When I think about how the old, good internet turned into the enshitternet, I imagine a series of small compromises, each seemingly reasonable at the time, each contributing to a cultural norm of making good things worse, and worse, and worse.

  • 1984@lemmy.today
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    1 year ago

    When it comes to Google, I find it completely absurd how people are OK with a giant ad / spy company saving and profiting from their private searches. Their entire lives, every sensitive query, stored in their databases. Why is this accepted? Completely shocking actually.

    They are basing their entire profit model on spying on users privacy and selling it to advertisers. Doesn’t that make you sick to your stomach?

    • deleted@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      How do you look stuff up?

      I use duckduckgo but wouldn’t return good results sometimes.

      • 1984@lemmy.today
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        1 year ago

        Kagi, it’s amazing.

        I used to use ddg a few years ago but it wasn’t good enough to completely leave Google search.

        Kagi is even better than Google. Highly recommend you try it, it makes the web feel fresh again.

        • deleted@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          I just read the article. I’m stunned.

          I’ve noticed in the past year or so that duckduckgo would return all results of one brand or similar websites no matter what general term I add.

          I know ddg send query to search engines but I didn’t know google was the culprit. I thought ddg sucks.

          Kagi sounds good. I’ll definitely give it a shot. Hopefully it’ll not get acquired by google or microsoft.

      • phoneymouse@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Google doesn’t return good results either though.

        If you want best effort, use DDG as your main search. If the first query doesn’t bring back what you want add g! to it and it will redirect to Google. yt! goes to YouTube, b! goes to bing, w! Wikipedia, etc.

        • deleted@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          I think google peaked in 2016 and since then it’s in steady decline.

          I use to assume if google didn’t return good results then no enough content is on the web.

          Thanks for the tip!

      • sudneo@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Big fan of kagi.com. rock-solid privacy policy (seriously, I am one of those guys who read them all, this is probably the best I have seen), excellent search results and very nice features (lensed to search in specific contexts only - say, programming, up/down ranking of sites as you prefer, automatic rewriting of urls, custom bangs). The cons, is that it’s a paid service. I am personally a customer since November 2022, never looked back.