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Every Google result now looks like an ad

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Re: Every Google result now looks like an ad

#912

I wonder - if there is a some economic theory that predicts, that in the end the only economic feasable solution for any company is to completely ruin there most important product and commit a sort of sepuku of trust.

maybe tech companies, but not any company.

coca-cola is still going strong. so is BNSF railway. so is McDonalds.

i mean, i could go on here with more counter examples if you want?

Re: Every Google result now looks like an ad

#913
post #347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Bing/DuckDuckGo have the article at around 7th or 8th place, You should take a closer look at DDG, it has the answer from serverfault.com in an instant answers box for your query and it highlights the required setting in a perfectly chosen excerpt from the correct answer: As of CentOS 7.2 tuned now has a no-daemon mode which can be turned on by setting daemon = 0 in /etc/tuned/tuned-main.conf. This is mentioned in…

Weird, I do not get that when running the query on DDG. Do you have the URL?

I can see the excerpt too. Try this:

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=centos+7+tuned+no+daemon&t=iphone&...

Re: Every Google result now looks like an ad

#914

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My Firefox install has seven search engines by default in the "one-click search engine" options. By contrast, DuckDuckGo has 13000 bang shortcuts. Sure, you don't need all of them, but I use dozens: some of them almost daily (like !w for Wikipedia and !wt for Wiktionary), some sporadically (like !tw for Twitter or !a for Amazon) and some of them only rarely (e.g. I picked up a Pokémon game recently and consequently h…

Firefox is a little lacking in that department. Chromium based browsers on the other hand, anytime a search is used on a page, that gets added to the list in your browser's options. For example, just used HN's search bar, and there it showed up in the options ready to customise keywords to my liking (if I wanted to change it). Before anybody claims it's an additional step, it's not. DDG requires you to know what the…

In chrome you also just start typing the name of the site, until it autocompletes and then hit tab.

For example if I want to want search wikipedia, I type "en.w" and hit tab.

Re: Every Google result now looks like an ad

#916

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which is complete fucking bullshit. It's driving me mental that when I search for something, Wikipedia usually isn't on the front page. It's almost always the best result for most things, it should be on top.

Shouldn't you then just go to wikipedia and search there ? You know to stop the "F * bullshit" and "save your mental state" ?

Wait, what?

Google used to put the Wiki article right at the top of the results list. It virtually never does that anymore. This is what's bullshit.

The point of a good search engine is that it is supposed to conglomerate good results, relevant results - let's say I'm looking up 'Phillip J. Fry' from 'Futurama', but I still want wiki information. Wikipedia won't even spellcheck for you if you don't know how to spell something correctly, like a city name.

If I use a search engine, I'll get this Wikipedia result: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_J._Fry

But I will also get the far more informative Futurama-wiki result: https://futurama.fandom.com/wiki/Philip_J._Fry

Wikipedia is not a search engine. Although, at this point, Google is barely one, so plastered with sponsored results it can be hard to find the result you're looking for, and with this change, I've finally made the long-needed jump to DuckDuckGo.

Yes, it's time to 'stop the fucking bullshit', and save all our mental states - searching Wiki isn't going to solve that - but not using Google can help. ;)

Comparing a search engine to wikipedia search is like comparing a search engine to a local file search.

If you're looking for a specific driver on your computer that you know the exact spelling and version number of, a local file search will help you find that. A search engine will return many results with download links as well as potentially other drivers, or other versions of drivers for your product - and will generally forgive you if you misspell something.

Re: Every Google result now looks like an ad

#917

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My employer just banned Firefox. Unless you theoretically have a "business reason" that they accept.

How do they enforce this? For that matter, why do they care?

Not unheard of on enterprise distributed machines. Before I was an engineer all my jobs were like this - two dudes (the only ones not in suits) tucked away in a dark room, changing our passwords for us when we forgot, setting up our email accounts, tweaking an internal firewall (so we couldn't watch nba games at work lol), shit like that. Machines were locked down, we couldn't install anything at all, they had to install it for us.

Re: Every Google result now looks like an ad

#918
post #418

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you (or anyone else) have any recommendations for an email service? I've cut pretty much everything Google out of my life, minus Gmail, mostly due to not wanting to go through all the trouble of transferring everything over to a service that I end up not liking. I've heard ProtonMail is good, but other than that, I'm not sure.

I'm leaning toward Tutanota, but I can't claim to have experience with them yet. Proton has appeared somewhat bumpy to me -- I can't say for sure why, but they give me some spidey tingles. Migrating / transferring is indeed a problem. I would suggest using Google Takeout, their data export tool, and permanently archiving your data with a third party service and / or physical backups. See https://takeout.google.com/ .…

Thanks for this, I didn't realize you can actually export all your data from Google.

Re: Every Google result now looks like an ad

#919

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I posted the solution below, Sorry to be "that guy" but for me the solution is to use DuckDuckGo. It's not perfect, but neither is trying to play arms race with Google's JavaScript.

I think I agree. Google still seems like my first choice mentally, but I used ddg a lot more as first search lately ( past month or so ). It is getting more and more annoying getting workarounds for everything though. It is more annoying, because I liked G layout, default colors snd so on. It was cleaner. Now not only is their search quality getting worse ( I got what I asked for on bing of all places ), their presen…

I wish google would enable infinite scroll like DDG. Internet search results are of the few times it is more user friendly than pagination.

Just being able to keep scrolling and seeing more results is very helpful. I guess it increases the value of the "first page" for Google.

Re: Every Google result now looks like an ad

#920

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Greasemonkey could also be used to remove the adds not just restyle them.

I guess, but what would be the point? Are there really people who are fine blocking ads on Google, but are not OK just letting Gorhill/EasyList handle the implementation? Bear in mind, there are a lot of other sites beyond just Google where you should probably be blocking ads. Do you really want to deal with the performance/maintenance costs of Greasemonkey on every one of them? Just install an adblocker already and…

I guess I would be one of those people - my reasoning being that I don't mind ads that much but in this case the google changes are pissing me off. Many media organizations are not doing to well, the do ads which is maybe not smart but that's how they pay for it. Google is doing very well, what they have already pays their bills and makes them rich, but they want to lessen the experience of their users to get richer.

So in this one case I'm the kind of guy who would like to block ads on Google and nowhere else currently. (Also if I install an ad-blocker I am at the mercy of the ad-blocker not reaching a deal with one of the richest companies in the world to let their content through because it's ok)

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