I'm giving up on Google.

[brettowe@fosstodon.org]

@lina I recently was told about SearXNG and now use that

[bryce@mastodon.brycedixon.dev]

@lina I've previously had issues where I'll have a technical problem, search online with the specific keywords describing the problem, and Google just gives me a hundred articles about how "this software so great because you can't have the described problem!"

[kadettin@muenster.im]

@Adam_Howard @lina nothing ist out of DTs influence. But every little step to cut his options counts.

[wombatpandaa@mastodon.social]

@lina I feel you, this is why I switched away from Google as well.

[su_melan@ani.work]

@Adam_Howard @lina hmm, same in japan

[vinmar@mastodon.social]

@lina Just tried searching with Kagi, no issues either. Glad I switched. Was very unhappy with the way Google provided search results and the shift they made

[mananabanana@hachyderm.io]

@lina Apparantly, google is indexing based on whether the content seems to be generated by Gemini or not
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=II2QF9JwtLc

[blaztinn@mastodon.social]

@lina Have you tried https://www.ecosia.org/

It uses the same search index as Qwant (https://blog.ecosia.org/launching-our-european-search-index/)

I switched to it from DuckDuckGo and I'm quite liking it

[morj_lecteur@h4.io]

@lina I switched to kagi years ago because its search was somewhat better, but I didn't expect it to become so much better

[lina@vt.social]

@blaztinn That one does work but all the search results seem to be provided by Bing... so I'm not sure how it's much different from DDG?

[cesarb@mastodon.social]

@lina What's sad is that Google used to be great. To the point of having that "I'm feeling lucky" button which went directly to the first result, because the first result was the best one that often.

I don't know when Google jumped the shark. To me, it was probably when I had to remove it from the "always run JS from this site because I trust it" list, because IIRC it started moving things in the search results page when hovering over links. But it probably started when they bought doubleclick.

[blaztinn@mastodon.social]

@lina Ah I didn't read the linked blog post in detail. They started rolling out european-based search index (https://www.eu-searchperspective.com/) only for users from France. I guess that's why I easily switched from DDG

What differentiates Ecosia from DDG is that they are spending a lot of their revenue for fighting climate change (https://blog.ecosia.org/ecosia-financial-reports-tree-planting-receipts/). On the other I don't know if they are as privacy focused as DDG.

[communist@mas.to]

@lina the only thing keeping me on any google services at all is maps... openstreetmaps are just not even close to good enough, I can't even find the times businesses close on it.

[pliny@tech.lgbt]

@Adam_Howard @keyshooter @lina Not necessarily. Kagi offers options to pay anonymously and features them in thier FAQ.

There is still the elevated risk of them being US based, but they at least take the minimum precautions.

[geonz@mathstodon.xyz]

@lina Thanks for the nudge. Yesterday somebody mentione dTiptoe through the Tulips and Google did not yield anything except stuff about Tiny Tim ignoring me adding "nasturtiums" to the mix.
Duck Duck Go yielded instant results. https://youtu.be/GZ_wkH4AUeM?si=weewe0dx2YUgsvC5

[schwarzelocke@ohai.social]

@lina Interestingly, while I use DuckDuckGo by default, I quite often have to switch to Google as I'm not finding what I'm looking for.

Just the other day I was looking into a frequent warning with the nvidia driver, and DuckDuckGo has zero results for "drm_page_free" whereas Google had a few results and I found posts with the same trace.