Another useful feature for power users that Google is killing.

They don’t care about us that day they we have a problem and the solution is in a now defunct site. That doesn’t generate revenue. “When People search on Google they need to find what they need on a click on the ads”, the shareholders are saying

  • ඞmir@lemmy.ml
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    9 months ago

    Another paid service that has no reason not to enshittify

    • friend_of_satan@lemmy.world
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      9 months ago

      What is the alternative if we need a searchable index of the internet? Self host? Participate in a community driven swarm? Is that possible or even feasible for us to do? I’d love to see such a thing. It would be quite interesting to learn about the architecture of it, especially ways that the tech prevents gaming the search results, but I have yet to see something like that.

      Or are you suggesting that internet search should be done by a non-profit or government agency that we fund with tax dollars? Even the internet archive struggles to stay alive.

      Edit: yay, no answers (ie: no alternatives to a for-profit company driven search engine), just angry downvotes, haha

      • pirat@lemmy.world
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        9 months ago

        If you figure out how to search “correctly” on SearXNG instances, some of them are pretty good (though they source part of their results from google). That’s how I search most of the time nowadays. I’ve found a favourite instance and a few backups. My most important advice is: to change the default language from “auto” to “en”, and only change it to some other locale for results specifically in that language/country.

    • gedaliyah@lemmy.world
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      9 months ago

      Honestly, I hope it’s around long enough. Right now it’s very good and rapidly improving. Enshittification by definition only happens when a service is large enough and successful enough. Until that happens, I’m going to keep using what for me is the best search option.

      Let’s face it. Search is a fundamental necessity of the internet. How many models can functionally work?

      • It could be free for the user, but supported by ads. We’ve seen how that works. Maybe it’s run its course.

      • It could be ad-free and paid for by users. The competitive incentive at least is to give users the best possible experience.

      • It could be entirely free and provided as a utility. Literally no one is asking for a government run Internet.

      • Maybe there’s some futuristic solution like an Open Source distributed network in which users run the search themselves. As far as I know nobody has come up with a search that doesn’t require a massive database with enormous costs.