OpenStars

Yeah, to be clear, I don't like it, I don't like it one bit:-P.

Please God let this be a humorous post that somehow does not also find a way to manage to come true...

All those toxic Redditors coming here... I hope we can manage to significantly beef up the mod tools before then.

Probably, and it was surely glorious (if you did it right)!:-P

Sadly, you give us too far much credit. "I'm sorry" not only expresses empathy, but can be construed by rich lawyers as an admission of guilt that can allow legal proceedings to move forward, to do things like garnish your wages until you can prove your innocence, or rather die trying - hence the companies will not even say that much. :-(

Likewise, that is a lot of yellow in the background there, and ink is expensive so... :-(

On the bright side, Lemmy is free, and fun, so that's something? :-)

Hrm, maybe Google screens those, so they are more purely a waste of your time rather than something that can be actually reported to a federal agency? :-P Or perhaps it is just a better scam, to keep a site up there for longer = more clickbait dollars, with less risk of angering someone so much that they track the scammers down and send them a "package" of explosive fun!:-D (the easiest profits come when the harmed party does not even realize that they have lost anything)

So maybe that's the genius of DDG - you skip right past the predatory SEO-optimized sites straight away to the predatory sketchy ones:-D.

There is a bunch of straw-man-esque argumentation going on here - e.g. I never said that we were "forced" to read anything - as well as a "shift the conversation" move as well. What I said was that (1) I found the results of this study to not be novel, and (2) the website did force me to hunt around for where to click to dismiss their full-page ad in order to continue reading the text on the page. Since you are neither stating that the results of this study ARE novel, nor are you denying that those advertisements exist, I conclude that you actually in fact agree with me, despite decrying so vehemently that you do not. I will further point out that I never "forced" you to read my comment either, I simply put it out there on this site (Lemmy) for all to see, and moreover, I did not put a full-page banner blocking you from continue to use Lemmy in order to get past it? So really, what is the point of arguing further - isn't there enough to do in the world that would be a better use of both of our time? :-P e.g., perhaps you will write open-source code to replace Google with, and if so I very much look forward to seeing how that pans out! :-)

I've heard people say that the answer is no, but in looking into it just now myself it looks like rather it is sometimes yes as well.

Basically the best way to describe it seems to be that it is "NOT Google, and MOSTLY does not want to be FULLY Bing (but still is somewhat, they're wanting to work on it, but to be clear they do have embedded Microsoft trackers that they are forced to leave in due to their licensing agreement)".

Tbf, do those sketchy sites also show up with Google?

DuckDuckGo finds some things. I'm no expert.

I came across as very rude, but... is this really even something for which there was the slightest shadow of doubt? I mean if a study were to be done proving that "water is wet", and then an article written about that, and then a full-page feature ad asking me to subscribe to that newsletter slapped in front of it, how am I supposed to conclude anything other than that this was a waste of resources... and of our time for being asked to read it?

In science, a paper must usually pass the novelty test - if a study has already been done before, then it does not rise to the standard to appear in a high-quality, high-impact journal. High school studies or elementary school projects proving that magnetism exists or that plants need water to grow or some such do not quality - which is not to say that they are not CRUCIALLY important for getting young minds interested in how the world works, which itself is a crucial component (motivation) for funneling kids into STEM fields; but it is to say that such a project does not (usually) rise to the status of being worthy of a truly international/global report?

People all over the entire English-speaking world were given this article to read. Sorry/not sorry, but I am outright offended at seeing what it contained. No solutions, no laying the groundwork for future studies like "this will a good metric by which to measure this phenomena moving forward", nothing beyond "we looked, and found what everyone who has ever used Google in the past 5 years already knows"... and btw which the CEO himself has already openly admitted (in the past I would have offered to dig up the article I am referring to, EXCEPT GOOGLE DOES NOT WORK ANYMORE!!!).

To clarify, I am not opposed to REAL studies being done on this effect. But an "investigation" should go even the tiniest fraction of a step beyond what is already known, or else it is merely clickbait to talk about imho. Whereas if the scientists who did this did not realize that the CEO of Google himself has already admitted that it is broken - which was at the time of the Reddit protests so has been quite awhile now already - then... perhaps they should read more, about the subject that they are trying to educate us about?