cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/5431344
The enshittification of the internet follows a predictable trajectory: first, platforms are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die. It doesn’t have to be this way. Enshittification occurs when companies gobble each other up in an orgy of mergers and acquisitions, reducing the internet to “five giant websites filled with screenshots of text from the other four” (credit to Tom Eastman!), which lets them endlessly tweak their back-ends to continue to shift value from users and business-customers to themselves. The government gets in on the act by banning tweaking by users - reverse-engineering, scraping, bots and other user-side self-help measures - leaving users helpless before the march of enshittification. We don’t have to accept this! Disenshittifying the internet will require antitrust, limits on corporate tweaking - through privacy laws and other protections - and aggressive self-help measures from alternative app stores to ad blockers and beyond!
A good search engine would be nice to have (again). How come even duck duck go or other (free?) search engines are also so bad now?
Because operating a search engine is expensive. I personally use Kagi and love it, but that’s $10/month for unlimited searches.
I tried the 100 free searches from Kagi and compared the results to DDG. In almost every search the results were the same. Even the order. I think the real benefit to Kagi is the lack of ads and tracking, tha’s all.
I think the real reason search sucks these days is the AI they put between you and what your looking for. It’s no longer searching for what you typed, it’s searching for what it thinks you want.
Have tried it and seriously didn’t see any difference between it and Google or duck duck go…
How come Duck duck go was close to Google when Google was really good, bug now both of them are serving just crap? Are we sites getting better at climbing the ladder?
Kagi currently uses Google and Bing in addition to their own index to serve you search results. They’ll likely only use their own index once it’s complete enough to be a replacement, as the API costs they pay to Google and Bing are not sustainable even with paying customers.
The advantage of Kagi being paid as opposed to being ad-supported is that you get unbiased results, or results with your own bias applied. You can set ratings for domains where you can set their priority in search results or even outright block them.
You can also setup redirects with regular expressions, so you could redirect youtube.com to piped.video for example.
And sure, you can emulate some of these features (like blocking sites from search results and redirects) using browser add-ons, but with Kagi this is integrated right into the search query, and as it’s all server-side it works on all your devices. It’s just very convenient.
Search always used to be free so I get that people find it discomforting having to pay $10/month for it (there’s also a $5/month plan with 300 searches instead of unlimited), but $10/month for something I use dozens of times per day seems like a no-brainer to me.
If it was better, which I do not think it is, I’d consider it. Actually I already did and got my hopes up BTW.
I am in my kagi free trial period and like what i see so far. I already added credit to my account to subscribe once i use my free 100 searches.
Just want to add, people are also not putting much content online in the way they used to. Between the want to monetise (which leads to ad-filled SEO sits or YouTube channels), or the dopamine-hit of getting likes, content is getting harder to find as well (the latter tends to be in walled gardens that search engines don’t get to index).
While you are correct in that there is less real (people generated or organic) online content available to index, I think the search engines do harbor some of the blame because they push the content that is profitable. One only need to look for product recommendations to see this. If you search for ‘best waffle irons’ you will only get SEO generated contented as it is more profitable. You have to explicitly add reddit to your search to get something resembling a real opinion.
I am look at Kagi but everyone is calling me crazy for paying for a search engine. I am using Bing at work right now because Google is fucking useless, so I might be out of options.
I tried it like some months ago and I didn’t get better results. Check it out its free for a bunch of searches (or it was).
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What happened to DuckDuckGo?
Well, the thing that gets me all the time is that you can no longer “-” a word. I’m frequently looking for stuff that doesn’t contain a word. That feature is completely gone now.
DuckduckGo is basically a frontend for bing with some privacy marketing added to it. It still sends microsoft trackers. They are all so bad because of enshittification.
Google and bing are here.
This is not correct. I think what you maybe referring to is an older dig by Brave and brave redditors when they noticed DDG were allowing MS trackers in specific cases.
DDG explained that it was difficult to resolve due to the way MS engages cross-site tracking but it has since been rectified.
Also, research has proven this was not some shady deal between MS and DDG.
https://www.reuters.com/article/factcheck-duckduckgo-gates-track-idUSL1N3792HE
Why are you lying? I literally shared a well-researched article disproving your statement.
I am not lying. You are nitpicking a piece of my argument and then surmising that the rest of my argument doesn’t hold. The details of if they are currently blocking tracking is largely irrelevant to my point. I agree with you but you are misdirecting my words into your own ideas.
No that’s what you’re doing. I fucking posted evidence you’re wrong and you’re ignoring it.
In other words, I hear and agree with the facts of what your saying but disagree with the implied conclusion of the facts. I am now disengaging as it is clear you are acting emotionally to my rational argument.
Oh no :( not DuckDuckGo
Where do we go now?