this post was submitted on 22 Jul 2023
63 points (95.7% liked)
DeGoogle Yourself
8541 readers
296 users here now
A community for those that would like to get away from Google.
Here you may post anything related to DeGoogling, why we should do it or good software alternatives!
Rules
-
Be respectful even in disagreement
-
No advertising unless it is very relevent and justified. Do not do this excessively.
-
No low value posts / memes. We or you need to learn, or discuss something.
Related communities
!privacyguides@lemmy.one !privacy@lemmy.ml !privatelife@lemmy.ml !linuxphones@lemmy.ml !fossdroid@social.fossware.space !fdroid@lemmy.ml
founded 4 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
EDIT: looks like SearX is pretty much dead and had been replaced by SearXNG
Clicks on link: "Unfortunately we are not yet available in your country."
🤔
I mean … I suppose that’s marginally better than Google’s frontpage telling me what town I’m in?
I guess any site will have access to the address that is used to access them. The question is what do they do with it. Maybe Qwant has a bot that scans addresses and sends back this message if they are not operating in a specific country. Important thing is that they don't put any cookie in your navigator and don't keep any information after you've left.
I’m not quite sure what Qwant is basing their country availability on
Use a VPN
Qwant claims not to know anything about me, yet I've noticed its results are very much tailored to my location.
I realize this is just data any site can easily see based on my IP, but still it's one of my pet peeves. If I want to see information tailored to my general location, then I'll add the name of the location in the search field. I really hate how search engines try to be so "smart."
I'll give you an example of why it bugs me: The first time I ever looked at Tik Tok, I saw nothing but right-wing MAGA content, certainly based on the political climate where I live. I don't like sites trying to determine my interests based on the fact that I'm in [location].
The only ones that don't seem to tailor results based on my location are SearX instances and Startpage. I have the same misgivings about Startpage, though I use it fairly regularly, and I haven't noticed anything questionable, in spite of the fact that I deeply distrust System1. There's no way they bought into it out of the goodness of their hearts. We may still be in the "bait" stage of a bait-and-switch.
What's most annoying about the "tailored experience" is that they presume to know what you're looking for, even though you directly told them what to show you. They don't give a fuck about relevancy, they're going to show you whatever is going to make them the most money, which usually means corporate ad crap, and outrage news. Plus if they show you shit results then you'll search multiple times and they'll get to show you 4 times the ads.
Yes, and sometimes it's straight-up dangerous. I'm into longboarding, and I've noticed if you use a site like Google or Bing to search for the best longboards, you get swamped by Amazon affiliate sites recommending cheaply made junk that could end in injury or worse. But hey, at least someone profits. Yay capitalism!
U.S.A! U.S.A!
These points seem to mirror my experience for the most part. DuckDuckGo has also been going downhill because certain search modifiers don't work anymore. Microsoft raised the price of API queries which in turn made it too expensive for DuckDuckGo to maintain certain ones. I mostly enjoyed it because it gives you access to Bing's search results without the user-hostile UX garbage Microsoft loves to put on all its products. These days I'm using Kagi. It's been about six months now and I'm really enjoying it.
I'd be curious to understand what Qwant brings extra to the table compared to DDG. Backend is the same, results seem quite similar and it's missing some things like math and conversion quick tools.
and then there is monocles 👍