Technology

Google literally redesigned their search engine to be worse so that you would scroll through more ads to find the results you want. On average, the best result now is the fifteenth result.

No, they're not, but they are one of the better-known alternatives to Google, and they do advocate privacy. This, in itself, is a good thing and should be promoted.

The problem is that Google's monopoly on web search is so large that using Google is the de facto standard for the vast majority of people. Getting them to acknowledge that there are alternatives to Google benefits privacy on the internet more than DDG having contracts with MS harms it.

Yeah I'm not a big fan of DDG either... it's powered by Bing so hardly surprising it isn't great. And Microsoft isn't any less evil than Google.

Presearch is the best I've found - just a nice, basic search - but it's a little slow and has some cryptoshit background so I'm open to alternatives. Ecosia is greenwashing bullshit afaik.

While I do appreciate this, their search results aren't great. I hate to say this, but even with horrible AI forward results, Google still returns better and more relevant results. I'll still use ddg first but it generally leaves me wanting.

While their first party browser convinced me if it's privacy capabilities, I need extensions (yes, recognizing that makes me much more fingerprintable) so I use their browser less than 1% of the time.

However, I have subscribed for their premium Services because I already trust their anti-tracker on my mobile devices and they have sufficient number of VPN nodes to be useful to me (I do miss Mullvad, and probably will use them when I'm traveling International, but it is getting harder to find good nodes and they don't have servers in south Korea at all, either).

And their measures to make a neutered and neutral AI interface is the first time I've ever paid for general AI access, finding it's helped some of my efforts as AI has been a necessary component for building my home studio and mini rack. I'm scared that my brain has already been ruined, acclimating to Google's integration of Bard and then later Gemini, and I make a regular exercise of hunting for sites that have articles or discussions that will help me work through tech projects and puzzles "the hard way" with just vanilla search queries and amendments.

I love that DDG's tech stack seems to play well in the general broader ecosystem, so it's my search engine of choice for all of my Gecko/Fusion browsers (Fennec, WaterFox, LibreWolf, and occasionally, full-fat vanilla Firefox).

I had really thought I could grow into using Kagi but I couldn't make it make sense for myself. When you're limiting paid subscribers at the first tier to 300 general web queries a month, and i could consume that many just on correcting my own typos and re-searches alone, DDG was a better investment for me for the time being.

TL;DR - I love that these guys play well with others, so I'll even pay for the access because I need them to still exist in a decade.

Those who enable and finance the pedophiles are international... they won't disappear when Trump dies, they have old money and are multigenerational. Trump is just a stooge for international interests, like Epstein was.

See Deutsch Bank, for example... they financed Trump with billions of dollars, and broke the law to do so. Without them, Trump would not be President today.

Also, look at the funders of organizations like The Heritage Foundation; coincidentally, many members are shared between them and the Council on Foreign Relations. All of this will remain when Trump is gone.

Ok...

Jesus should we go back to having to type in the specific web address to find everything !?

Yes, you should inconvenience yourself with the weighty first-world burden of having to press a few buttons for access to the full library of mankind's knowledge in order to avoid using a product which is inherently destructive to the one and only planet currently available for our species to inhabit.

Hope that helps. Fuck peace, go in love, including the love of a mother bear to destroy what threatens those she loves.

It doesn't matter how fast it is if the answer is wrong, and it does seem to be wrong an awful lot. I will check their citations to see if they back up their output, and many times they do not.

Jesus should we go back to having to type in the specific web address to find everything !?

http/:www.whatdhfuckamitypingallthisoutfor?

Uh, no? Just use a search engine? You remember those, right?

You probably don't remember since you've been eating glue at an LLM's advice, but search engines have existed for a while, and even worked at one point!

Duck it, we'll search it live

The thing that is hilarious about this is that DDG is powered by Bing. 😂