HipPriest

Love Pizzacake's comics, nearly always make me laugh

The Guardian and BBC for home news and then links here, Mastodon or wherever else seems interesting. I have Google News installed which is shit but points me to some good quality American or Australian sites. And if I switch my VPN to a different country that can be interesting although it means relying heavily on Google Translate

Ah I was just going to their website and it was refusing to load the page. But then when I tried it on Chrome it was fine.

I'll have a play around later, cheers

Doesn't seem to play nicely with Firefox Android unfortunately. Which is ironic because Chrome on Android is one of the areas of Google I decided to experiment degoogling from just a week ago or so

I mean the article is specifically about Google search. Which might have gone downhill since whenever it first came out with the introduction of ads (sorry, 'Sponsored Results') but I'm not seeing significantly better competition for delivering search results. Everyone is still just aping the brand leader.

DuckDuckGo is obviously better for privacy for example but it doesn't seem to have any ambition except to deliver the same results as Google but without the ads and tracking which is ok but not a big enough draw except for people already concerned about privacy. Bing gets essentially the same results but if anything seems more spammy than Google with pop ups about making it or edge your default search engine or browser. It feels like other search engines just take Google search as something to copy and put their spin on it though.

I'd say search is one of the things Google is still getting right enough to earn its place as the leader. Some things it does well, some things it has badly declined on (someone above mentioned Google assistant hardly understanding anything anymore, when it used to be the best in this area too), but generally you can replace most Google things with programmes doing things their own way. Search engines just feel a bit like reskins to me

Well you've got to now!

I'm epileptic and won't take offence if that's the reason...