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google.com/goto: Google's anti-scraping update

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Re: google.com/goto: Google's anti-scraping update

#131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Like the OP says, it's being hidden form scrapers. Like you I don't see a reason for normal users to be concerned.

Unless I want to see what the link is before clicking. Or copy the link.

Or navigate to the link without waiting for however long it takes for Google's redirect endpoint to respond.

Re: google.com/goto: Google's anti-scraping update

#132

I've been using the 'ClearURLs' FF addon for quite a while now, and it gives you the URLs back in the results. https://docs.clearurls.xyz/

That wouldn’t work at all with this url format - the url can only be resolved by requesting the goto link. I recommend reading more than the headline

> That wouldn’t work at all with this url format - the url can only be resolved by requesting the goto link.

What is "that" you say wouldn't work?

The extension can work fine by requesting every goto link upfront. As far as your google searches go, this is just as private as before.

I would recommend you avoid judging a comment because of a metric it neither said nor implied.

Re: google.com/goto: Google's anti-scraping update

#133
post #7

The enshittification continues. Nothing good ever comes from businesses desperately trying to protect their moats rather than making their products better so they don't need to.

Thank Prabhakar Raghavan for that. After destroying Yahoo’s search product he failed up and did the same at Google. In reward for making Google Search materially worse in every way except ad revenue, he failed up again and was promoted to a cushy do-nothing role. Everything wrong with the tech industry, embodied in a single person.

He wasn't the one who merged ads and search into the same org. The blame has to fall on Sundar, surely.

> promoted to a cushy do-nothing role

The people who this happens to are not perceived as successes. Everyone knows they are gentle firings.

Re: google.com/goto: Google's anti-scraping update

#134

As much as I am sad that Google died like 15 years ago, I am past the mourning phase. That was when they announced they were shifting from returning websites to "returning answers" and it has been a long slide into shittification I do enjoy using their free AI. For actual web search I actually like using Yandex. It reminds me of old Google, returning reasonable results and much less "shaping results to please our cor…

>I do enjoy using their free AI It's really not free. You're paying with your data.

Worse - We all are paying with our planet.

Re: google.com/goto: Google's anti-scraping update

#135
post #83
post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Kagi is what I settled on a couple of years ago. I do think sometimes the fawning is over the top, but it is a solid search engine and tended to give me a bit better results than Google out of the box. The real win, though, is that you can give various sites a weight, so the search results will prefer or avoid sites according to your desires. Once I had that going, my search results tended to be much better than Goog…

Yup, same here. Been using Kagi for years. It's boring, it just works. Hoping they can stay that way.

My ongoing concern with Kagi is they always seem to be focused on sidequests like their Orion browser and their LLM-powered Translate tool. Maybe that's interesting for some people, but I can't help but feel like I just want a damn search engine than works.

Re: google.com/goto: Google's anti-scraping update

#136
post #33

I've been using DuckDuckGo for years now, ever since it became noticeable that two different people searching for the same search term would get two different results back from Google. Meaning they were no longer completely reliable: they might show one person a result that they hide from the other person by burying it on page 3 where few people ever look. DDG's search results have been poorer recently than they used…

The age of internet search is over. The age of Cloudflare has begun. It wouldn't be possible to build a search engine now if they wanted to... and there wouldn't be anything to search for anyway. The non-corporate internet withered into dust and blew away in the wind. If you could find what you want, how would they ever sell you what they want you to buy? And I'm not just talking merchandise, though that too. Your po…

I'm hoping for a future where we create static HTML pages again styled with a bit of handmade CSS, because we're so tired of bot attacks and long loading times. Then suddenly a Cloudflare network becomes absolet.

Re: google.com/goto: Google's anti-scraping update

#137

While a lot of people are concerned with local model performance, I wonder how feasible is it now to run a local indexed web search? Surely running an old school Google is possible with the beefy AI rigs today. I know the problem will be crawling which would be bottlenecked by the ISP but I use Google to search SO, Wikipedia, programming language docs, Github issues, and AWS docs. I think a feasible workflow would be…

Until 10 years ago, i used Dash for that. It’s still around https://kapeli.com/dash

It’s instant, works offline, auto-updates, and includes all the websites you listed, and allows for custom ones too.

Re: google.com/goto: Google's anti-scraping update

#139
post #31
post #4

If I hadn't already ditched Google long ago, this would be more than enough to chase me away.

They are forcing my further and further towards kagi. I do hope the fawning on here is at least partly justified.

I don’t fawn, I just pay and use-and-forget. It’s almost to the point where it’s a little mental bump when I have to make a browser use it again, setting up something new.

Kagi has a pile of features I’m not getting the benefit of too, I’m sure, because it’s just-search, mostly, to me.

That’s fine; I know what I’m supporting, and I know that I’m the customer and not the product.

Re: google.com/goto: Google's anti-scraping update

#140

While a lot of people are concerned with local model performance, I wonder how feasible is it now to run a local indexed web search? Surely running an old school Google is possible with the beefy AI rigs today. I know the problem will be crawling which would be bottlenecked by the ISP but I use Google to search SO, Wikipedia, programming language docs, Github issues, and AWS docs. I think a feasible workflow would be…

Plausible. Figure 100 GB each of search index for Stack Overflow, Wikipedia, and GitHub issues, then add a dozen more for docs of all your favorite techs. So maybe half a terabyte. Download and build updated dumps of those once every week or two, and it'd work pretty well. Impractical, but possible.
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