here’s my new favorite helen keller quote, courtesy of Google ai, haha
In a similar vein, I was trying to find something on Facebook (yeah, I know, but it was a funny work thing) today and went to use the search function to look for the FB page in question (searched the exact name) and if you just hit enter the new AI assumes you’re asking it a question. It’s FB! It’s not a search engine! Why is it trying to give me a phone number for the police department I’m looking up to see their insane post?! I want to see the page! The page with the name I searched! On the app I searched in! Now you have to click a separate button that specifies you’re looking to search through FB… In the FB app!
This AI crap is already k.i.l.l.i.n.g. me.
in this situation the search engine DuckDuckGo is better than Google because it has an opt-in for a.i.
https://duckduckgo.com/DDG is just Bing
It is better Bing
It’s Bing in a private browsing window.
No it isn’t. Just because most of the results come from Bing does not not mean that it is Bing. Bing is awful and DDG is useful.
Last time I ran a side-by-side test, DDG results were identical to Bing in a private browsing session.
That’s the results only though.
That’s often what I’m looking for from a search engine
Then Bing it is. I switched on my daily machine and DDG has been ok. Still a lot of sponsored shit I don’t need, but better than getting a solid lie from Google
Deliberate vandalism of the commons needs to actually be made illegal. This would include the entire field of “search engine optimization” which is simply a misnomer made of weasel words, which actually mean they’ll hide the results you want behind an ever increasing amount of plain old grifter-ass crap sold by the same three old assholes who bought everything and think that means it’s actually theirs, even as they dilute the concept of ownership for the rest of us.
The whole idea needs to die.
Hoping to phase Google products out of my life. I think the challenge will be YouTube. Hopefully Rumble becomes more popular and has as good if not better features than YouTube.
For me it’s gmail. I’ve disconnected from everything else, but I have WAY TOO MANY things connected to and through my gmail account.
If it’s any comfort I’ve spent about a year getting away from Gmail and I can report it is in fact doable.
Finding another email service and using a domain of my own with it was the easy part. The hard part was painstakingly replacing my address everywhere I was using it with new addresses.
Way more doable than YouTube, which I don’t foresee being replicated any time soon.
You can also forward emails from your old Gmail to your new email as a bridge to ensure you don’t miss anything.
I would not forward anything from GMail to another email provider. Google is intrusive. They have no reason to know anything about my new email address. But I’m overreacting and that’s okay.
Just use an alias, it’s anyway a good idea to find a provider that lets you create unique aliases for each account.
From the article …
but that I have to wait for all the crap I don’t want in the first place.
It comes down to Google telling us what it thinks we’d want, vs giving us what we actually ask for, and the time wasted doing so.
That, and probably punishing people who use ad blockers.
While I agree with everything said, using Google to find out how many episodes your own podcast has just seems a bit lazy. Bookmark the page, and next time you want to do your admin work you can follow the bookmarks and be done with it. Easy fix.
Also, use DDG
Been using DuckDuckGo for a long time but I recently trialed Kagi and have been quite impressed! It’s not free but hopefully it keeps the enshittification away for a bit longer.
