Kind of fucked up but tbf Google does similarly shady stuff.
Please just use duckduckgo (or SearX).
I host my own SearXNG instance, which miiiight be a bit of a bad idea because the anonymity of the crowd disappears but hosting your own services is way too cool to ignore. It’s at search.gregtech.eu in case anyone wants to use it.
Pretty impressed, very accurate information
Accurate indeed. Pee is stored in the balls, cum is stored in the prostate
You know your content is certainly used to train LLMs ?
Did they stutter? Everything they said is 100% accurate.
It pulls from Wikidata
Hahha GregSearX I love it!
I’ve used searX in the past and found it was decent but personally I am going to stick with duckduckgo because it just works better for my needs (especially since I’m on mobile).
This is nothing like GregTech! Where’s the tedious microcrafting to enjoy before every search?
I asked them about that once and they created the instance without knowing about the modpack. xd
What I don’t like about SearXNG (aside of no favicons/icons I think) is that it doesn’t show the content of what I am looking for in the browser desktop tabs, if I search for “Linux” in the tab it is only shown “SearXNG” instead of what I am searching for… That definitely kills my browsing habits… I hope I am being clear (can’t post a screenshot right now), also unsure if it was the same with mobile browsers.
You can control that with a setting. In Settings - Privacy, turn on “Query in the page’s title.”
My instance has a magnifying glass as the favicon.
Thank you, totally missed this then 😄
That is configurable. Settings > Privacy > Query in the page’s title
Oh, so it was a privacy feature then? Neat!
I can set up a favicon resolver on my instance. I’ll do it today.
Thank you, I didn’t even know it was possible.
I am gonna try it later, happy spying /j
There we go, I have the favicons set up. Sorry for the intermittent downtime, I was doing some configuration.
It supports favicons now, it has to be enabled by the instance.
Thanks for the heads up, always a good thing being proved wrong when asking for features :p
How did you change the logo? I tried to do that on my instance and failed miserably. Running it through docker.
You gotta mount the image to the place where searxng accesses it, like this in docker compose:
volumes: - ./searxng:/etc/searxng:rw - type: bind source: ./images/searxng.png target: /usr/local/searxng/searx/static/themes/simple/img/searxng.png
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So then you can track my searches?
I guess I could technically do that, but I really don’t give a f what people search for on my searxng instance. Plus, Google and the likes have an incentive to use your searches for advertising and building a profile on you.
If people search for illegal content does that get you in trouble?
I mean, none of that content is on my server, and the search engines searxng indexes probably so their best to remove illegal stuff.
I really hope I don’t get in trouble for anything, but I doubt I will. I have a grand Total of like 5 users.
You are in for a surprise, tomorrow you will have 7 users, you just got Lemmyed!
Lemmy hug of… life?
DDG is just Bing under the hood
And Searx is the same. And startpage is just google.
But the point is they don’t track.
DDG was letting Bing track users. They may have stopped now that they got in trouble for it.
Wait really?
Best I could find was this arstechnica article from 2022:
Microsoft trackers run afoul of DuckDuckGo, get added to blocklist: Search privacy company still needs Bing, but won’t allow Microsoft’s trackers. https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/08/microsoft-trackers-run-afoul-of-duckduckgo-get-added-to-blocklist/
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Yeah that would be it:
Previously, we were limited in how we could apply our 3rd-Party Tracker Loading Protection on Microsoft tracking scripts due to a policy requirement related to our use of Bing as a source for our private search results
I couldn’t remember the details exactly, but basically up until then they were allowing Microsoft tracking despite all their advertising claiming they wouldn’t track users.
SearX is dead; you should use SearXNG now.
I feel like Microsoft is way more shameless about their shady stuff. They’ve been messing around with impersonating google/chrome for awhile now, they recently had that thing where they would copy all your open chrome tabs, and then when you started your computer it would open edge with all your chrome tabs to trick people into using edge instead.
They aren’t afraid of people complaining about them, they are afraid of the government, and they fulfill a hefty amount of contracts for the gov
I would use anything else before DDG, the primary function of it which is searching, generally feels sucky
Why? DDG is fine for search, and the bangs make up for any issues.
Microsoft does so many scammy things when it comes to trying to prevent people from using Chrome/Google. Even though Edge/Bing hasn’t caught on, I really think them abusing windows dominate OS position this way should be enough for an antitrust lawsuit.
Not just Google. There was a performance “bug” in Windows Defender a while back that specifically harmed Firefox. It had been reported but Microsoft took 5+ years to fix, and Mozilla did the bulk of the sleuthing and proposing fixes themselves.
Now, whether MS were intentionally crippling a competitor’s browser in the beginning when the bug surfaced (which coincidentally was around the time Edge was relaunched as a chromium browser), there’s no way to know.
But after a certain point, a software company with a market cap in the trillions loses any benefit of doubt I’d give them in scenarios like this where it benefits them not to find a solution. And 5 years is far beyond that point.
Unfortunately for Firefox, they didn’t really have the money for a lawsuit against a juggernaut like Microsoft.
I was installing chrome on a work computer, and windows defender was automatically flagging the chrome installer (official, directly from google) as malware and deleting it automatically as soon as it was downloaded. It wasn’t blacklisted for very long, I was able to download it without issues the next day, but I always have wondered if that was something they were testing out on purpose or not.
I’m having antitrust deja vu. Anybody else?
