Interesting, I remember a lot of people switching from Google and even seeing billboard ads for DDG. Even Ecosia, the site I use myself, is just returning Bing results (which are somewhat less ideologically curated compared to Google results). I don't like Bing either (Microsoft are a criminal enterprise). Has anyone used another search engine to recommend for privacy and good social values?
i think this is low key wrecking minds. our brains are being SEO'd. it becomes harder to refer to a thing itself, and instead, it's now whatever is boosted by the algo
also, shit, i made a bad choice many years ago. i stopped focusing on memorizing things because i could always just google it
Idk if this is just me, but I feel like there was also a transitional period post-2012 where I'd put "quotation marks" around every word to make sure it didn't ignore it. But even that doesn't fucking work anymore.
Yeah a couple of years ago Google stopped recognizing search operators like quotation marks,
AND,NOT, etc.EDIT: I may be wrong about this, haven't used Google in a while
Wait really? No wonder its got really shit for me too. feels bad man, just want classic google back.
So I just checked and apparently the
-and quotation mark operators are still supposed to work. I wouldn't be surprised if Google does its natural language fuckery anyway though.
i made a bad choice many years ago. i stopped focusing on memorizing things because i could always just google it
I think this is a documented shift in the psychology of a lot of young people who grew up with the internet. People use their brainpower to remember where and how to find things rather than remembering things directly. It's not necessarily a bad thing, since it's more efficient overall I think.
Of course, it is kind of a bad thing when a lot of human knowledge starts to depend on the existence of a dozen major websites
i made a bad choice many years ago. i stopped focusing on memorizing things because i could always just google it
unless it's on your hard drive, and backed up, it doesn't exist
It's because of "search engine optimisation", where people sort of "game" the algorithms to get their website featured higher in Google results (in particular, Google SEO is the most well-known).
The top Google results for most images are from Pinterest and require an account to view them full size. I've heard "they are good at SEO" as an explanation, but I think Google would rather boost Pinterest to further the goal of a closed internet.
the worst is pornhub. Sometime around 2018 their search function because babby's first programming project
yea I know volcel yadda yadda
Same here. A search I did last night, in fact: "best mecha tabletop game" returned a bunch of clickbaity articles that were mostly useless - but "best mecha tabletop game reddit" linked me a bunch of threads of people talking about and linking to what I was looking for that were way more informative.
reddit is effectively the new google. It's the best low-tech/accessible way to see what people actually talk about, and to see what those people are like.
Yeah I hate this shit and I don't know how to fix it. It seems like the last 2 years it has become especially bad. You really can't find shit any more.
Yeah and it's always half-irrelevant articles and blogs and never any primary sources or actual discussion.
it’s honestly easier to just amend every search with “reddit” at the end
yeah I do the same with "forum" a lot of times to find actual discussion
I recently realised you can create your own bangs aka search keywords in firefox. Here's how.
Kind of a tangent, but the article links to a "privacy focused" browser called Epic.
Why tf do all these "privacy" browsers use Chromium? Yeah, let's get away from Google by switching to... a Google project.
Chromium gives good compatibility, and you can scrape off all of the google shit that normally comes with it.
I agree. The most popular browsers are either Google-based or Firefox-based even if not branded as such.
And Mozilla recently came out in support of greater capacity for censorship through the browser, justifying it as opposition to Trump.
Here's Wikipedia's list of browsers. It appears there are some open-source alternatives. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_web_browsers
One concerning thing is DRM being built into the browser standards. https://www.defectivebydesign.org/drm-in-web-standards
Which would conceivably reduce the functionality of open-source or free software browsers.
There are effectively only 3 remaining webengines and two of them are nearing their death beds. Blink, gecko, and webkit.
Blink is of course the backend for chrome and all of the browsers based on chrome (chromium, opera, brave, epic, edge, vivaldi, qutebrowser, and so on).
Gecko is the backend for firefox and pretty much JUST firefox. There are some browsers like icecat and waterfox which are older forks of firefox on life support with a few features added. Mozilla was developing a new rendering engine a few years ago which was very promising and was being used to modernize and replace large portions of gecko and hopefully allow for some new independent browsers to appear. Unfortunately, Mozilla fired that whole team and is rapidly spiraling out of relevance.
https://drewdevault.com/2020/10/22/Firefox-the-embarassment-of-FOSS.html
https://calpaterson.com/mozilla.html
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2020/08/firefox-maker-mozilla-lays-off-250-workers-says-covid-19-lowered-revenue/The last one is webkit which was started a long time ago by the KDE developers, but today it only really exists as a fork powering safari and the ios browsers. Blink is actually also a fork of webkit and the only real reason we have more browsers than JUST chrome, firefox, and safari today is because those KDE devs were wise enough to license their work under the GPL. The situation is a bit more hopeful than gecko, but webkit is essentially only maintained and developed by apple. It's very hard to implement and even when implemented perfectly will struggle to play videos or render most complicated websites (apple doesn't quite release everything or make it easy to use).
The remaining stuff on that wikipedia page are text only browsers and graphical browsers so old they can't render this site. At this point there's really no hope for http/html. Our only hope is to abandon the corporate internet and leave it for shopping sites, major social media, and other garbage. Projects like gemini and ipfs are neat attempts at this. Course you can't solve political issues with tech solutions so we still need to fix the things that led to our internet being taken over by capitalists.
Internet security stuff makes me lightweight nihilistic. Do your best to protect your privacy but at the end of the day, if you're using windows, if you're using a major email provider, if you're using almost any large browser, even Firefox, well, eventually your shit is not as private as you think it is.
The thing that gets me how easily a person can actually be canceled by large platforms like Google. If you use google and your email gets banned SOMEHOW, well everything you've attached to that account, bank accounts, social media, documents, fucking you name it just became the biggest nightmare
True. I agree. If the software is too well-known, ie Firefox, it is targeted by more hackers due to a larger number of targets. If it is too small, it is more likely to have code that is not as well-reviewed and patched, or could even be malicious.
Your second point was really good, because of the use of single-sign on by a variety of services. But yes. Better to have your own domain and email hosting (ideally from 2 providers).
Not to mention if you're using something really obscure, it gets really easy to fingerprint you.
Well but what search engine is recommended? The article mentions searxes but it's gone. Other than DDG I like startpage but it's not as good. Any other recommendations?
You're right. Anyhow, results are not skewed according to what google assumes your interests are and your data stays private.
All of the actually private search engines are basically terrible
I reccomend searx, it aggregates a bunch of search engines (including individual websites searches and lets you pick and choose what you want. You just have to find an instance you trust and is fast or you can host your own.
A question I've had for a while is, does hosting your own searx instance do any good if you're hosting it out of your home connection? Wouldn't all those queries still show up from your ip address?
yeah hosting it yourself and for yourself only isn't going to do you any good. It's strength is in a lot of people using it at once so that it muddles anything any one person is doing (sorry if that's a poor explanation im tired rn)
Yeah that makes sense. Basically you want to generate lots of garbage data that isn't attributable to any one user.
Goddamn I tried to use Ecosia for YEARS, but the results are dogshit and they make money from ads, which I block, so I don't even know if using it was doing any good.
There is these articles too: https://search.slashdot.org/story/13/07/14/0046257/duckduckgo-illusion-of-privacy https://steemit.com/technology/@kevinsarpei/the-truth-about-duckduckgo
My brains broke, every time I see DDG i have to double take.
I never switch to duck, i’d been using google for so many years already they could probably find me again by my old habits.
in 25 000 years from now, yacy will be any good and we will be free from corporate overlord on search engine
