Europe plots escape hatch from enshittification of search As search engines are intentionally made worse, and software grows ever bigger and more complex, a possibly unexpected ally emerges: the European Union. If you ever get the impression that search engines are getting worse, or that alternatives are not all they seem, it's not just you. It's what journalist Cory Doctorow calls " …
Thanks Liam! I can live without AI hallucinations, let me know if/when it becomes reliable.
Making "literal search" the default is also very useful. There's something to be said for search trying to be "helpful", or at least highlighting where a particular search term was not found. But, again, I can live without that (or open Google Home if I want to open the sewer gates).
> I believe the OP meant if/when AI would become reliable.
Oh! How silly of me.
I believe there is a prototype running on a Nordic datacentre which is showing great promise, if they can just get the cooling sorted out. But when the temperatures get low enough, below about 270 kelvin, it should work reliably. I am not allowed to publish the name but it's near 63°26'22"N 10°54'29"E.
I think you mean "verbatim" , found in the Results dropdown, which is itself hidden till you click 'Tools'
And yes Google are tools.
BUT you can't make it the default AFAIK
Several years ago you could but effing Google stopped that, "Oh no, we can't make things easy, our mission is to spew garbage at you"
Interesting indeed ... I searched for Robert DeNiro with and without &udm=14 to see the difference:
https://www.google.com/search?q=who+is+robert+deniro
https://www.google.com/search?q=who+is+robert+deniro&udm=14
... it is quite substantial.
I see that out of the search result categories (under the search bar) of "All", "Images", "News", "Videos", "Forums", "Short videos", "Web", and "Finance" it picks (sets) "Web" which I guess eliminates the AI fluff. Setting one's browser default to udm=14 (Web) sounds cool then imho, as you can always then click on another category if you want to see other types of results ... (not stuck)
You can ignore that AI result in the top of the page, and meanwhile you have cost Google a tiny bit of money to generate it for you to ignore. I'm all for making them waste more money!
Not that I use Google much at all, my default is DDG and I only turn to Google if I can't find what I want with that. It is more and more rare that Google is able to find what DDG can't (I don't test the reverse so I don't know if some of the things DDG finds for me that Google would have been unable to)
I liked DDG for quite a while but I started to notice that its search results favored sites like LinkedIn. It took me a while but then I realized that it was just repackaging Bing search results.
Switched to kagi about six months ago. It works the way I want a search engine to work (altavista anyone?). Faceted (lens) searches, decent date/time specs, etc.
I liked DDG for quite a while but I started to notice that its search results favored sites like LinkedIn. It took me a while but then I realized that it was just repackaging Bing search results.
News search on DDG likewise features almost exclusively MSN, which certainly didn't happen before. I guess Microsoft had to find some way to wreck it.
> You can ignore that AI result in the top of the page, and meanwhile you have cost Google a tiny bit of money to generate it for you to ignore. I'm all for making them waste more money!
If you want to get the best of both worlds, you can use a UserScript (extension: Stylus, or similar) to hide the AI results with CSS. They'll still be there, Googoyle will have payed to generate them, but they won't pollute your page.
Starting with extensions like this is always a bit time consuming at first.. and then it's one of those things: you use it, you figure out how to use it, then you use it quickly all over the place. I have a "Standard Paragraphs" style sheet that changes p tags, #comment elements, etc. to revert to "initial !important" the line height, font family, size, and opacity for every site. It makes things *so* much more readable. I almost never have to zoom in on sites! (why do so many of them declare font-size 0.8 em?!? an em is the standard line height!!)
You could have, instead, a single interface that despatches queries to search engines (~ federated search), and have some gentle poking from EU to make companies behave, and have users score how well the engines are doing, and have that information publicly visible.
The struggle to control the default has not worked the way intended, all browsers I used recently allow you to modify the engine, but default dominates population usage.
Instead, mandate default to at least 3-5, and make it mandatory that the respective engines are from multiple sovereignties, and pay non-negligible tax in at least one.
The internet is, in the end, national infrastructure, and that doesn't stop at the networks themselves, just like a road network needs enforced policies that do no harm to the users, instead of a free for all maximize greed at all costs.
There is a whole generation of people who never experienced good search. Few more years and all this talk about "enshittification" will become a conspiracy theory.
Probably major search engines should be nationalised and then given to a non-profit or university to run.
After all this is now an utility like water and energy. Having this in private hands is an idiocy (see UK water or rail debacle).
Nationalize? That'll just permanently codify the enshitification into law. You do not want [insert political party or politician] controlling search results. And don't think simply putting it under a NGO will magically insulate it from forced bias. All search engines always serve their money supply. Whether that be advertisers, subscribers, eccentric billionaires or governments.
