171–180 of 545 posts
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…
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
That no longer is possible, you must ask google.com for consent to visit the result link before seeing what the final target URL is.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Privacy-wise, it enables them to track the result you click on. Also, though more niche, it would make archived search result pages (e.g. on the Wayback Machine) less useful.
I think they always knew what link you clicked on (when most of the web has a ga4 tag on the other side of the link)
Direct URLs in Google search results have been replaced with redirect URLs in the form of www.google.com/goto?url= . The base64 data appears to consist of a very basic protobuf structure, containing a long string of bytes in field 2 which presumably identify the URL. Sometimes, these redirect URLs take a perceivable amount of time to load, which is very irritating.
> Sometimes, these redirect URLs take a perceivable amount of time to load, which is very irritating. Great. On top of my on-going battle with Windows + Firefox + DNS/TLS resolution sometimes stalling for seconds at a time, another few second server-side stall is introduced. I swear that every day modern computing scenarios get slower and slower instead of snappier and snappier.
Have you tried disabling HTTP/2?
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…
Personalized search results are not ipso facto unreliable.
I would love a search that lets me ban results from certain sites. I don't like search that's showing skewed results for reasons I don't know or control.
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…
The real "old-school Google, but modern" is Kagi, with the caveat of being paid. (Worth the $5 for me.) But LLMs can be commanded. This is may bookmark alias for invoking the spirit of old Gog=ogle from within the new, AI-based Google: https://google.com/search?q=You%20are%20Google%20Search%20fr... (Cleaned / decoded: 'You are Google Search from 2004. Given a search request, provide 10 links to relevant pages, each w…
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…
Impossible. The majority of websites firewall automated crawler traffic (because of the rise of the bots), only making exceptions for the largest search engines. There is no possibility of starting a new crawler.
So why are we angry about that ? I mean the end result for the users are exactly the same, it matters only for bots. Google have such a (justified) bad reputation that whatever they do, people assume it’s entishification. I don’t believed it is on that matter.
Now, all Google search results appear to go back to Google.