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- cross-posted to:
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but that I have to wait for all the crap I don’t want in the first place.
It comes down to Google telling us what it thinks we’d want, vs giving us what we actually ask for, and the time wasted doing so.
That, and probably punishing people who use ad blockers.
in this situation the search engine DuckDuckGo is better than Google because it has an opt-in for a.i.
https://duckduckgo.com/DDG is just Bing
Then Bing it is. I switched on my daily machine and DDG has been ok. Still a lot of sponsored shit I don’t need, but better than getting a solid lie from Google
You can disable the sponsored results in the settings of DDG.
It is better Bing
It’s Bing in a private browsing window.
No it isn’t. Just because most of the results come from Bing does not not mean that it is Bing. Bing is awful and DDG is useful.
Last time I ran a side-by-side test, DDG results were identical to Bing in a private browsing session.
That’s the results only though.
That’s often what I’m looking for from a search engine
ya, that kinda sucks. for me it shows both and i directly sick to search results, but Google search has gotten worse
Hoping to phase Google products out of my life. I think the challenge will be YouTube. Hopefully Rumble becomes more popular and has as good if not better features than YouTube.
For me it’s gmail. I’ve disconnected from everything else, but I have WAY TOO MANY things connected to and through my gmail account.
Its pretty easy to just redirect Gmail‘s messages to a new account. Some providers even allow you to import previous emails. My switch to Protonmail was incredibly smooth.
During Covid, I did some digital cleaning. It took me around a month (from couple of minutes, up to few hours each day) to clean up my gmail inbox. I had a gmail label where I placed all the emails received from any site where I created an account. I went one by one to each of them and either changed the login (to a non gmail address), or deleted an account (if I wasn’t using it anymore).
Now I use another email provider, and i pay for it. I use gmail for situations/accounts where i suspect that my email address could be spammed. Right now, my whole google space usage is around 50 mb. I stopped using google drive, I don’t use google search, I still use YouTube and pay to have no ads - because I just like YouTube.
It’s possible to disconnect oneself from Google services as much as one wants. Still, I continue to use an android phone (I like iOS, but it’s still too limited in comparison to Android).
If it’s any comfort I’ve spent about a year getting away from Gmail and I can report it is in fact doable.
Finding another email service and using a domain of my own with it was the easy part. The hard part was painstakingly replacing my address everywhere I was using it with new addresses.
Way more doable than YouTube, which I don’t foresee being replicated any time soon.
You can also forward emails from your old Gmail to your new email as a bridge to ensure you don’t miss anything.
I would not forward anything from GMail to another email provider. Google is intrusive. They have no reason to know anything about my new email address. But I’m overreacting and that’s okay.
Just use an alias, it’s anyway a good idea to find a provider that lets you create unique aliases for each account.
You can ditch YouTube,
without actually ditching YouTube content,
through a privacy respecting alternative frontend:
https://www.privacyguides.org/en/frontends/#youtubeMy favorite ones:
- Desktop: Invidious + Piped
- Android: Newpipe + Tubular
Google is required to send you a CSV of your YouTube subscriptions upon request.
If you have an Android phone, once you have said CSV file, you can upload it into the Newpipe Application and voila, watch YouTube without visiting YouTube (or supporting the creators, but that’s an aside to this topic). Sadly I know of no way of doing something similar on iPhone.
On desktop/tablet, you can always use Invidious. This is especially useful when combined with the tool yt-dlp and sponsorblock. If you use an RSS reader, you can “subscribe” to YouTube channels that way, and use redirection extensions to redirect you from YouTube to invidious, after that you can use yt-dlp with a sponsor block flag to download the video directly to your desktop, and watch it in whatever quality you want, with subtitles if you want, and have all mentions of sponsors cut out, and of course, no ads.
Obviously, this is too much work for most, but this is what I do to not visit YouTube while still watching their content, which is simply more plentiful and, IMHO, higher quality than what you find on other platforms (save for possibly Nebula).
Rumble is just a bunch of Nazis from what I’ve seen, so fuck them and their shitty platform.
Personally love Piped and the LibreTube app. I’m using the smnz.de instance for steaming and adminforge.de for authentication. Been super stable over the last few months. AFAIK Piped acts as a proxy between you and the yt servers so they have no chance to gather data about you. Not sure invidious works the same.
here’s my new favorite helen keller quote, courtesy of Google ai, haha
Deliberate vandalism of the commons needs to actually be made illegal. This would include the entire field of “search engine optimization” which is simply a misnomer made of weasel words, which actually mean they’ll hide the results you want behind an ever increasing amount of plain old grifter-ass crap sold by the same three old assholes who bought everything and think that means it’s actually theirs, even as they dilute the concept of ownership for the rest of us.
The whole idea needs to die.
In a similar vein, I was trying to find something on Facebook (yeah, I know, but it was a funny work thing) today and went to use the search function to look for the FB page in question (searched the exact name) and if you just hit enter the new AI assumes you’re asking it a question. It’s FB! It’s not a search engine! Why is it trying to give me a phone number for the police department I’m looking up to see their insane post?! I want to see the page! The page with the name I searched! On the app I searched in! Now you have to click a separate button that specifies you’re looking to search through FB… In the FB app!
This AI crap is already k.i.l.l.i.n.g. me.
I haven’t seen any AI results yet, wonder if you have to be logged in for that.
While I agree with everything said, using Google to find out how many episodes your own podcast has just seems a bit lazy. Bookmark the page, and next time you want to do your admin work you can follow the bookmarks and be done with it. Easy fix.
Also, use DDG
Been using DuckDuckGo for a long time but I recently trialed Kagi and have been quite impressed! It’s not free but hopefully it keeps the enshittification away for a bit longer.
