This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Usual Microsoft, using shady tactics instead of creating a better product or just focusing on their own thing and respecting user choice. They should grow up sometime.
Don't care.
They can fuck with google for all I care.
Google is shady af
User: "Can we get Google?"
Microsoft: "But we already have Google at home!"
The Google at home: [reskinned Bing page]
The single thing Google did right when they first came out was a clean UI with a search bar on an uncluttered page.
At the time the competitors had search pages cluttered with ads and news. It was so bad you couldn't think.
If Microsoft makes their search nice to look at them it's going to get many more users
Microsoft does so many scammy things when it comes to trying to prevent people from using Chrome/Google. Even though Edge/Bing hasn't caught on, I really think them abusing windows dominate OS position this way should be enough for an antitrust lawsuit.
This is a search engine showing open evidence of skewing results away from true for their own motivations. Slightly comic when it is Microsoft doing it to Google but if they do this so blatantly how else are they more subtly redirecting our searches towards biased or even false results that benefit them and misinform the user.
The Yes Men have already done it.
We need to get back to real fucking culture jamming. Andy Bichlbaum you're our only hope!
Kind of fucked up but tbf Google does similarly shady stuff.
Please just use duckduckgo (or SearX).
SearX is dead; you should use SearXNG now.
I would use anything else before DDG, the primary function of it which is searching, generally feels sucky
I feel like Microsoft is way more shameless about their shady stuff. They've been messing around with impersonating google/chrome for awhile now, they recently had that thing where they would copy all your open chrome tabs, and then when you started your computer it would open edge with all your chrome tabs to trick people into using edge instead.
They aren't afraid of people complaining about them, they are afraid of the government, and they fulfill a hefty amount of contracts for the gov
I host my own SearXNG instance, which miiiight be a bit of a bad idea because the anonymity of the crowd disappears but hosting your own services is way too cool to ignore. It's at search.gregtech.eu in case anyone wants to use it.
So then you can track my searches?
I guess I could technically do that, but I really don't give a f what people search for on my searxng instance. Plus, Google and the likes have an incentive to use your searches for advertising and building a profile on you.
If people search for illegal content does that get you in trouble?
I mean, none of that content is on my server, and the search engines searxng indexes probably so their best to remove illegal stuff.
I really hope I don't get in trouble for anything, but I doubt I will. I have a grand Total of like 5 users.
You are in for a surprise, tomorrow you will have 7 users, you just got Lemmyed!
Hahha GregSearX I love it!
I’ve used searX in the past and found it was decent but personally I am going to stick with duckduckgo because it just works better for my needs (especially since I’m on mobile).
DDG is just Bing under the hood
And Searx is the same. And startpage is just google.
But the point is they don’t track.
DDG was letting Bing track users. They may have stopped now that they got in trouble for it.
Wait really?
Best I could find was this arstechnica article from 2022:
Microsoft trackers run afoul of DuckDuckGo, get added to blocklist: Search privacy company still needs Bing, but won't allow Microsoft's trackers. https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/08/microsoft-trackers-run-afoul-of-duckduckgo-get-added-to-blocklist/
Yeah that would be it:
Previously, we were limited in how we could apply our 3rd-Party Tracker Loading Protection on Microsoft tracking scripts due to a policy requirement related to our use of Bing as a source for our private search results
I couldn't remember the details exactly, but basically up until then they were allowing Microsoft tracking despite all their advertising claiming they wouldn't track users.
