I miss old mrwhosetheboss who was more technically knowledgeable. He was talking about android modifications like roms that he probably would never talk about today.
this post was submitted on 12 Oct 2024
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For the time being at least, there are options to still use the cleaner search results. For Firefox, this post walks through how to set it up: https://lemm.ee/post/42488635/14853159
I've been experiencing this, but only when I'm not logged in to my Google account. It seems that they're forcing people to log in so that the search results are less shitty.
Can anyone confirm this? Sounds like something exactly they would do for better data farming. All corps over last few years are offensive with browser tracking bullshit.
At this rate will demand a camera in your toilet to authenticate you every time you shit to ensure proper ad sense "fingerprint"
who's to say the little black sensor on the public toilets aren't already doing that?
For the same reason it became more popular than other search engines in 00s. Those would give honest search results, Google would have various kinds of complex foolery approaching ML to give people what they wanted quicker.
One can say their corporate culture shows signs of overfitting for that situation. And not just theirs. In general those attempts to make products more competitive with even more complex foolery outside of the main functionality - are that.
Except when products are simply less usable for said main functionality, people use them less even if they don't consciously realize that.
Also - what is Google in essence? It's saying that some computing thing is too smart for you to run it at home or self-host it. It can only be done by the very smart and important people in companies with trillions in capitalization. And because you can't, you are by some cultural taboo forbidden, to run it at home or self-host it, they get to manipulate results to make you give money to the people partnering with them.
We all know there's nothing fundamentally or practically impossible in making a search engine. If we don't have to cache pages, it's actually easy.
The issue is in the service requirements. What the Internet needs is a technically transparent p2p market of services. Where storage and computing power can be transparently donated (or sold) just like in some countries you can sell power to the electric grid.
OK, I've described the magic wand. That's the strategy. Tactics is for someone actually capable of conceiving the thing. LOL
When you go to search something and you literally have to type site:reddit.com at the end of it to get a human response it's no wonder it's falling apart
And reddit is locking shit up as we speak. These corpos about stole 30 years of the internet from us. There is not much recourse either they control pretty much all of the IP and infrastructure. So their way or highway.
Well there is fediverse for social media at least but it will long time to scale. Other sub sectors will probably need to explore similar models if people want to get away from being gang by 2-3 oligopolies in every market/service they need.
The search engine magic isn't just about caching pages. It's also extremely expensive / complex to:
- maintain an index of all the websites in the world. This is an extremely high cost
- refresh that index in almost real time. How long will your self hosted crawler take to find new content for every website in the world?
- there's also the algorithm for weighing results. The order of results and their relevance is not easy at all. How many times a word appears on a page is a terrible metric.
A hosted search is also a lot more environmentally friendly - that gigantic search index and all the energy poured into the work is something that can be shared by everyone. If everyone did that themselves at home, you spend that same amount of energy for every single household.
"Almost real time" is not what I'd call necessary.
Weighting results - I'd expect user feedback (good result, bad result, combined with keywords from the request) would be good enough. Similar to ed2k for files' reputation.
The index is going to be big, yes. But if we want a p2p system with split storage and computation, something between Freenet and Ceph, may be doable.
A hosted search is also a lot more environmentally friendly - that gigantic search index and all the energy poured into the work is something that can be shared by everyone. If everyone did that themselves at home, you spend that same amount of energy for every single household.
With some kind of such a p2p system I can imagine the overhead to be like 10 or maybe 100 times Google. But not what you said.
Because Enshittification
Because - and this is a real thing, despite how baffling and utterly, obviously insane it is - the guy who now heads the Google search team is the very same guy who drove Yahoo search into the ground.
This is insane. Idk what google is thinking.
Google: "Well surely, he couldn't tank TWO massive social media engines in one lifetime!"
Granted I’m jaded as fuck from only a decade and a half as a software engineer, but from where I’m standing, it’s pretty much all just c-suite circlejerking. Competent, incisive, effective, and ethical c-suite leadership that doesn’t focus primarily on finance matters is vanishingly rare these days.
I’m also a software engineer, but much earlier in my career and mostly having worked at small startups. But I hope some of the tech giants fall and make way for smaller players and innovation. But maybe that’s too optimistic.
I’ve got the same hope, buddy. It’s engineering; we solve problems. We just need to figure out how to unshackle ourselves from the hypercapitalists. Hopefully we can sort that out soon.
Don't think there's any new info in the video.
Thats subjective though...
New to who?
Sometimes I forget that google is a searching engine, I've been using DDG for years now! :)
I can't say I'm liking DDG. The first page gives me the same domain links. Like when I search for "eye washing gifs", the first three links is the same website. Where I'd expect it to give me three separate websites (and combine searches).
It does that for a few searches.
But then again, I'm not even liking Google.
DDG does have its issues like giving me random news articles from my area if it cant find anything relevant...
have you tried searchpage or searxng? i think they use google (while searxng also use other search engines) beyond the scenes.
I've been dogfooding Searxng for a week or so now and I'm sold on it over DDG and certainly over Google. Besides good results out of the box and being selfhosted so I have some search privacy (sorta), you can tune it to get better results for your particular situation.
Setup was a quick docker compose and env file, and then add it to FF with a rightclick on the URL bar to set it up in my search engines.
i am using a public instance right now, might host one in the future. its just been two days since i started using it and i am still trying to get accustomed to it.
The best thing about ddg is that I can click on any of the result links.
In google I have to skip like the first 3 rows because they are all tracking ads and my pihole blocks them 😁
Thanks for the suggestion. I've gotten fed up with trying to work with Google now. I've given up
Is Bing really that much better, though?
You can use a bang, !g , to get google results on ddg
That's just Google with extra steps
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