I don't think it's possible to convince people that viable alternatives exist. I've been aware of them for years, and never considered using them once. They have the stigma of just being not as good. Having more search engines does nothing if nobody will use them-- Google's hegemony remains if there's n or 100n other search engines, if none of them can provide quality results reliably.
The world needs more search engines
351–360 of 549 posts
Re: The world needs more search engines
#352How do I make this my default search engine as for when I type something into my address bar like I can with Google, Bing, or DDG?
Re: The world needs more search engines
#353Google's dominance is almost entirely due to the fact that its by far the best at search. I use ddg, but I use google search via !g about 25-50% of the time after a failed attempts. And 9 times out of 10 Google gives me exactly what I'm looking for. For instance: "the actor that plays the news guy in spiderman" ddg: Tom Holland (side bar) Spider-Man Homecoming (imdb) Tom Holland (wiki) Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Ver…
> Google's dominance is almost entirely due to the fact that its by far the best at search.
Yeah, and due to economies of scale and network effects it will stay that way, unless some people are willing to suffer the minor inconvenience of using a slightly inferior competitor.
Re: The world needs more search engines
#354Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are other ways to fingerprint users, though if Google is using them they’re certainly not making it obvious by allowing users in incognito mode the ability to sign in to their associated account.
"fingerprinting" is a catch-all term, so I'm not sure what you're saying with "there are other ways to fingerprint users".
I’m using it as “(ab)using metadata to associate activity with users in a nonobvious or undesirable way”.
Re: The world needs more search engines
#355It is impressive what they built. The results are quite good! The UI shows innovative elements like trackers used on the page. I see two problems with their approach: 1. The product is not built with the 'grandma test' mindset. More sliders and widgets is not what your grandma wants in a search engine. This is why building a search engine is hard. You have to guess with very little information what the user wants and…
The article says: > One could rightfully counter that Google has a good product. They even offer it for free. But Google Ads are not free. If Search is the product, then advertisers are the customers, not users.
Yes. Google has a superior product riding on top of a corrupting business model that cannot help but mis align Google's interests with those of the users they are claiming to serve. Google should unbundle the current business model from the technology and also offer clean, unbiased, private search service that is paid by the user on a subscription basis. I would jump on the chance to pay say $10 a month for Google quality search if I knew my search was private and the results were not influenced by outside parties.
Re: The world needs more search engines
#356I don't think it's possible to convince people that viable alternatives exist. I've been aware of them for years, and never considered using them once. They have the stigma of just being not as good. Having more search engines does nothing if nobody will use them-- Google's hegemony remains if there's n or 100n other search engines, if none of them can provide quality results reliably.
Did that stigma not exist for IBM? Microsoft? Oracle? If the crux of Google is an outdated reputation they'll have to invest more and more to maintain it until it consumes them and somebody else steps up.
Re: The world needs more search engines
#357Google does everything it can to either have the first click or second click result in a paid event. Videos and related searches are clear examples of the abuse.
True content is buried or listed in a row or two out of 10 plus results.
Mobile is even more flagrant. Inswitch engines, just to get a less mainstream and digested view of my queries.
Re: The world needs more search engines
#358Google's dominance is almost entirely due to the fact that its by far the best at search. I use ddg, but I use google search via !g about 25-50% of the time after a failed attempts. And 9 times out of 10 Google gives me exactly what I'm looking for. For instance: "the actor that plays the news guy in spiderman" ddg: Tom Holland (side bar) Spider-Man Homecoming (imdb) Tom Holland (wiki) Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Ver…
> And the results were made in incognito mode so Google wasn't able to cheat with privileged information about me as a user. that's not what Incognito mode does. It prevents your search from being included in the browsing history and doesn't send cookies from active sessions, but that's about it. Google still knows this is you being unauthenticated. You don't need to be logged into google to be reliably targeted with…
This comment and everything downstream from it are a distraction from their point: Run their query from your machine or from Tor and you'll see the same results in Google and lack of results in DDG.
Another example is a query for "elm dict". DDG has little idea what you're looking for while Google links you directly to the docs of Elm's Dict data-structure.
Re: The world needs more search engines
#359Side note: > In the TV world, this would be the equivalent of 100 different channels, but they all show Fox News 24 hours a day and just replace the logo. This clearly cannot be good. Unfortunately that's already happening, just look at Sinclair [0]. They operate 193 different TV news stations covering 40% of US households and syndicate very similar content between stations (with the same political biases, just diffe…
How much of that is syndication (using the same news stories in different local markets) vs whatever you would call having two channels in the same market with the same content, but trying to market themselves as different?
Re: The world needs more search engines
#360Google's dominance is almost entirely due to the fact that its by far the best at search. I use ddg, but I use google search via !g about 25-50% of the time after a failed attempts. And 9 times out of 10 Google gives me exactly what I'm looking for. For instance: "the actor that plays the news guy in spiderman" ddg: Tom Holland (side bar) Spider-Man Homecoming (imdb) Tom Holland (wiki) Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Ver…
Google's dominance is almost entirely due to the fact that its by far the best at search.
But is it? I find myself often having to fight it to search for what I entered into the box, rather than what it thinks I really meant. If you know what you want just not where it is, DDG and Bing are both superior.