Google begins recommending DuckDuckGo.
this post was submitted on 17 Jan 2025
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At this point I’ve been using DDG for 7 years as my main search engine. It’s gotten better while Google has become a joke.
Can confirm. I didn't think it'd be like that but it do be like that. DDG gang, where you at.
I switched to DDG recently due to the manifest v3 changes and AI junk and have been really liking it. It feels like what Google used to be when it was good.
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So, you're saying Bing got better.
I don’t know the full story about how Microsoft is developing Bing, but I do know that Google made a conscious decision to make their search results worse, simply so that you’d search more times, which for them translates to additional ad revenue. But, my sense is Bing hasn’t gone this far yet.
DDG does add their own spice on to – or so they claim, and Bing doesn't have bangs so I'd never want to use it.
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DuckDuckGo: The coolest way to use bing and apple maps.
(I do use it though)
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Can't wait until they enshittify, the way I see it, everything will eventually, even Lemmy. It's up to us to not settle too hard in one place
The core of what you're saying has been my approach for many years. Never go "all in" on anything.
Convenience is one thing (to me, but it's everything to so many), but it's just one factor. And if it means I am (or my data is) the product, it costs too much.
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I remember interviewing at Google years ago (if you're keeping score, it was 2012/2013 just before their stock hiccupped and my onboarding was killed as I was only a 97% fit), and the guy was religious about page load times. "We cut 200 lines of code if it'll give us a millisecond of page load speed", that kind of thing.
How they've fallen.
well they don't need to fight for new users anymore. Everyone uses it already, and children are basically indoctrinated to it: all schools have that as search engine, often they even use google classroom and drive and whatnot on the classes. if they have chromebooks, the chrome browser automatically starts after login even if you don't want to use it, and you can't unpin it from the taskbar either
Google sucks so bad that I switched to Bing. BING!
DuckDuckGo for day-to-day stuff, Bing for naughty content.
Duckduckgo is bing. They route their searches there afaik. It's just a privacy layer, like startpage is a privacy layer on Google.
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Careful saying that round these parts, you'll summon the ducks.
quack
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We really are ruled by corporations.
I guess this is why it was so important to neuter the government and public institutions. Can't have regular people with control over their own lives.
Feels good not to care anymore about the unrelenting enshittification of Reddit, Twitter and Google since I switched away from them.
Cool. As if the over-promotion of AI garbage wasn't enough of a reason to stop using it.
why no one quotes searx instances? https://searx.space/
or even paid search engines : kagi.
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Doing this to combat bots like they aren't also using bots to scrape data from the internet is interesting.
I wonder how this affects modified/custom search engines (like udm14).
Udm14 is just a query parameter to open google with the "web" results tab. Still works.
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Just makes me realize that I haven't used Google search in like over a year now because I use Kagi. Even before that i was using searx-ng.
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If the British civil service, even operating under previous administrations, can put together a multi-functioning government domain that runs reasonably well without JavaScript, there's no reason Google can't continue to do the same with a ducking web search.
The former works better with JavaScript, that's true, but it works OK without and that's the point.
Then again, the civil service were ordered to do it largely out of spite because the government didn't want to give the plebs any excuse for not being able to use the site.
I'm not sure how to get Google to lose the need for scripting in the same way.
I think this isn't a case of if Google can, but rather of why they should. Do enough people really use the modern web without JavaScript to justify spending the resources to test and maintain functionality without JS? And they probably don't want to let the few people that don't have JS to open support tickets or write articles about how google.com is broken. Easier to just block it on purpose than to let it decay.
It makes more sense that a government website would support it, since they can't let even a single person fall through the cracks, and changing laws/regulations is more difficult than making a company decision.
🥱
I fucking hate how these companies get so bloated and then start doing whatever the fuck they want.
Me, to Google right now:
May I suggest https://mojeek.com/ as a privacy respecting alternative that actually has its own web crawlers and indexers.
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If only I could replace YouTube...
Being a parasite is the Google business model
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Not like I was using it to search anyway
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