I used to love Google, the company, the search, the tech. But god damn if in the last 5 years it hasn’t become the most insane ad delivery tool in existence. Sometimes when I Google something it’s multiple full pages of ads before I actually see what I’m looking for. I switched to duckduckgo.
this post was submitted on 11 Oct 2023
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Should look into Kagi. No ads at all, for $5/month
I don't think that's a good idea in terms of privacy and reliability. You need an account to use it
In terms of privacy that could be debatable.
But what do you mean by reliability?
DDG is essentially Bing though. The results aren’t the greatest. If Bing decides to ban a site, it’s banned on DDG.
Try presearch: it has way better results than DDG
Seems like a Brave-esqe crypto platform:
In addition to offering users a great search experience, Presearch is dedicated to creating significant value for marketers who would like to reach Presearch users. Advertisers can stake their PRE to a keyword, and whichever advertiser stakes the most tokens will have its ads displayed when a user searches on the term selected. Advertisers confer the most external value on PRE, so their success is very important to the ecosystem.
True, for the browser. But their search engine works in any browser and has the best quality search results
The site has ads too. Nothing specific to the app.
Just the cost of doing business.
Certainly true for Apple if this is 15% of their operating profits every year.
Mega corp paying protection fee to another mega corp...
FTC see nothing wrong with this market
Hey Google! If you want you can be my top search engine again... 🤭
Pretty lies 😂
The number is massive regardless, but this figure is speculation fyi
The Justice Department’s lead litigator Kenneth Dintzer, estimates Google’s ISA payments to be over $10 billion, and while the true figure remains confidential, the $18-$20 billion estimate assumes a new magnitude.
that's pretty fucking insane
Fucking hell! and they still fire their employees.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
According to a Bernstein analyst, that’s how much Google is paying Apple to keep its top spot, representing roughly 15% of the iPhone maker’s annual operating profits.
Bernstein analysts are looking into Apple’s exposure to the Department of Justice’s antitrust lawsuit against Google, originally reported by The Register.
One of the major interest areas of the case is the payments it makes to Apple, classified under the Information Services Agreement (ISA).
“We believe there is a possibility that federal courts [will] rule against Google and force it to terminate its search deal with Apple,” says the Bernstein report.
Google’s Chief Executive Officer Sundar Pichai raised concerns over the bad optics of its Safari deal back in 2007.
“I don’t think it is a good user experience nor the optics is great for us to be the only provider in the browser,” said Pichai in emails to co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin that were revealed in the case.
The original article contains 304 words, the summary contains 158 words. Saved 48%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
I’m thankful I have the option to change it.
It's not clear to me how browsers are supposed to make the list of search engines open and not bound to money. Especially for closed source stuff, how would it work? Should they have a git repo to which search engines can make pull requests to to be included in the list of search engines a user can choose from when first starting up Safari?
If the list and process of getting on the list is closed, then one can always just assume that to get on the list, it requires money. But if that's made illegal... yeah, not sure how this should be solved.
I mean, you just have to specify the format of the url that the search engine uses, and then the browser just formats in your search string into that. This has existed for years, if not over a decade, at this point, at least on desktop.
Firefox solved this long time ago: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/change-your-default-search-engine-firefox-ios
In desktop Firefox there is also a format in which webpage can inform it's a search engine and the browser would list option to add it in the search selection (Firefox has a selector to choose search engine on each query if you want).
Any user can add their own search engine in desktop versions of Firefox and Chromium-based browsers. Not sure about mobile versions. IIRC search sites can even put an icon in the URL bar to automate the process.
Yeah duckduckgo can't possible afford that
As long as they don’t suddenly stop supporting Apple devices overnight, leaving Apple to scramble to make their own search engine that sucks and still sucks 10 years later. #mapgate
There was a recent post about them entertaining making DuckDuckGo the default. I think it's just a negotiation point.
I have switched to DDG and like it.
It was ok to me, but still tended to find the Google results better (especially in verbatim mode) and kept going back to it.
I'm using Kagi right now for a bunch of reasons and it's awesome, but 99.99% of people aren't going to pay money for a search engine. Especially at these prices. But it's way less money than Google, and Bing make off mining our data, or DDG does selling ads and doing SOME mining
Only for private mode, which made some sense.
But...the maps are actually pretty good now? I thought?
They’re getting better but still takes you to the the back entrance of the place now and then. Plus it doesn’t take me to the shortest drive on my commute. Keeps on taking me to local streets, adding 5 minutes then I disregard the turn and it updates for a shorter drive. But they’re making progress.