Should have started sooner, a lot of people seem to still think it is the only choice.

My phone reset the default search to Google and it was ridiculous. First page was all AI garbage sites and aggregators. I switched back to Bing, slightly less bad, and found my results on the first page. Gotta get DDG on the default list.

What are the better options, I use DDG for reference. Curious if there is a go too. Haven't touched Google in years for a search. Do occasionally use their reverse image search no that I think about it.

no propaganda in the schoolhouse

Good luck with that one. Even if you could get schools to stop requiring the Pledge of Allegiance every day, every history textbook and literary novel has a perspective in it and was published by a megacorp.

Because he is

I think he looks like an extra from the matrix who looked too nice to make the final cut. But I know he is badass, and that’s the point :)

I thought based on the thumbnail that this was about Daredevil.

And possibly be better off for it

yes, sometimes he just looks silly and nonthreatening. still not a bad look.

Lol, my thought exactly was "damn, that's a badass photo, for a badass motherfucker"

He's a normal human being I think, weird for a politician idk

He correctly understands that he will personally benefit from living in a more functional society more than he could stand to gain from corrupt behavior

Google wants kids reliant on Big Tech to do the thinking for them. It's an insidious and much more damaging goal.

SearXNG ftw

Unfortunately school boards are not very tech savvy and typically want to go with name brand vendors for everything.

Probably the nicest way to put it, all things considered

Self host 4get

It works great!

SearXNG

There are public instances, or you can self-host it.

Its a “meta search engine”, meaning that it aggregates, and reorganizes results from the indexes of whichever search engines you want (after removing AI, Ads, and sponsored content from those results).

You could set it to index only Google if you wanted, and you’d basically have pre-enshitified google. I have about 20 indexes active in my personal instance, but they have ~100 indexes that you can use, allowing you to see results that wouldn’t turn up on Google or DDG.

It’s free, and it works better than Google ever has.

I had been searching for a specific rare game ROM for literally years, to no avail. I ran one SearXNG querry, and found the ROM from the 2nd link on page 1 (that’s right, pages, none of this infinite scroll rigmarole).

I've been using startpage lately, but I find it meh.. although to be honest I don't know if that is so much their fault as it is how SEO has ruined the web

what I can say is that whenever I search a topic, the first half dozen results I click on are just AI generated bullshit all with the exact same web page layout. and that's just the ones I click on, not the ones that I scroll past that I can tell are the exact same shit

I don't know exactly why all the search results nowadays are websites that were clearly AI generated under the same template and have a whole novella about how it's important to use the correct torque for your oil drain plug, but like dude I just want to know what the torque spec is for my car because it's not in the manual

Ecosia feels like a greenwashed Bing, but I have stuck with it as my default for a few years now and it feels "good enough"

I have an instance of SearX for an alternative that I haven't quite gotten the hang of, though

It feels really temperamental and apparently it just pulls from DDG anyway? Glad to be part of Lemmy so I can get some new suggestions for alternatives to Google

noai.duckduckgo works very well for me. I left ddg years ago because I thought it was crap, have used ecosia, and startpage since then, but ended up on noai.duckduckgo this year and I see no reason to change

This is also interesting https://marginalia-search.com/

You can use MetaGer, Ecosia, Startpage, Mojeek, Qwant, specific page searches..... or all of these. if you want a deeper research. After more than a quarter of century I've anyway half the internet in my bookmarks and only use the websearch in few occasions, or for security checks of unknown URLs.

I'd not thought it it this way but in the state of the world this makes a lot of sense

Even in the worst case scenario, it would be as easy as making the AI <div> invisible. Which is a 5 minute job. Well, for a bug tech company 10 hours, since they are horribly inefficient. But 10 hours is nothing in order to please a customer at the scale of Google.

The search is still there. It's just pushed down by the AI window. Which takes a great part of the screen.

Two things can be true....

It's not just search though. Google's monopoly on schools is based on them providing cheap chromebooks. Chromebooks are 100% not a good tool for learning how computers actually work.