InterestingUsernameAged like milk
astraeusNot sure about getting rid on “don’t be evil” but Prabhakar Raghavan was driver for the enshitification of Google search.
I don’t think they got rid of it.
Then your thoughts don’t align with reality.
It says it’s still there: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don't_be_evil
SystemDiscYou seem likely to believe things without doing your own due diligence.
That’s because you are very easy to manipulate and quick to judge, two outstandingly bad traits.
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.
Its 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.
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.
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. A lot of pages would just add “free, mp3, sex” to each page 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.
soulseek
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.
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.
Well the main thing for them now is to sell more ads…
Then again, I’m almost happy the small web is going back to webrings like codeberg.org/susam/wander#readme
Mwastephango.com/quality-software
But yes - a one off purchase (or a $50-100 for 5yrs) would be a selling point.
i also want to mention Donation based/ads(if not too intrusive) are also fine ig.
and sometimes(depends on country) your only option is monthly subscription (whatever its rent or internet price) you can find for sale buts its like in the millions and i think internet price is monthly only.
but yeah i dislike monthly subscription as much as you(and i agree with you)
and sometimes(depends on country) your only option is monthly subscription (whatever its rent or internet price) you can find for sale buts its like in the millions and i think internet price is monthly only.
but yeah i dislike monthly subscription as much as you(and i agree with you)
I’m not against a subscription for something like this. Kagi has ongoing server costs, I think it’s only fair that users pay on an ongoing basis.
As opposed to, say, Office where the software can be more or less “finished” and I don’t need or want updates.
starlingukI’m sure old Google didn’t require a subscription.
ChaisI’m really happy with Kagi but I’m scared its price might go up and I’d want them to really not depend on the GAFAM. I think their results or something is still coming out of these bad companies…
Last I looked, they used both GAFAM and their own infra (teclis)? I think the goal is to eventually move solely to their own infra / web indexing.
I dunno how much longer “search” is going to be a unique category. I think we’re probably going to need to move to personal AI fetch tools, as grim as that sounds.
The surface web is cooked / enshittified.
Aren’t they super into chatbots tho?
They have em and you can use em, but you can also turn them off AFAIK.
Lanske
TattorackI dunno. Milk can age into cheese if done right.
I’d say it aged like a badly discarded biohazard container.
Aged like a used condom
The 2007 acquisition of Doubleclick is the watershed moment that converted Google from a competitor into a monopoly of the Internet ecosystem.