"After all this is now an utility like water and energy. Having this in private hands is an idiocy (see UK water or rail debacle)."
You evidently don't remember the days of nationalised rail and utilities. I do. Shit customer service, huge under-investment in assets, poor technical and operational performance, and massive inefficiency. I've also worked for a decade in the water sector, and in the energy sector. The companies are far from faultless, but vastly better run than the various unaccountable and badly run public authorities that preceded them.
The problems we've seen in energy, water, and rail come down to a mix of ineffective regulation and calamitous government policies, rather than a failure of privatisation in principle.
Yes, it was bad then. It's far worse now.
The privatised rail infrastructure directly caused multiple deaths, and was renationalised.
The privatised rail operators are currently being paid by the Government - all ticket revenue goes to the government, and the operators are paid to run the trains. Their profit is entirely a subsidy from the taxpayer.
Put simply, the current situation is the worst of all worlds.
For water, the private companies have invested almost nothing. Instead their assets have been stripped and they've been loaded with massive debts - in many cases borrowed from the company that owned them.
Privatised monopolies never work.
You evidently don't remember the days of nationalised rail and utilities. I do. Shit customer service, huge under-investment in assets, poor technical and operational performance, and massive inefficiency.
British Rail went through some difficult times. You've identified a core issue of under-investment which is not the fault of BR and did not get any better under RailTrack (it got fatally worse, to the point the Government were forced to renationalise RT as Network Rail).
Until 1980, BR was run on 5 regions, inherited from wartime divisions. In 1980 we got sectorisation, with BR split into six businesses:
* InterCity
* Rail Express Systems (parcel freight)
* Provincial Services
* London & South East
* Trainload Freight
* Railfreight Distribution
Breaking BR into sector-specific business units saw the new orgs responsible for driving their verticals - whether that was local passenger services, container freight or long-distance travel. By 1985 services, reliability and passenger numbers were all growing, driven by a new sense of purpose and clearly targeted improvements - InterCity might assess that a section past a freight yard was bottlenecking their long-distance services, develop a business case for improvements or an additional passing line and get it built. In many cases people had not really been paying attention to the express services because they were busy ensuring the freight was reliable and express services just had to crawl past. But now there was a champion for them saying "let's sort this section out" in the same way road bypasses and motorways were being built to avoid town-centre bottlenecks.
The emphasis on business and profit centres played well under Thatcher. Ridership rose, as did freight volumes.
It's important to note that it's nonsense to imagine rail got better under private operators because it was privately operated. RailTrack cut maintainance and treated engineering as below them. They were - by design - a contract management agency, with a focus on sheholder dividends. The decision makers had no engineering background and didn't understand the reports they were supposed to be shuffling from one subcontractor to another. As a result, people died. Yes, passengers were impressed when the likes of Virgin ordered shiny new trains via the Rolling Stock Companies (ROSCOs - who then lease the trains to Train Operating Companies). They were required to do so under the terms of their franchise, and the government could just as easily have ordered new rolling stock - but they didn't want it on their books, in much the same way George Osborne did austerity which the BoE had to counteract with Quantitative Easing to stop the UK entering a prolonged depression. You're just picking whose books the debt appears on.
This of course is asinine because noone can borrow cheaper than the government and cost-of-(private)-capital will always result in higher fares (or energy prices! See: Hinckley Point)) eventually. Particularly when the ROSCOs do not have profit caps as the TOCS did. Even today, a totally disproportionate chunk of your fare goes to the ROSCOs.
The fact is, rail operations have been all-but nationalised since 2020. The TOCs all went into administration and have basically been run by the DfT since then on a concession model (similar to TfL). CrossCountry for instance do not set their own timetables or services. They are contracted to deliver a timetable by DfT with the government paying a flat fee and receiving the farebox. Despite an indifferent service, every rail service outside of London is well above 2019 (pre-Pandemic) levels. In 2022, long-distance leisure was 125% of 2019 ridership. Of course politicos like to tell us that "ridership hasn't really recovered" on the basis national ridership has only just reached 2019 figures - because London commuting remains on it's knees. But that fact that London was the only city with really good rail service and dominated the statistics masks the fact that every other train in the country is rammed, and politicians seem reticent to build the solution (HS2 - which provides a dedicated long-distance route and lets you (re)open lots of local stations and run local services along the lines where London-Glasgow services are no longer slamming through).
