this post was submitted on 30 Dec 2023
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No Stupid Questions
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It got so bad, I mainly use duckduckgo (95%) as of about two months ago
I don’t get why everyone espouses ddg but shits on bing when bing is the underlying source.
Because you're in a bubble of "big corporations bad". Not uncommon on the fediverse for obvious reasons.
It's a fairly reliable truth.
I don’t really subscribe to that mentality personally. Some are and some are not. Just like people.
That explains why my DDG searches have been less than helpful... it's just as unhelpful as Bing. I usually find myself trying other search engines, but run back to Google when I can't find anything relevant to the problem I'm trying to solve (most of my googling is tech help stuff).
Exactly.
As much as I’ve seen threads here on lemmy complaining about how terrible Google search is, Bing isn’t any better.
I've been using SearXNG over Duckduckgo lately. It's a free (as in freedom) aggregator that searches all the engines. It's not perfect but you know 100% you are not being tracked.
The results are closer to a true old school search of the web. Sometimes it works better, sometimes not as well. It's best to pick a local instance that has quicker speeds since the main site can be a bit slower than local ones.
This distributed web stuff is really taking off. I like it!
After hearing it for a decade plus I still don’t know what “free as in freedom/free is in beer” actually means
Free beer, like you get a free beer at a party or event, it's no cost. Free software that costs nothing but is closed source.
Free as in freedom means the user has full access to the source code and is not subject to unknown code like in proprietary software.
Freedom as RMS sees it: https://lemmy.world/post/8134208
The phrase is "free as in SPEECH/beer", because it doesn't make sense to say "freedom" - especially since that has all sorts of other connotations, especially in the USA. Everyone should be able to understand that free speech doesn't mean a speech that you listen to at no cost to yourself. It means the ability to express yourself without censure. And beer... everyone understands that, and who doesn't love free beer?
I always get confused by this analogy because my mind goes to beer representing open source (the ingredients aren't secret, and you can brew it yourself if you want to). "Free Coca-cola" would work better, like you're not paying for it right now but only one company knows how to make it.
It's open source. The line comes from the early days when people were still arguing over definitions and free vs. open source and GPL vs. BSD, when the concept was new enough to the general public so that they would confuse "free software" for "freeware": Closed-source software that doesn't cost any money. By now all that has died down (unless you're the FSF) and the acronym "FLOSS" was invented, which sidesteps the double meaning of "free" by adding on "libre". Really they should've gone for GLOSS: Gratis, libre, open, source software. If you have a choice in marketing between shiny and dentist, always go for shiny.
(And for the nitpickers yes searxng is AGPL which makes it libre, not just open).
Oh, and speaking of, haven't looked at it in a long while, there's yacy, a peer to peer search engine.
Free as in freedom means it doesn't infringe on privacy (or any other rights) and free as in beer means no financial cost.
It's the default on all my devices, works just fine.
Another vote for DDG. I honestly didn't realize Google had gone to shit, because I haven't used them for anything in the last 5 years (which is wild for me to think about, because I used to be a huge Google fanboy in the G+/Hangouts/Google Now/Nexus era).
It doesn't allow keywords to be excluded from what I have been able to figure out, and some other minor issues that sometimes makes google easier and quicker to use. Most of the time that is a non-issue however.
when i need to search google i add !g at the beginning
It's funny how when I jumped to DDG a few years back, I felt like I was sacrificing the quality of results for better privacy.
These days you get the best of both.
I only use DDG for searching. I use Google for things like checking business hours or directions (you can use
!gto search google)https://duckduckgo.com/bangs
Sadly it doesn't work as well on non-English websites