great!
now I can just disable JavaScript to end my dependence on their services.
this post was submitted on 17 Jan 2025
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I remember interviewing at Google years ago (if you're keeping score, it was 2012/2013 just before their stock hiccupped and my onboarding was killed as I was only a 97% fit), and the guy was religious about page load times. "We cut 200 lines of code if it'll give us a millisecond of page load speed", that kind of thing.
How they've fallen.
well they don't need to fight for new users anymore. Everyone uses it already, and children are basically indoctrinated to it: all schools have that as search engine, often they even use google classroom and drive and whatnot on the classes. if they have chromebooks, the chrome browser automatically starts after login even if you don't want to use it, and you can't unpin it from the taskbar either
I didn't know they allowed you to search without JS before. If you're at the point of disabling JS, presumably for security or privacy reasons, why not just use DDG which works perfectly well without JS?
Old browsers.
Just makes me realize that I haven't used Google search in like over a year now because I use Kagi. Even before that i was using searx-ng.
Feels good not to care anymore about the unrelenting enshittification of Reddit, Twitter and Google since I switched away from them.
At this point I’ve been using DDG for 7 years as my main search engine. It’s gotten better while Google has become a joke.
So, you're saying Bing got better.
It's not only the results, though, but other features too
I don’t know the full story about how Microsoft is developing Bing, but I do know that Google made a conscious decision to make their search results worse, simply so that you’d search more times, which for them translates to additional ad revenue. But, my sense is Bing hasn’t gone this far yet.
Can't wait until they enshittify, the way I see it, everything will eventually, even Lemmy. It's up to us to not settle too hard in one place
The core of what you're saying has been my approach for many years. Never go "all in" on anything.
Convenience is one thing (to me, but it's everything to so many), but it's just one factor. And if it means I am (or my data is) the product, it costs too much.
The fact Lemmy is open source and federated makes it almost impossible to enshittify. What are you gonna do, show ads? Third party clients are first class citizens here
it still can enshittify, but we can save it with the help of git and the fork button
No, I don't think that's sustainable, nor is it sustainable to act as if it were true. Given the lack of resources we have compared to Google the only way to make it work is to stick with something for the long run, and bake in protections in both the technology and the organisational structure. Being opensource and federated goes a long way there, there's no real reason why something not for profit would have to enshittify. But people won't put in the effort to keep building it if they think that's inevitable.
Can confirm. I didn't think it'd be like that but it do be like that. DDG gang, where you at.
I switched to DDG recently due to the manifest v3 changes and AI junk and have been really liking it. It feels like what Google used to be when it was good.
Google begins recommending DuckDuckGo.
That or Startpage
Cool. As if the over-promotion of AI garbage wasn't enough of a reason to stop using it.
If the British civil service, even operating under previous administrations, can put together a multi-functioning government domain that runs reasonably well without JavaScript, there's no reason Google can't continue to do the same with a ducking web search.
The former works better with JavaScript, that's true, but it works OK without and that's the point.
Then again, the civil service were ordered to do it largely out of spite because the government didn't want to give the plebs any excuse for not being able to use the site.
I'm not sure how to get Google to lose the need for scripting in the same way.
I think this isn't a case of if Google can, but rather of why they should. Do enough people really use the modern web without JavaScript to justify spending the resources to test and maintain functionality without JS? And they probably don't want to let the few people that don't have JS to open support tickets or write articles about how google.com is broken. Easier to just block it on purpose than to let it decay.
It makes more sense that a government website would support it, since they can't let even a single person fall through the cracks, and changing laws/regulations is more difficult than making a company decision.
Me, to Google right now:
Not like I was using it to search anyway
If I have to go back to using Excite, I will.
Like, I'm tired of Google Search, it's always been shit. I'm tired of it's AI Generalization, tired of it's garbage results, tired of the stupid section of questions asked by 'people' with these low-hanging fruit and softball but dumb questions there is to be asked.
Curious if this going to affect google results in Searx. Not sure how it works (scraping page, API, etc)
If only I could replace YouTube...
Being a parasite is the Google business model
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