Honestly I want to see Google on trial for their adsense business.
Google search is basically a lock-in service now, which is integrated into a massive browser project, an entire OS used by governments for education, and as the #1 option in competing systems due to sponsorships. Search itself though is awful, and if people were more aware of options maybe we’d see more improvement.
Google trying to profile users and alter their search results for “engagement” is one of the worst things to have ever happen on the internet. Facebook and others doing the same was following suit.
I’m curios, what are better options? I for example use duckduckgo and although I like it and it is my search engine to go, I find the search results of google and it’s visual representation better…
Otherwise I’m on your side of the boat and except youtube I got rid of all other google services in my dayli routine
Hijacking this comment thread to recommend SearXNG, it’s basically a decentralized search engine (if I understand correctly) and you can choose from where you want it to give you the results.
You can choose to index searches from both major (like Google, Bing, DDG, etc) and minor search engines at the same time and it will just give you the most relevant results. Alternatively, you can choose what engines you don’t want results from as well.
My experience with it has been great so far, I’ve just had minor issues when searching for something extremely specific and in those cases I use DDG or others, but most of the time the first 3 results are exactly what I’m looking for.
I use the Disroot instance on SearXNG, but you can choose other instances or host your own. There is a dedicated website for choosing instances.
does this also work with safari on ios? One of the reasons I sue duckduckgo is that I can use it across all browsers and operating systems without any issues.
DDG looks better to me, in dark mode anyway. But their results have become targeted. Even when I search with the regions set to all I get very local results. For example I searched for Ray Bans and the third result was a post on a small second hand website that I have used before. I can’t believe that this post is the third post globally for people searching for Ray Bans.
