And they plant trees!

Imagine the internal meetings they had leading to that outcome.

"Guys, we're evil now, okay?"

Imagine if they could be held accountable for something like this they said.

is this satire?

You edited your post, one part I was calling bullshit on is the quality of search results, which you removed :/

The other part that is bullshit is that people "love google". 99% of Android users are locked into the google ecosystem and use whatever they are used to.

I've been using ddg for years and fell back to google eventually when I couldn't find what I was looking for otherwise. And in the past two years especially, this fallback has been failing more often than not because google search results have been enshittified.

I find myself not bothering to fall back to google anymore most of the time.

To be fair, I think they still believe that.

Their later solution to this problem is interesting: for a long time the search and ad teams were entirely separate. The search team had one mission and that was to make Google search as good as possible. Selling ads and making money was someone else's task. The old reasoning of "Make a really good product and then the profit will follow". This is how Google search was able to outcompete all it's competitors.

Then 2019 rolled around, the Google Ads team failed to meet objectives, and they blamed Google search for their failure. Google's solution was to make search worse, reduce the visual difference between ads and results, and eventually put the ads guy officially in charge of search. The goal of Google search had changed from making the best search engine possible to optimizing ad views and clicks. This is one of the best documented stories of enshittification imo.

Good reads about this:
https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/
https://codingwithcody.com/2025/10/search-is-dead-google-killed-it/

Some say that If you speak Prabhakar Raghavan's name three times while looking into a mirror Ed will appear

I laughed. It definitely feels like that when reading Ed's articles, the glee is almost palpable whenever he gets a chance to dish on Prabhakar.

TIL and wow

Not trying to pick on one thing but I guess I am focusing on it in my reply.

Am I the only person that thinks duck duck Go is no longer worth recommending?

Not to mention Kagi is based in the U.S. Whatever privacy promises they make are bullshit.

Didn't know this until you wrote your comment but 2019 is definitely when shit fell off so hard I rethought using Google at all

I would imagine ddg can't licence Google maps. I'm surprised they don't use bing maps (if that's still a thing)

I use https://noai.duckduckgo.com/ together with the uBlacklist browser extension. It lets you ban domains from your search results across all major search engines and also lets you subscribe to blacklists compiled by others, such as https://github.com/laylavish/uBlockOrigin-HUGE-AI-Blocklist (I see now that this hasn't been updated since last year, but there are most likely others out there.)

And decades later they're multibillionaires who hold all the traits of multibillionaires. They're into transhumanism, the singularity, effective altruism, microdosing, owning your own private yachts, planes, and islands, donating to conservative candidates, and moving their assets to avoid paying taxes. Complete scum. Utopia isn't going to happen when all your AI shit is making creative people miserable.

Study math at university, start a search engine company using your sick math skillz, become the evil businessman you presumably hated when you started out, and then use your wealth to fund AI that will make nobody want to study math at university. Pulling up the ladder. What a world.

Could you please tell me why you dislike it?

Psychologically poisonous? How? I'd imagine that it'd liberate you and then you can just be yourself.

Problem with all SEO is AI is really good at grabbing hold of the search crawlers and creating articles on questions whether it answers the question or not. I sometimes search by date published so older non ai articls have a chance. Perhaps they could increase the wighting based on age.

No, it's not just you. DDG hasn't been very good in my recent experience. I bit the bullet and gave Kagi a try and it's been excellent. It's what I recommend now.

It's not free, but I'll gladly pay to ensure that I'm the customer being tailored to instead of the product being sold.

Yeah initially it felt silly to pay for a search engine, but I gave kagi a try and really like it. I could immediately turn off all ai shit. I can block websites that are ai trash or that I just plain don't like or I can just down rank a website so I'll see other results first. For example, I have the Minecraft fandom website downranked but not blocked so that if I'm searching for something that isn't documented on the Minecraft wiki then the fandom page will still pop up, it just won't be the top result ever

Also, I'm on the basic 300 searches a month and I've never hit the max despite feeling like I search a lot between my phone and computer

Edit: there's also a little indicator next to websites that have a lot of trackers and ads so you can avoid or block those sites if you want

I think they also discovered they were charging companies for all the blocked ads nobody saw, and were about to get sued into oblivion, so they refunded a token amount, and threw ads into overdrive.

I think ads were never paid by the dished out links, but by the actual opens. sometimes even only by the click on it (impression vs click).

I paid for kagi for a year or two. Problem (for me) is, they are very USA centric and offer less value to other regions. For region-independet search they were on par or better with google.

Either bullshit or delusional (which amounts to bullshit for the users) if they don't realize that they can't do anything about a FISA court order. Do they have a warrant canary at least?

Google 'charges for YouTube adverts viewed by bots'
Published
23 September 2015

I think this lead the charge to confirm you’re a human, i.e. age confirmation.

Ugh foreal

Disney+ changes subscriber agreement to allow ads on every plan

https://feddit.org/post/35666466

If you can't opt out of ads then they are not only there to sell more products.

Liberated in the same way a toddler is liberated from social decorum. The world enforces personality traits via social and evolutionary pressure. As that pressure wanes, humanity's prosocial nature can morph or decay.

You are right, you get to be yourself. Ultimate freedom. Say hello to people at the park? That's an option. Purchase a restaurant you enjoy? That's an option. Gain an uninterruptable supply of cocaine? That's an option. Kidnap kids to be your island sex slaves? That's an equally easily available option. You are free.

