solarpunk memes

Stop using Google. You can’t change them, you have to leave.

this is wrong, because today you won't find the thing you're looking for at all. Just 100 results where one word of your 5 word query vaguely matches.

Slight update to this comic, to call out the dangers of Google's Sponsored Results.

Examples, for those that are not aware of this risk:

• https://www.techradar.com/avoid-google-ad-malware
• https://www.verifythis.com/article/news/verify/scams-verify/google-ads-scammers-redirect-website-url-different-search/536-4ef6c41d-087e-4db9-a281-86bcf7637c68
• https://krebsonsecurity.com/2024/01/using-google-search-to-find-software-can-be-risky/
• https://www.malwarebytes.com/blog/news/2023/01/rogue-sites-causing-trouble-in-google-advert-results

Stop using Google.

And Microsoft. And Apple. And Amazon. And every single corporation that cares more about money and stealing people's privacy than serving you.

I'm honestly amazed no one's sued google over the site telling them things like "Jump off a bridge if you're depressed" or that products have been recalled that haven't

by using uBlock Origin, uBlacklist, and then something other than Google.

&udm=14 is a temporary fix for those who still feel the need to use Google's search.

Paid search isn't the solution, as evidenced by the untrustworthiness of the CEO of Kagi search.

What I would like to see is a non-profit search.

Google wanted to organize all the world's information to make it useful. Sounds like a great idea destroyed by a profit motive getting in the middle. Try the same idea without the profit motive and you'll probably end up creating something people will defend endlessly, like Wikipedia.

What if your search engine asked you for a five dollar donation, once a year, the way Wikipedia does?

Search engines should be non-profit, honestly, they should be an extension of Public Libraries.

butlerian jihad?

Do you mean to tell me that I keep scrolling I'll eventually get to the yellow promised land?

This started to become noticeable years ago when Google decided to start censoring searches even with SafeSearch off.

I switched to Bing at that time, which was good for a while, but eventually they have started doing the same thing.

I can now no longer find a search engine that actually works to find me all the relevant results. I've tried all that I've heard of, and none will provide complete results.

The easiest canary in the coal mine for this is NSFW stuff. If I search for a popular character of which I know there's lots of porn/hentai, with SafeSearch off, and do not get a heavy mix of SFW and NSFW results, I know that search engine is messing with those results, and is also definitely doing it with searches that are not so obvious.

That's the neat part, you don't.

The top results have been useless spam for a decade or more at this point, and the only difference is Google sit there hoovering up the money instead. The money is in the way of search. Any popular search engine will end up the same way.

It's a shite situation, but until somebody makes a non-profit search engine and filters out spammy results, we'll continue to Google, scroll down two pages for a reddit link, and carry on.

Same with visiting almost any website.

Then

1. Click on link to website.
2. Read website.

Now

1. Click on link to website.
2. Click on Cookie options.
3. Scroll down looking for 'Reject All'.
4. Discover there is no 'Reject All'.
5. Scroll back through list turning off all optional cookies.
6. Scroll back to the bottom to click on 'Confirm my choices'.
7. Hunt for the close X on the 'Subscribe to our newsletter' pop-up.
8. Click on the close X on the 'Subscribe to our newsletter' pop-up.
9. Read the website.
10. Discover the website is just more AI generated SEO garbage.
11. Go outside, walk on the grass barefoot, weep for the future of humanity.

I'm currently prioritizing DuckDuckGo over Google and others for a better quality of search results. There ain't much ads to mess your attention, and the results are quite good most of the time.

If you need to use Google, I'd recommend the &udm=14 trick, as demonstrated on the linked site. It goes straight to a "web only" filter for search results. There are some tricks and tips to set that to your default search option in settings, or you can get a browser extension.

kagi.com for me has been more than worth it for the price with unlimited searches.

Try out the searxng browser plugin. It pretty much takes you back to the first pane.

I was (trying to) use AI to help me with something on my PC a few nights ago. It was telling me to go menus and choose options that literally don't exist.

Wtf is going on with AI right now? About a year ago, I found it useful for certain things. But it seems to have totally shit itself recently, and is pretty much useless now.

It's an extremely bold assumption to make to presume that we even could? Like Ukraine wanting to not be invaded, or Rome wanting to not fall, or someone wanting to not die of cancer, or perhaps the best analogy: never exercising a day in our lives + eating however we feel like in the moment, yet wanting to not suffer the negative consequences of obesity, hardened arteries, etc.

I take the approach of the stoics: we brought this upon ourselves, allowing ourselves to be tricked by the "Don't be evil" slogan. I do not own Google - I have no stocks in the corporation, they are not running their server code on my machines, they use none of my electricity, I do not own the land they park their buildings upon, etc. - and therefore I have no call in how they choose to go about their business. They chose to enshittify, and I am not offered a say in their choices. Therefore "we" cannot "fix" this. Only they could, and only if they want.

But maybe we can build our own LLMs so that we never need to use Google to search for anything ever again, directly? For now, I use DuckDuckGo whenever I can, Google when I have to, and perhaps most important go directly to the site that I want if possible - e.g. wikipedia, wiktionary, stackoverflow, Reddit if I absolutely must, etc. We lived in a golden era of prosperity when we were allowed to "have things", but that is over - we did not take care of it properly, and it was taken over from the inside, as it was always going to be, our delusions to the contrary notwithstanding. Now, maybe we can be more realistic about our expectations moving forward.

I just subscribed to Kagi to try it out.

Been like this for years now, I jumped ship 4 years ago to DuckDuckGo, might even jump that ship if it gets any worse, but alternatives...

Any way people could just remake 'old Google' that solely focuses on search and nothing else?

Use Ecosia.