Capitalism cannot allow good. Good is not profitable. We must extract, squeeze, enshittify until the very end.
I’d argue ddg is good and they area product of capatalism. Nobody is forcing you to use google
DDG is just Bing in disguise. It's nowhere near as good as google used to be back in last century.
I use it and I have no problems at all. Would say it’s on the same level, but the ai searches are actual relevant and tasteful unlike google
Anyone using ai searches is automatically un trustable to me. Ive never once needed it and ive corrected many stupid people asking ai things and suddenly thinking they are smart on a subject that I'm actually knowledgeable in because I actually read and use my brain.
Kagi is maybe one aspect of capitalism that works. I pay, I get good product. I know it has a couple bad things (possible Russian ties) but yeah
I still remember when Google launched, the uncluttered homepage was the real differentiator, other search engines, especially AltaVista, were just as good at the time, but they would load their homepage with as much extra stuff as they could think of to attract people. Then Google came along with a quirky name (for the time) and a uniquely minimalist look that broke all the established rules, it wasn't necessarily better search at that point but it really looked different. Different times of course, a search engine was just another website, no different to your own personal page.
As far as I remember Alta Vista was ok at the beginning, but soon people figured out that you can get to the top result if you just repeat your top keywords multiple times in the meta Keywords tag. Another trick was to just add "free, mp3, sex" to each pages meta keywords to get more traffic. At this point Google was better, and also would load much faster on dialup than the image heavy sites like yahoo or Alta Vista.
So where do I go for my free mp3 sex now?
soulseek
I liked dogpile back in the late 90s because it would aggregate from several sources and wasn't terribly cluttered comparatively. I think I swapped to Google around 2000ish because it was so minimalist.
If google were just a search engine still, there wouldn't be a problem. But they are much much more now. Plus they suck at doing the thing they were supposed to do, i.e. searching.
I read something that said they are PURPOSELY bad at search now because if users have to click multiple pages, they see more ads. Like, how evil do you have to be to purposely corrupt your main thing just to sell more ads.
Well the main thing for them now is to sell more ads...
Search never made them money. Ads do. Ads are their thing.
We need to figure out a way to host content on the web that is just part of the network, without needing servers or big tech companies.
It’s not really possible I know but we need to anyway.
Yup, I know. They are, first and foremost, an advertising company. If they can integrate advertising into their products, you can bet money on them doing so. Which is all the reason i need to never use google again.
I2P. You can host a simple web page on your own router, only accessible to other I2P users. We could bring back web rings.
It's all about market capture, then anything they want.
The 2007 acquisition of Doubleclick is the watershed moment that converted Google from a competitor into a monopoly of the Internet ecosystem.
Well that aged like milk. Google is primarily an advertising company now.
When it was cool to google....
Eh, their home page is still very clean, as described in the picture.
A community for those that would like to get away from Google.
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