Pluralistic: Google’s enshittification memos (03 Oct 2023) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
pluralistic.net

When I think about how the old, good internet turned into the enshitternet, I imagine a series of small compromises, each seemingly reasonable at the time, each contributing to a cultural norm of making good things worse, and worse, and worse.

  • @deletedEnglish
    6•9 months ago

    How do you look stuff up?

    I use duckduckgo but wouldn’t return good results sometimes.

    • @[email protected]English
      10•9 months ago

      Kagi, it’s amazing.

      I used to use ddg a few years ago but it wasn’t good enough to completely leave Google search.

      Kagi is even better than Google. Highly recommend you try it, it makes the web feel fresh again.

      • @deletedEnglish
        4•9 months ago

        I just read the article. I’m stunned.

        I’ve noticed in the past year or so that duckduckgo would return all results of one brand or similar websites no matter what general term I add.

        I know ddg send query to search engines but I didn’t know google was the culprit. I thought ddg sucks.

        Kagi sounds good. I’ll definitely give it a shot. Hopefully it’ll not get acquired by google or microsoft.

      • @PlutoniumAcidEnglish
        1•8 months ago

        Okay i will have to Google for Kagi since you didn’t provide a link… /s

        Edit: Kagi requires a login just to search? Wtf? And it’s $10 per month?? Hahaha forget it! Bye!

    • @phoneymouseEnglish
      4•9 months ago

      Google doesn’t return good results either though.

      If you want best effort, use DDG as your main search. If the first query doesn’t bring back what you want add g! to it and it will redirect to Google. yt! goes to YouTube, b! goes to bing, w! Wikipedia, etc.

      • @deletedEnglish
        2•9 months ago

        I think google peaked in 2016 and since then it’s in steady decline.

        I use to assume if google didn’t return good results then no enough content is on the web.

        Thanks for the tip!

    • @sudneoEnglish
      3•9 months ago

      Big fan of kagi.com. rock-solid privacy policy (seriously, I am one of those guys who read them all, this is probably the best I have seen), excellent search results and very nice features (lensed to search in specific contexts only - say, programming, up/down ranking of sites as you prefer, automatic rewriting of urls, custom bangs). The cons, is that it’s a paid service. I am personally a customer since November 2022, never looked back.