My main search has been DDG for a long while, so I'm not super upset by the death* of Google Search, but it has been helpful in some difficult cases.

[nina_kali_nina@tech.lgbt]

@jamesb Google search is going to be replaced by a chatbot, apparently, as per https://techcrunch.com/2026/05/19/google-search-as-you-know-it-is-over/

[jamesb@fedi.duckduckpigeon.co.uk]

@nina_kali_nina Oh. Not much different from now then.

[domi@donotsta.re]

@nina_kali_nina@tech.lgbt oh well. interesting times indeed

searxng+ddg will get me through this, but i'm not happy about less choice, even if the results already were of dubious quality...

[nina_kali_nina@tech.lgbt]

@jamesb the screenshots hint that there might be no SERP, just chat, "at times"

[brendan@discuss.systems]

@nina_kali_nina doesn't sound from that article like startpage (DDG but backed by Google's index instead of Microsoft's) would be affected

[haui@mastodon.giftedmc.com]

@nina_kali_nina
I've used ddg for some time until they started censoring the truth. That got me off pretty quickly.

[cdrichards@mathstodon.xyz]

@nina_kali_nina It is 2028. People look up websites by hand in a pair of directories called “What’s New” and “What’s Cool”.

[stiv@mastodon.social]

@nina_kali_nina it's crazy we all allowed Google to build the definitive index of the web, and now they won't even let us see it.

I wish back when Google started showing different search results for different users people had pushed back and not put up with it. There are some resources that are so important they must be made accessible to the public without being hidden behind an algorithm, and the index of "everything on the internet" is one of them.

[cdrichards@mathstodon.xyz]

@nina_kali_nina *drags self to Grey Havens, discovers last ship has sailed*

[nina_kali_nina@tech.lgbt]

@haui

[pulkomandy@mastodon.tetaneutral.net]

@nina_kali_nina also, duckduckgo lite does not like my user agent and shows me a captcha that doesn't work.

I should look into using marginalia and other search engines more, but this just makes my life more complicated...

[wakingrufus@bigshoulders.city]

@nina_kali_nina
We are going back to webrings, I guess.

[sol_hsa@mastodon.gamedev.place]

@nina_kali_nina What I wonder is who's going to pay for all that.

[zanagb@lgbtqia.space]

@haui @nina_kali_nina

wait wait wait. They did WHAT!? What happened?

[haui@mastodon.giftedmc.com]

@ZanaGB
Ddg is censoring heavily. You can test this easily. Open a handful search engines and type in different topics. Of course there will be small differences but in "certain" topics, only the state news will pop up. That is very bad.
@nina_kali_nina

[zanagb@lgbtqia.space]

@haui @nina_kali_nina well.

That leaves us with... Qwant? Ecosia? Startpage? Maybe some locally run SearXNG instances? Most of these are bing based too so ugh.

[haui@mastodon.giftedmc.com]

@ZanaGB Well yes but that is how materialism works. Nothing in life is ever perfect. Even the idea of perfection is wrong because it is unachievable and easily usable to manipulate people.

Therefore: we exist on this planet in relative imperfection and embrace it while only pushing for progression, never for perfection.

So right now I'm testing multiple search engines. Startpage being pretty on point. But we will need a decentralized search engine with e.g. fedi instances sharing sites' data.