Released from restraints, people can be their best self or the most debaucherous, ladder pulling, vile thing ever to be birthed. Or cycle between either extreme as they slide through philanthropy and torture like a saltwater crocodile between marine and freshwater environments. Eventually, an itch that shouldn't be scratched might arise and an opportunistic infection could follow. I'm not interested in putting myself in that situation, let alone others.

Interesting, I didn't know about this. Youtube isn't search however, Nibbler is right that advertisers in search only pay per click, not per impression.

They used to use Openstreetmap, which was very accurate where I lived, and also seemed to be reasonably good at knowing when something needed a map (like a business or location you were trying to find) and when it didn't need a map (like any other normal search).

How on earth is effective altruism a negative?

Disney has never been on the other side of that.

Yeah, Disney's origin story is as shitty as Apples: business man screws his creative partner, expunges him from the company's origin story, and declares himself the true visionary.

It’s name washing. Carnegie was a horrible person no matter how much his foundation funds classic arts.

Because Effective Altruism doesn't mean what it sounds like. It's a pseudo-ethical philosophy that justifies gross accumulation of wealth with the implication that at some point in time you will use your wealth to do good. The poster child for this is Sam Bankman-Fried, the scam artist CEO of FTX who conned investors into believing he set up a securities-backed cryto-exchange, when in reality the securities firm insuring the cryto was being inflated by the cryptocurrency it was allegedly insuring.

SBFs fall from grace should have killed any legitimacy Effect Altruism ever had, but unfortunately there are billionaire sycophants trying to bring it back to life. I guess the reasoning is if there are that many idiots that keep falling for Donald Trump's promises, they should be able to find enough idiots in the investor class to keep running the same scam over and over.

I've been using DDG since the beginning when it was an inferior product to Google, manly because of the bang! search feature (which replaced Yubnub for me) and for the privacy aspect. If a DDG search didn't give me good results, I could just add !g and see the Google results. It cut down my dependence on Google by about 75% at the time but only got better as the '10s wore on. By 2020 it was just a better search engine.

Since then it seems to be going through the same enshittification that Google went through, although they know that they live & die on their privacy feature and that seems to still be better. Instead, they have added the AI summary ("search assist" is not auto by default, so a basic search doesn't query the AI), prioritize a few of the top hits on the search (along with context results like wikipedia, dictionary, stock summaries, etc.), but the rest of the results on the first page appear to be paid ranking pages. Below that are related searches, and below that is the "more results" button that is the hits that used to come before the paid ranking pages.

Even though it seems to be sliding into the same patterns as other commercial search engines, I still think it is better than most of the alternatives. I still set it to default some from the browser I can do things like search for RAM on NewEgg ("!ne 16gb crucial ram") and go directly to that page instead of going to a search results page that may or may not be a sponsored link that takes five seconds to load because of spotty wireless & all of the 3rd party elements having to load.

VPN providers and torrent sites solved this a while ago, allowing anonymous payments: crypto, even mailing cash.

Quite honestly, if I was handed that much cash, I would 100% go the Paul Newman route. Food for children, free education, free healthcare... damn dude, if I were elected President, I would be assassinated the same day. I would tax anyone with a billion dollar net worth 95%.

And I would also close down the military budget. Vote for me to be dictator, and I will start practicing Neo's moves. I would be literally dodging bullets and would have to wear an anti-bear bullet proof suit.

But I would do it in a heartbeat for humanity. So much of this suffering is so easy to stop that it makes me sick.

Are you really so naive to assume that your searches tied together won't allow to identify you within days? Please never work in cybersecurity.

Also, crypto coins are a scam nowadays, thanks to the investment markets making them unstable as fuck.

You should only support staying services that have an ad free plan so ars don't take over. I'll still pay for and ads free plans i can subscribe to and cancel the ones that don't provide this service. But as well know consumers as a whole won't do this. Look at YouTube premium. It's amazing, cheap, and no ads, and you can share the keys with friends and family.

Yet no one wants to pay for it.

Just realize that consumers are not willing to pay for ad free plans. The future is grim.

That sounds about right. I haven't used Google search is half a decade. Same with chrome.

There are so many better services out there today I'm surprised Google is still something people use

Yes: https://kagi.com/privacy

They also have options for anonymous search.

I’m curious about how well they enforce that, and how as a European on European servers they do more, but I wil assume it’s all transparent to state actors. As are all others.

The benefits are in corporations and being monetized.

I use it with Librewolf. Search engine is just a website. I don't count Brave as Big Tech so that is a win in my book.

Oh, like Tesla?

That's my problem with DDG too, unless the query makes sense for the US it outputs mostly garbage. They don't handle localization very well, or at all.

I'll ask the shareholders, that's a good trick!

While a noble effort, voting with your wallet means that those with the biggest wallets get their way.

We need legislation. We need us to be in power, and to put an end to capitalism superseding our democracy.

In the words of Mark Carney addressing the European Parliament a few days ago (and I paraphrase):

"We believe in a strong economy, not as a goal in itself, but as a means to create a good democratic society."

Naomi Klein is right, being a billionaire or even a millionaire, changes who you are fundamentally.

If money is power, and power corrupts absolutely, then money corrupts absolutely.