Hope for EU sanctions because it’s going to be a rubber stamp for at least the next four years in the US.
At least. Honestly I’m expecting a full dictatorship at this point…
lol the gall
Usual Microsoft, using shady tactics instead of creating a better product or just focusing on their own thing and respecting user choice. They should grow up sometime.
They seem to pathologically not be able to help themselves, even with products that don’t need to be promoted that way. I used Outlook for Android for years because it was actually quite good. Had a multi account inbox view, true dark mode, Galaxy Watch compatibility when those were all rather unusual features. But then they started trying to put Bing search in my long press menu system wide, using Outlook as the Trojan horse to do so, and I just found that too obnoxious
I don’t think they can. They would need to rethink their company culture, but because the current one makes big numbers go up, they don’t really have to change anything.
User: “Can we get Google?”
Microsoft: “But we already have Google at home!”
The Google at home: [reskinned Bing page]
This is a search engine showing open evidence of skewing results away from true for their own motivations. Slightly comic when it is Microsoft doing it to Google but if they do this so blatantly how else are they more subtly redirecting our searches towards biased or even false results that benefit them and misinform the user.
Great movie. Some jokes surely have aged badly, but it’s a classic.
I was surprised that the sequel wasn’t that bad either. Faithful to the style and silliness.
lol, I just watched this movie this week
Does it hold up in 2025?
It’s a classic comedy movie from the '80s. To a modern audience some jokes will appear too raunchy or racist, but I think it’s still worth a watch.
Personally I started to dislike it’s comedy, even though it was one of my favorite movies back in the 90s. I tried to watch it’s sequel and I couldn’t go beyond the first 10 minutes. It hasn’t aged well to me.
This is a genius move to keep you from Google search
Seems more like a genius move to get slapped with another antitrust-like lawsuit.
Corps don’t give a fuck about an antitrust law suit. In the US, the party that pays the most to jerk off CEOs just got put in charge. Even if it was the other party, who only pays slightly less, the most extreme fines are a slap on the wrist. Hell, come Jam 20th it’ll probably a tax write off.
Until the EU levies fines that would kneecap these companies out of business, there is no incentive to change the behavior.
I mean the original lawsuit was for aggressively bundling Internet Explorer and kneecapping other browsers. Which sure sounds a lot like a minor variation on what they’ve been doing with Edge and Bing for a while now, without consequences. Antitrust enforcement is not something I have a lot of confidence in for the foreseeable future.
Bing/Microsoft are so scummy lately
The enemy of my enemy is still my enemy! But an enemy I like to watch.
lately
Don’t care.
They can fuck with google for all I care.Google is shady af
Yeah tbh, it’s just two shady companies trying to out-cheat each other.
Who do you think the actual loser is in that case? Because I’ll give you a hint, it isn’t Microsoft or Google.
The single thing Google did right when they first came out was a clean UI with a search bar on an uncluttered page.
At the time the competitors had search pages cluttered with ads and news. It was so bad you couldn’t think.
If Microsoft makes their search nice to look at them it’s going to get many more users
DuckDuckGo and Kagi managed to figure this out. Bing is the odd one out.
I have no idea what you’re talking about.
With Net Neutrality gone, these giant tech companies could start bidding to make ISPs make their search engine default and have the other competitors fail to load.
The stupidest thing about this whole entire thing about net neutrality.
The entire reason the FCC was created was to prevent the committee from being governed by the government process to avoid corruption for the exact circumstances we’re seeing here
Saying that the Supreme Court and the appeals court has any area of saying what the FCC is legally allowed to do is laughable, as the entire reason for the committee being isolated from the standard Executive Administrative branches was to prevent government overreach like they’re doing currently.
This is 1,000% them saying hey you’re an isolated committee that we can’t touch but you’re not allowed to do the one thing that your committee is supposed to do
Corruption all the way to the top. It’s the American way, ironically I think the slogan “drain the swamp” works for both parties, as it’s clear that the people that are in charge aren’t willing to actually uphold the commitment they’ve made to the people.
“This thing that one party did, multiple times, is the fault of both parties!”
Thank you for providing a perfect example. It’s manipulative or delusional to say that the fault of the country is exclusively one party. It’s how we got in this situation in the first place. The amount of partisanship that this country has is ridiculous, especially when the go-to response for anything going wrong is well look at the other side. The US as a whole needs to do better, nobody’s going to get anywhere if it’s just the blame game. Both sides can be at fault, blame is not unilaterally one way nor is it equal levels. I’m not downplaying either sides position, but I’m not going to ignore what’s happening in the country.
Being said I’m not engaging further in this, I don’t want it to devolve into a political thread as its not the purpose of this, I was just making a one off comment on the irony of it all.
Microsoft is a pathetic little husk of a company, what a corny and predatory practice that not even google cares to do if you search other search engines.
The Yes Men have already done it.
We need to get back to real fucking culture jamming. Andy Bichlbaum you’re our only hope!
I first became aware of the Yes Men after they apologized for the Dow/Union Carbide disaster in Bhopal. Just wanted to share,
https://hoaxes.org/archive/permalink/the_yes_mens_bhopal_hoax
And just when I thought their endless begging couldn’t get any more pathetic.
Soon enough they’ll tell you a puppy dies every time you launch a non-edge browserIf you’re going to use one of the two, it’s a lot better to be using Bing than Google. At least you stand a chance of finding what you’re looking for with Bing.
I guess? But deception ain’t helping anyone
