Bringing up the tax revenue of Wyoming as a yardstick sounds like you're trying to diminish the severity. Like we should be more pissed off that they get away with it for so cheap when you put it that way.

This isn't universally true. There are plenty of people with that amount of money that aren't psychologically poisoned, but they stop trying to double their weathly and many go philanthropist but you rarely hear those stories because they don't make a big deal about it.

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.

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

I would probably break mentally if you gave me that much money. After a short shopping spree to buy the things i always wanted but never was able to finance (nothing major - mostly high end PC hardware and around 100 TB redundant storage, a phone without a huge amount of scratches, a nice e-bike and some home renovations) I would give most of it away with minimal involvement from my side and just keep a small nest egg because i never had one.

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.

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).

Main problem with "paid" is that you have to log in for searching = all your searches can be tied to your payment into / identity. That's a big no-no.

Not everyone on the Internet has money to burn.

And they plant trees!

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.

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.

Could you please tell me why you dislike it?

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.

I think it outperforms both Mojeek and Qwant, so it's my go to right now. Mojeek has a very small index and Qwant is slower. Haven't tried Brave or Kagi yet.

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.

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.)

I wish it didn't append completely irrelevant "Apple Maps" results for places thousands of miles way, to everything I search for.

Fuck brave. One huge anti-feature collection.

is this satire?