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Everything that's wrong with Google Search in one image

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Re: Everything that's wrong with Google Search in one image

#681

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> How are buybacks defrauding anyone? Mr Doctorow's point is that the company is taking money from its operations, which it should be spending on expanding those operations and increasing its value, and spending that money on artificially inflating its share price, by effectively wash trading the shares, creating artificial demand, and artificially reducing supply. If you bought shares in the company as a long-term p…

I can tell why Mr. Docotorow is a sci-fi author and not a finance guy. This is like listening to RFK talk about medicine.

By comparison, Neal Stephenson is much better about this stuff. His Baroque cycle is a treat.

Re: Everything that's wrong with Google Search in one image

#682
post #581
post #375

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Much of Linux is provided by for-profit entities.

Which doesn't matter, precisely because those entities have no ownership over Linux and thus no ability to enshittify the product.

Eh, I heard lots of complaints from the Xen folks that the prevalence of RedHat in the kernel development community leads to double standards that makes their favourite product (KVM) get nicer and quicker reviews than the Xen related changes.

(I used to work with the Xen folks.)

Re: Everything that's wrong with Google Search in one image

#683
post #524

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As a user, I'm still baffled that the interface to view and manage the apps I have installed on the system - which is 90 out of 100 times why I'm opening the play store - is tucked away in some obscure corner of the app. The other 10 times, it's because I want to install some specific app that I already know and I just want to get to the page of that exact app - either through a direct link or through the store's sea…

As an aside, am I the only one who has problems finding the Play Store icon amidst the various Google tools? All these icons look the same. They're basically all red/green/yellow/blue.

I swear I am basically icon blind at this point over the course of years and thousands of icons across a handful of operating systems

Re: Everything that's wrong with Google Search in one image

#684

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The trademark infringement is when their ad includes someone else's trademark. Look at the screenshot in this post. All four of the ads at the top of the search results include the trademarked name "Midjourney" in the title of the ad. This is more like putting up a giant sign outside of your Honda dealership saying "Best deals on new VWs!" but when you pull in they don't sell VWs, they sell their own competing produc…

Some players circumvent this by creating "blog posts" where they compare/about multiple tools. Like it is a fair use but in reality is an ad in disguise.

Oh right. thats quite common! Pretty sneaky if you ask me

Re: Everything that's wrong with Google Search in one image

#685
post #32

They still get away with it as ‘only’ 1% complain and Google thinks they don’t matter. We built our entire company for that 1%.

How is Kagi for non-US folks? I've tried switching to DDG a while back but the experience for me, living outside the US, was not great. Sure, programming related searches were pretty good, but everything else was not. Does Kagi have a better localized experience?

Native Asian, bouncing between Taiwan and Japan. Kagi works quite well for these two locales. Even for gov docs, medical docs, and for some rather obscure Taiwanese language things.

Well, except for local shops and pois in Taiwan. Which is reasonable. Google map also sucks for less-populated Taiwanese areas. I kind of have to rely on my good old legs for that.

Re: Everything that's wrong with Google Search in one image

#686
post #373

One of my "sales pitches" is "I can find answers online, I know kung-fu". I've been using internet since '98, and I somehow developed this elusive skill of knowing how to navigate all these ads, seo farms, paid content, murky websites, and getting straight to the answer, no matter what the question was. For a long time I didn't thought of that as a special power. I thought it was natural, like driving a car, or speak…

Is Perplexity, as a business, sustainable? I'm skeptical of these "AI search is better than web search" claims. Not because it's not true, but because of how wildly subsidized these AI things are. Web search doesn't suck because it's an impossible problem, web search sucks because it has to be profitable, and the profitability comes from making it suck. That's not true today for AI tools, but it will be in a few year…

> web search sucks because it has to be profitable, and the profitability comes from making it suck. That's not true today for AI tools, but it will be in a few years.

Many people pay to use _AI tools_, that already brings in revenue. I had chatgpt plus since very early days, which was 20$/month, I don't have it at the moment because my company provides pro plan to me (and every other engineer) which is probably around 200$/month/user.

Of course, serving a single inference on LLM's probably costs a lot more than a serving a single search on google, but they've already got a solid business model and they won't need intrusive adds _in a few years_ (if at all)

Re: Everything that's wrong with Google Search in one image

#687
post #58

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You also should just stop using Google Search. DuckDuckGo is solid, or if you don't want to use search results from Bing's index, I've been very happy with Brave Search.

people say that but they often come back to Google ;) I've just learnt to use ad blockers. the only time I disable it is when I look up the definition of something or the location of a place and the entire page goes blank because of some rules I've added to uBlock.

I haven't used Google (apart from their as-of-yet undefeated image search, the occasional hard link from a web page, and the two times I tried the Circle to Search feature) for at least five years now and I have zero interest in going back.

Re: Everything that's wrong with Google Search in one image

#688

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Yup. For reference, on Android your best bet is to install Firefox + uBlock Origin. On iOS, I believe Kagi's Orion has built-in content blockers but you can also install uBlock Origin [1]. [1] https://help.kagi.com/orion/browser-extensions/ublock-origin...

Brave is excellent on Android. I watch YouTube all the time with literally zero ads ever.

Brave is a series scam company.

Re: Everything that's wrong with Google Search in one image

#689
post #654

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America is nearly as bad as Russia. Dollars paid to American companies are taxed and used to bomb children in Gaza. Are you boycotting all American companies?

From my point of view United States, all things considered, is not nearly as bad as Russia. I do not boycott all American companies but I do boycott some.

Also, funding Russia directly funds their WW3 in Ukraine. (As does Trump, but in a less efficient way.)

Re: Everything that's wrong with Google Search in one image

#690
post #318

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In hindsight, we should have known this would happen eventually. At this point, we have to be actively be against free services. Every time its just a ticking time bomb. There's literally no incentive for them to be an actual good service, just good enough that you tolerate it and not consider other options, but shit enough that they can extract value out of you.

Yeah agree 100% - this is why I’m a happy kagi customer It’s kind of cool being treated like a customer New feature releases aren’t about ad placement or SEO or personalization / tracking Instead, their product updates are targeted at me - cool nifty features that I can immediately try out Like kagi or not, just the feeling of having devs care about my actual personal experience is a breath of fresh air I know not ev…

This. Please can we go back to the days where I simply pay for services or items instead of being trapped inside a maze of buy now pay later, credits, coupons, bonuses, gifts, tiers, etc

I am sure there have never been such a time, but I long for it anyway.

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