the same time?
Can we have one thing that is just doing ok?
Government - fucked.
Education - fucked.
Healthcare - fucked.
Environment - fucked.
Societal and Social Cohesion - fucked.
Wealth Inequality - fucked.
Personal Technological Autonomy - fucked, and under continuous attack.
Technological Enshittification - Running like gangbusters. So really - fucked.
Damn, someone give me some kind of ladder to climb out of this pit of despair.
And yet, resistance seems very weak…
That's weird -- we water our soil with nutrients like "there's no point in voting", "they're all out to get us", "politicians are shit", "nothing changes", "governments are bad".
I wonder why people haven't been motivated to fight. Whenever they express faith in our leaders, or institutions, or have any positivity, we're quick to shut them down. But still.
I'm from India so two more things to add to the list
Air - fucked.
Cleanliness - megafucked.
Every civilization rises and falls. We're on the down slope ATM. Sorry. The 80s and 90s were pretty nice in America!
That feel when the Matrix actually called it
Every single one of these flows from wealth inequality.
(and reinforces it)
They also flow from corruption (regulatory capture/failure to enforce anti-trust and other consumer-protection law). It's hard to say whether that is itself a cause or result of wealth inequality, though.
Nintendo, when chasing developers of emulators and modders, uses regulatory mechanisms. IP is such a mechanism initially. Intended to protect the little guy from big bad corporations.
It’s hard to say whether that is itself a cause or result of wealth inequality, though.
It's both of course. Only time flows in one direction and never the other.
Excellent point!
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Does EVERY axis in life have to be fucked up at the same time?
Yes. There are many texts written on this since start of writing, some are written down from what was carried in word before that since start of speaking.
The ladder has been privatized.
You get the greased pole.
I know it isn't much, but services like mastodon, lemmy, kbin, friendica, Peertube, etc have shown me there is connected pushback.
Tilde communities have given me something smaller scale to focus on.
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Is this for human beings, or is it for Google to show their investors to prove that AI is totally going to revolutionize something eventually?
Screw Google either way, I'm not going to use their search engine either way, but this doesn't feel like a product they are genuinely committed to releasing. Maybe I'm wrong, and in that case, screw them even more.
Would this be the same AI that spits out incorrect summarys or just flat out gets data incorrect constantly? What could possibly go wrong by making that the ONLY way to look for things going forward. Fucking morons.
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Oh wow sounds great, can I get in line now to not use it?
I don't really get Google's angle since it's pretty obvious that their AI search sucks. Maybe it's just to impress shareholders?
I mean, they're ruining their search anyways. It's almost unusable at this point, it's like asking for relevant ads and two year old Reddit posts
Is it censorship? Did they decide to just straight up sell SEO? Are websites locking down and blocking their crawlers to stop AI training crawlers?
I legitimately find Bing to be better at this point, but whatever they're doing it's maddening. Even better AI assisted web searches kinda suck because the data fed into them is more of the same
But solid chance they're trying to boost Gemini, which has been a shockingly bad llm for a company that basically wrote the book on AI not too long ago
There’s also the problem that there’s much more noise in the web nowadays—it has been growing exponentially and people try to manipulate the search engines. It becomes more difficult to filter out that’s good and what’s bad. Be too strict and you risk missing valuable but less polished information. Be too lenient, and you drown in low-quality, SEO-optimized content that prioritizes visibility over usefulness.
This makes sense to me. All other reasons presented sound like wishful thinking that google is still the same company from 2005
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