this post was submitted on 02 Feb 2024
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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