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!
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
Actually true. They hooked me in the golden era of rewards points and I’ll be damned if it isn’t way better than Google now. Bing image search is especially great. Even their copilot thing (RIP Cortana) is useful.
Are you pulling my leg? I’ve been using ddg for a year and the image search is the worst part by far. I can almost never find what I’m looking for without crawling back to google images.
I tried to switch my primary search engine on Firefox to DDG yesterday when I heard the news. 3 searches later, I switched back. I don’t like Google, but damned if I’m not used to it.
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.
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.
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.
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).
You are not logged in. However you can subscribe from another Fediverse account, for example Lemmy or Mastodon. To do this, paste the following into the search field of your instance: !technology@lemmy.world
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
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.
ya, that kinda sucks. for me it shows both and i directly sick to search results, but Google search has gotten worse
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
Therefore bing > google
Actually true. They hooked me in the golden era of rewards points and I’ll be damned if it isn’t way better than Google now. Bing image search is especially great. Even their copilot thing (RIP Cortana) is useful.
Are you pulling my leg? I’ve been using ddg for a year and the image search is the worst part by far. I can almost never find what I’m looking for without crawling back to google images.
Regular search is OK tho
I tried to switch my primary search engine on Firefox to DDG yesterday when I heard the news. 3 searches later, I switched back. I don’t like Google, but damned if I’m not used to it.
I haven’t seen any AI results yet, wonder if you have to be logged in for that.
here’s my new favorite helen keller quote, courtesy of Google ai, haha
From the article …
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.
Anti Commercial-AI license (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0)
that’s “it thinks we’d want to buy”
They’ve gone for the money and are now finding out that cannabalizing search stops customers coming to their site.
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.
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.
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.
Dood… thanks for posting this. I’ve got some researching to do.
Props to Sponsorblock
Hells to the yeah
Spread the word - the more sponsorblockers the better!
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.
https://proton.me/easyswitch
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).