this post was submitted on 02 Feb 2024
291 points (99.7% liked)
Technology
59092 readers
6622 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Google is actively working to close off the internet.
Thinking Google is "the internet" is probably part of the problem.
100% this. Google is killing Google. We just need to embrace that death and start using and promoting better alternatives.
Ecoisa!
They just planted 200 million trees.
I've heard of Ecosia, but I've never heard of how exactly their model works. It sounds to good to be true, so I've always written it off as bullshit.
Ahh yes, the classic "it's not 100% good, so it's 100% bad" thinking
More like "a company doesn't do something out of the kindness of their own heart" thinking.
Maybe they are fantastic, but the idea of a company doing something positive for the world just by me using their product (for free) sounds outlandish.
Here are their financial reports.
https://blog.ecosia.org/ecosia-financial-reports-tree-planting-receipts/
Kagi is nice
Another paid service that has no reason not to enshittify
Honestly, I hope it's around long enough. Right now it's very good and rapidly improving. Enshittification by definition only happens when a service is large enough and successful enough. Until that happens, I'm going to keep using what for me is the best search option.
Let's face it. Search is a fundamental necessity of the internet. How many models can functionally work?
It could be free for the user, but supported by ads. We've seen how that works. Maybe it's run its course.
It could be ad-free and paid for by users. The competitive incentive at least is to give users the best possible experience.
It could be entirely free and provided as a utility. Literally no one is asking for a government run Internet.
Maybe there's some futuristic solution like an Open Source distributed network in which users run the search themselves. As far as I know nobody has come up with a search that doesn't require a massive database with enormous costs.
What is the alternative if we need a searchable index of the internet? Self host? Participate in a community driven swarm? Is that possible or even feasible for us to do? I'd love to see such a thing. It would be quite interesting to learn about the architecture of it, especially ways that the tech prevents gaming the search results, but I have yet to see something like that.
Or are you suggesting that internet search should be done by a non-profit or government agency that we fund with tax dollars? Even the internet archive struggles to stay alive.
If you figure out how to search "correctly" on SearXNG instances, some of them are pretty good (though they source part of their results from google). That's how I search most of the time nowadays. I've found a favourite instance and a few backups. My most important advice is: to change the default language from "auto" to "en", and only change it to some other locale for results specifically in that language/country.
If I understand correctly, isn't that just a meta search that is using corporate results as the back end?
It is indeed, but in my experience it's somehow better than the corporate backends at presenting the "correct" results to me.
this has been my experience with paulgo.io with the exception of images, which i sometimes have to use google for
Whispers: "they're trying to build a prison..." DUN DUN DUN DUNDUNDUNDUN
The forest grows out, gets fat with wood and brush and stuff, then it all dies to a fire or whatever. Something new always rises, and I'm excited for the new growth
Google and netflix and stuff will eventually push people away and people will find something new to do with their time.
They already kinda have by manipulating search results to fit their best interests.
They still need to cache them anyway when they're crawling the pages.
It wasn't a full backup like archive.org but a broken text only view
they made billions of profits last year. they are very far from loosing money.