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A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.
Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.
In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.
Some Rules
- Posting a link to a website containing tracking isn’t great, if contents of the website are behind a paywall maybe copy them into the post
- Don’t promote proprietary software
- Try to keep things on topic
- If you have a question, please try searching for previous discussions, maybe it has already been answered
- Reposts are fine, but should have at least a couple of weeks in between so that the post can reach a new audience
- Be nice :)
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Just 5 minutes ago, tried to google search a topic, got instead a blank white page saying we don’t recognize your phone traffic, please complete this capcha to prove you’re not a robot.
I don’tknow, I don’t use Google search since many Years. The nearest I used are Startpage and Whoogle, but currently Andisearch, Mojeek, AstianGo and sometimes MetaGer. Apart of this only specific ones (Wiki, WolphramAlpha, Images, Forums…)
Google sucks and I think there business is starting to be in trouble
Google is an ad company first, and as long as that gravy train is flowing they’ll be fine. Their dominance as a search engine is just to maintain their monopoly on internet ads, not give customers a good searching experience, hence why sponsored links are the first thing to appear and count as a view in their analytics
The problem with the ad business is that the ads have become so bad that people use ad blockers.
Feels worse than what exactly? Than google search N years ago?
Every alternative I tried is objectively worse than google search, instead of writing these cope articles, why doesn’t someone make a search that’s objectively better than google search instead?
Google used to be better. Lately though, I really am noticing a decline in search quality.
I’ve found that DDG is better in terms if results
The internet is getting worse is what I would agree on.
We’re all clamoring to see your version. I’m sure it’s great
This guy gesticulates with one hand for a couple of seconds, then grabs the microphone with that hand and then gesticulates the exact same way with the other hand and just keeps doing that for the entire twelve minute video.
Once I noticed it became almost impossible to keep paying attention to what he was saying.
He had a point until he mentioned Reddit. While it used to be true that it had really detailed answers to specific questions, who knows how long that will remain the case with all their changes.
Try out SearXING (https://paulgo.io/) where you can edit preferences on what it crawls.
Because the entire internet is one big Amazon link back. I’m not even joking. Ran DDG earlier on a dvd burner model and the first two pages were Amazon links. The next were other competing stores. WTF.
But I mean we gated it all behind like 3 companies. Can’t believe it didn’t turn out good.
Especially ironic since DDG is just Bing under the hood.
Kagi.com has been working really well for me. Sure it’s paid, but I am glad to no longer be dealing with google.
+1 for Kagi. I don’t mind paying for things that have value.
Google search quality has been declining since they took away the plus operator
Ya it’s such crap results nowadays. What do you guys use for your default search engine? I like ddg.
I’m using ddg. It used to be noticeably worse than google; now Google is noticeably worse than ddg.
I selfhost a SearXNG instance in my homelab. It aggregates results from multiple sites, works without JavaScript and filters out all tracking, AMP bullshit and so on.
It is important to run it at home, Google tends to blacklist VPS address ranges, and if you have a public instance, you’ll get rate limited quite fast.
I did that a while ago but always ran in timeouts for some search engines (varied from time to time). Also the order of search results is often completely fucked up. And sometimes I search for something and got something completely different. For example I searched for something like “open source software” and the search results were filled with porn lol.
Also what’s bad about self hosting this in your home network is that your SearXNG instance does the searches from your home network of course. That means all the searches to all the selected search engines like Google, Bing etc. are made from your IP which is counterproductive when it’s privacy you’re trying to achieve.
Whoaw! Neato! Dos it cost anything to self host?
A spare computer (e.g. a rpi), tailscale (free) and a bit of time to set up.
Sounds like a fun project. That’s really cool sounding. Thx
I did a ton of homelab stuff this weekend, planning to write everything down eventually and publish it somewhere…
I hope you do! Can you pls add a link to this comment chain if or when you do. Id be interested in learning more.
DDG used to use Google and is now Bing on the backend.
Did not know that. Much obliged.
Kagi is great but it’s a subscription based platform ($10/month). Well worth it, at least for me.
I guess with meta(sh*t) trying to extort their user base for a monthly subscription service fee just for privacy in the eu, paying for a search engine could make sense…
Much obliged, i shall take a look at this kagi.
+1 for kagi. I think they have a smaller subscription too. Also not too long ago they changed the 10$ subscription from 700 searches/month to unlimited, which gives hope that they might improve the pricing over time.
As a side note, it is surprising how many searches one does during the month! I thought I did thousands per month, turns out I am always between 200 and 400!
It was surprising for me how many searches I do in the opposite way. Thought I did hundreds per month, ended up being between 2,000 and 3,000.
I am one of those people who constantly thinks of questions and looks it up. Which makes me think of another question.
With Kagi I can actually find the answer though. On Google I could do several searches and still not find anything besides ads and ai generated fake content.
Yup, they have a $5 monthly plan as well which I utilize.
Thx I’ll look into.
Edit: I’m not to familiar yet with Lemmy, so I hope that this thank you comment reach’s everyone that replied. Appreciate the knowledge sharing.
I kinda like Brave’s search
But how can you trust anything brave says? Fool me once, shame on you, full me twice, shame on me, try and fool me thrice…nah, the joke is you > bravebrowser…
I thought this place is to get away from imperialist capitalism big tech privacy violators and abusers.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://piped.video/watch?v=RZiZZpm1bjs&list=WL&index=15
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
The irony is so thicc