Google

Oh, that's kind of helpful. I can never remember what I had for dinner last night

And what your eyes are doing. I'll tell them about your eyeballsssss

I changed all of my browser search engines to this and it’s been great!

I've used DDG on and off for years but switched to it full time when google started pushing their AI bullshit.

The ONLY thing I miss is google maps when I search for a particular business or something - but pulling up maps when needed is just one extra step. No problem.

Yeah Duck Duck Go is my default on my browser at home.

I have also stumbled across alltheinternet.com and it has become my favorite. It feels like searching on Google 20 years ago, and I actually get unique, relevant results that Google and DDG don't always give me.

I mean, there's definitely a certain merit in helping to answer the question "Which service do I currently subscribe to that hosts the movies I want to watch?" I would go even further and suggest a digital tool that toggles subscriptions on/off based on the movie you want to watch tonight and its availability would be a helpful gadget.

But all of this is downwind of a digital service setup that is constantly shifting and hiding content behind different payment plans. And using the revenue from those plans to undermine public libraries, open source digital repositories, and a free globally accessible internet. That's the really annoying bit.

What's the current product half-life? 10 years before enshittification starts or something like that.

Yeah, for a while there was really good progress on search results serving up the things you're looking for, and not just by Google. I remember how impressed I used to be by the Amazon search engine. I could put a description of something that I didn't know the name of into the search box and the first result was usually what I wanted. I could sort by user rating and usually get the best one on top.

Now there are pages of sponsored products that keep getting shown if you keep scrolling. The search engine has become completely enshitified, and so many bots have created positive and negative reviews that the ratings are way less useful.

google was a perfect product.

No it wasn't. It was the best in a bad batch of half-conceived search engines. And this was only true for a relative window of time in the '10s, when they hadn't quite cornered the market on search and hadn't fully optimized how to maximize their ad revenues.

Google was a massive conflux of investor capital that produced a better-than-average set of tools as loss-leaders to hook you into their Walled Garden. Once you were inside the Walled Garden, what you discovered was Microsoft 2: Electric Boogaloo.

You can: https://udm14.com/

I've been using uBlock to get rid of it.
At some point the provided AI blocklist didn't work, but element picker took care of that fairly easily.

I certainly don't like putting up with it, and for the most part try to avoid it.

I just use my phone so I don't have to use a computer.

Results are okay, better than google by far. I found i have to block sites frequently to keep things relevant, but im no longer starting each search with an angry crash out dealing with the site and crappy results like i was with google/duckduck.

The date filter is also nice for finding recipes published before 2020.

Iv tried kagi twice. It was the most worthless fucking experience of a search engine iv ever seen. I rather use Yahoo.

Save the resources, use DDG instead

Is Brave actually blocking ads noe, and not just inserting their own?

Are they still installing crypto miners on people's computers?

It's not even the ads or ai. I don't get relevant results for anything remotely complex. It ignores like 2/3 of my search terms. I can even quote something verbatim and it won't even bring up the origin most times

I remember being able to find things much easier, especially when looking for older news articles.