After recently noticing AI image results in practically every search I’ve made, I switched over to Duckduckgo as my default search engine. I realize this article isn’t about search results but Google seems to not understand that these practices are pushing users away
this post was submitted on 19 Jan 2024
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I've also switched to duckduckgo as my default search engine, but I do find myself falling back to google more often than I'd like because duckduckgo can't find what I'm searching for.
Any opinion on using startpage.com?
Not yet, but I’ll give it a go!
I think you get used to it, or you realise the google results nearly universally suck?
I’ve been using DDG for many years now, and have maybe used google intentionally 5 times in the last few years. Mainly for local things that DDG kinda sucks at.
The default and unchangeable search engine at work is google, and I find myself often re-searching for things in DDG that I’ve accidentally hit google for.
>enshitify web searching by turning SEO into a career
>search all the top web resultsto train AI
Why are top web results enshitified AI?
I’m appalled by the fact that Google News is promoting garbage AI-generated articles that plagiarize and distort the original work of journalists. This is not only unethical, but also harmful to the quality and credibility of news. Google should have stricter standards and filters for what qualifies as news, and not just rely on algorithms that can be easily manipulated by spammers. I want to read authentic and original stories that are well-researched and verified, not some AI nonsense that is full of errors and nonsense. Google News is supposed to be a trusted source of information, not a platform for spreading misinformation and propaganda.
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People use Google News? I left the notifications on and 90% of them are news articles I saw here or elsewhere 1-2 days prior.
I use it to skim through headlines and pick through various sources on each topic. There's probably a better free news aggregator out there, but I don't know what it is.
I've been using https://ground.news thanks to a recommendation from the folks over at Some More News.
Highly recommend.
Ground is weird. You start off by selecting topics that interest you. There are 24 topics to select from before you start. Some are broader like economics, technology or environment. But others are Bernie Sanders, Xi Jinping and Tucker Carlson?? Why are they more important than say the PotUS? It‘s a little baffling.
I use it every day, but I have noticed a lot of shitty articles outside of local.
I tried using it for a while and kept saying I'm not interested in this topic on nearly everything, but Google News just keeps being shit. Can't even call it news mostly.
Archive link: https://archive.fo/UG1wQ
Some excerpts:
One example was a news site called Worldtimetodays.com, which is littered with full page and other ads. On Wednesday it published an article about Star Wars fandom. The article was very similar to one published a day earlier on the website Distractify, with even the same author photo. One major difference, though, was that Worldtimetodays.com wrote “Let’s be honest, war of stars fans,” rather than Star Wars fans. Another article is a clear rip-off of a piece from Heavy.com, with Worldtimetodays.com not even bothering to replace the Heavy.com watermarked artwork. Gary Graves, the listed author on Worldtimetodays.com, has published more than 40 articles in a 24 hour period. Both of these rip-off articles appear in Google News search results. The first appears when searching for “Star Wars theory” and setting the results to the past 24 hours.
There are a few different ways to use Google News... ...search by “topic,” such as “artificial intelligence,” “Taylor Swift,” or whatever it is you’re interested in. Appearing in topic searches is especially important for outlets looking to garner more attention for their writings on particular beats. 404 Media, at the time of writing does not appear in topic searches (except people, funnily enough, writing about 404 Media, like this Fast Company article about us and other worker-owned media outlets). As in, if you searched “CivitAI,” an artificial intelligence company we’ve investigated extensively, our investigations would not appear in Google News, only people aggregating our work or producing their own would.
Not that anyone asked, but I’ve been really happy using kagi as my primary search engine. Qwant is usually #2 on my list.
But if I’m trying buy something, I’ll use google if I can otherwise find it through the others.
What are your thoughts on Kagi's deal with Brave, and the owner's response to the backlash where he basically called it a woke backlash?
I'm on Kagi, it works pretty well, but that basically stained my perception of them. Not necessarily the fact that they're dealing with Brave, but the response he gave to dodge the question.
Unfortunate at best. But if I moved away from every product where company leaders demonstrate themselves to be crappy people, I don’t think there would be anything left.
That seems like a healthy stance, thank you for your input.
I think I'll keep using Kagi for now.
Do you have some more info on this? Kagi was starting to become an appealing proposition. Brave was an obvious stink from day 1. Is there is a collaboration between the two?
Have would you say these compare to duck duck go? I switched away from google but duck duck go is just kinda ok, haven't heard of these two
I’ve never gotten past Luke-warm with duck duck go. I don’t have anything bad to say about it, but I don’t really have any praises to sing beyond it gives us the privacy we ought have.
Duck duck go never “engaged” me as a user so I don’t have meaningful feedback to give.
That privacy point is also iffy considering they dont block trackers from Microsoft. Everybody else could just buy off this data from Microsoft instead of directly from Duckduckgo.