191–200 of 272 posts
Google is DRASTICALLY reducing the size of their search index. The reasons can be debated but the outcome is clear. A much smaller index of pages they consider to be the primary authority. Anything else they are not interested in and do not need.
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DDG is repackaged Bing. Used to be Yandex too but sanctions put an end to that.
We are significantly more than that at this point, including that we've been working on our own web index for the past two years (see https://insideduckduckgo.substack.com/p/duck-tales-why-duckd... ). But on top of that we don't get local results, knowledge graph, answers, sports, anything AI related, and many more essential modules from Bing, all of which collectively makes up a large % of the results at this point,…
Google does not hate us... it is worse than that - it is indifferent to us. Hate requires some sort of recognition. I mean this single incident may not mean anything but overall google is heading to an _interesting_ place. In short, it was state of the art but in 20 years it became just another conglomerate sacrificing quality for shareholder gain, I think? As a search engine, it does not work for me. I see promoted…
Apple Maps never does that. Still, I usually use Google as I want an accurate idea of whether a business is actually open and what its hours are.
FYI Google also hates OpenCV What used to be easily searchable (e.g. "opencv orb") now brings up pages and pages of spam sites (basically "learn opencv here!" blogspam). Literally the first result on "docs.opencv.org" is on page 4, and points to version 3.4 (9 years old!). The page that I want https://docs.opencv.org/4.13.0/dc/dc3/tutorial_py_matcher.ht... is nowhere to be found.
Growing up as a teenager and young adult, I remember fondly browsing Newgrounds and being thankful to those who were paying to keep the servers running; I swore that once I got my footing and had some cash to spare, I'd be paying it forward and have been doing so for almost ten years now (took me longer than expected).
So, what I'm trying to encourage is to normalize THAT (Having X% amount of paying customers that make it possible to keep it free for those who can't pay, or to support growth), because I'm pretty sure dozens of thousands of successful careers in programming and animation were launched — or at least inspired — by wonderful sites like Newgrounds and I think that has been very much a positive net thing for society.
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The 'mail is fine' is an impending apocalypse that most people don't think too much about. Google can dump you at any time for any reason or no reason. Your chances are small, but if it happens its incredibly disruptive. I don't know the durable answer, but I definitely need to complete that step of degoogling, the job just seems huge.
Get a custom domain. Strat using that. Route to Gmail to start but easily decouple. It took me about a year of updates but now I rarely get anything to a @gmail
It’s the best option we have, but it’s no solution to the crapshoot that is email today.
Google does not hate us... it is worse than that - it is indifferent to us. Hate requires some sort of recognition. I mean this single incident may not mean anything but overall google is heading to an _interesting_ place. In short, it was state of the art but in 20 years it became just another conglomerate sacrificing quality for shareholder gain, I think? As a search engine, it does not work for me. I see promoted…
Why would Google need to direct traffic to the website when they've already scraped and trained their models on the data? Content creators and legitimate websites were wham-bammed and thank-you-ma’amed.
Personifying Google in this way is not realistic. The search team alone at Google is made of thousands of people who are all working on different things with an over-arching mission of making the web MORE accessible, not less. Any release from any of those people could have created a side effect of this kind. Is there a chance it was an intentional policy implementation? Sure. But the odds are heavily against it.
> thousands of people who are all working on different things
those thousands of people aren't making the overall decisions
> with an over-arching mission of making the web MORE accessible
google's mission has for a long time now been to deliver value to its shareholders; making the web more accessible is secondary, nice if aligned with increasing revenue
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Users do not compensate websites for serving ads. Your argument just doesn't make any sense. Also - negotiating 'a truce with advertisers'? What does that even mean? Granting the ads industry even more power and control over the internet? Can you come up with an idea that isn't a dystopian hellhole on its face?
>Users do not compensate websites for serving ads. Are you confused or being sarcastic? I'll admit the system is one step larger than a typical transaction, which could be hard to understand for some, but the views -> ads -> dollars pipeline is the still straightforward to understand. Maybe not. I don't know when things get too complicated here.
These aren’t simply commercials running like OTA tv in the days of old. They are basically fracking our data and then selling it to other people without any oversight or ability to stop it. You are basically under assault from the moment you walk through the metaphorical door. Why does a host need my device info, my demographics, every app I’m on, my router info, all this incredibly personal and granular data just so I can watch a damn video? They just start probing and sucking up every bit of information they can get their hands on and they put a lot of effort into making sure I don’t know it’s happening or where it’s going. I will never forget the first time I fired up little snitch mini on my Mac years ago and watched all those little lines light up like the Fourth of July.
They are the parasites when you get down to it. If the transaction was clearer and we had the ability to get out of it ultimately I think people would be a lot more willing to deal with ads. But again, it’s not simply ads. This is sophisticated network data mining and reselling that vastly outstrips the value we are getting out of visiting a friggin news site or whatever, and it happens basically every single time you travel to a URL. It’s absolutely relentless, and it certainly doesn’t benefit creators 99.99% of the time.
TL;DR: framing this as people simply not wanting to watch ads is not fair at all.
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DDG is repackaged Bing. Used to be Yandex too but sanctions put an end to that.
We are significantly more than that at this point, including that we've been working on our own web index for the past two years (see https://insideduckduckgo.substack.com/p/duck-tales-why-duckd... ). But on top of that we don't get local results, knowledge graph, answers, sports, anything AI related, and many more essential modules from Bing, all of which collectively makes up a large % of the results at this point,…
DDG often has scam sites for example when you search for FMHY, https://fmhy.net comes up on all other search engines, but fmhy [.] click comes up on DDG.
Same with "anna's archive" returning the fake site annas-archive [.]io.
Google does not hate us... it is worse than that - it is indifferent to us. Hate requires some sort of recognition. I mean this single incident may not mean anything but overall google is heading to an _interesting_ place. In short, it was state of the art but in 20 years it became just another conglomerate sacrificing quality for shareholder gain, I think? As a search engine, it does not work for me. I see promoted…
The promoted links have gotten insane, the first 5-6 links often appear to be ads