The worst part of this is that privatisation saw lumpy rolling stock procurement. There was a big-bang of companies buying new trains in the late 90s and then nothing. As a result, most of the UK's rolling stock factories were closed down by their owners or consolidated. BR had always maintained a rolling programme of fleet renewal. The consequence is that rolling stock either has to be imported, or is built at "pop up factories" which are spun up for the purpose at relatively high per-unit cost. It also means we don't have enough stock for special events or contingencies. For-profit ROSCOs refuse to buy stock speculatively, or to cover surge. They'll only buy what they have a confirmed lease for. This leaves us in a pickle when a fleet of CAFs have to be withdrawn pending chassis inspections.
There could be a place for private firms in rail - as simple contracted service providers, the same way TfL's buses are run. The private firm just runs buses on a timetable with no initiative to add or withdraw service. The farebox - and risk - lies with TfL, meaning than loss-making public services (e.g. late night buses) are not withdrawn as uneconomic, screwing over shift workers. It can instead by cross-subsidised by profitable rush-hour services. Whereas out in the provinces, the bus operators just don't bother.
>The problems we've seen in energy, water, and rail come down to a mix of ineffective regulation and calamitous government policies, rather than a failure of privatisation in principle.
Sort of. Natural monopolies handled by private operators can't have meaningful competition. That means they can, and do, fail in principle (e.g. by fundamental economic theory, rather than by individual bad actors). Unfortunately, there really isn't a self-adjusting system for operating natural monopolies, as free markets notoriously don't work for monopolies. I'm not saying that the state always handles monopolies well, but there's really no reason to expect the private sectors to naturally do better, except for ideology. They'll just suck in a different way.
That's a fair point, but operation of the trains is tightly coupled to the rail system, and also limited by it. I don't think the network should ever be private, but I think private trains can work, with adequate regulation and strong enforcement. I don't think they would work efficiently with loose regulation.
I don't think the network should ever be private, but I think private trains can work, with adequate regulation and strong enforcement.
The problem is, private operators don't want to run mostly empty trains at midnight - despite them being vital for shift workers and suchlike.
So your regulation has to be so robust (to the point of specifying minimum service requirements - "You can run whatever services you like, but there must be trains running till 0000 and starting at 0500 or whatever) that you end up squeezing out any "creativity" in service patterns. A train operator can only ever give the track owner a wishlist and they'll be assigned train paths based on the line's maximum TPH, what other "competitive" operators have asked for, etc. There's no meaningful competition there.
Who remembers the "Wheeltappers and Shunters Club"? The wheeltappers did what it says on the tin, go around the yards tapping the wheels to detect cracks and chips. Why? Because faulty wheels damage the track. Suddenly there are two different companies running the track and the trains and the train companies have no incentive to keep checking wheels as they don't pay for the damage caused to the track. British Rail were crap, but at least you knew who to sue!
Running a train is no more a natural monopoly than an airliner.
The actual tracks, fair enough, I see that, but the trains not so much.
Nonsense. If Concorde took off immediately after a little twin-prop islander running to Jersey, it was not delayed by that aircraft. They have to get their takeoff slots but once in the air they can go their separate ways. Likewise running National Express/Greyhound coaches on the freeway/motorway.
But an express train cannot go just after a slow local-stopping train. They're on the same track and it'll be held up. The answer there is to set off the express train first. Which is fine if you only want to rn one express train per day. But if you want to run another, then you're going to have to wait a long time for the local service to trundle off and build up a good lead/headway before your next fast train can dispatch. This is why (in the UK) it's common for a route to have maybe three trains per hour, but they're all within 20minutes of each other. Then there's a half-hour wait for the next one. It's because they batch off a bunch of fast trains, then the slow trains and then wait half an hour before the next lot of fast trains can go.
To run a train on a railway you need permission from the track owner. They have to schedule you in and assess your speed/performance profile to ensure you don't conflict with other traffic - either running into slower services ahead or getting rear-ended by an express train.
On any reasonably busy section of the UK network it's a one-in-one-out system. If one operator wants to run a new service they need to boot someone else out. Whereas it's trivial to (say) run an extra bus or coach service down the motorway. Worse yet, if someone wants to run an incompatible service - say a 100mph express service that blows through a load of intermediate stations without stopping - this could involve cancelling multiple local or regional services to clear more headway for the fast train.
Consequently, there's no real competition - train operators can bid for train paths, but the track operator (Network Rail) ultimately decides who gets them, often having to abide by regulatory public-service rules that says every station needs at least n services per hour and you can't just leave half the stations without service because one express operator is willing to outbid the local operator.
There's no meaningful space for competition in railway operations. Competition for rolling stock procurement, sure. Competition for hardware and infrastructure procurement. But in terms of running trains, it's a tightly intermeshed system and at the end of the day, there's one scheduler setting down who can use a section of track at a particular time. Who gets which train paths. What priority will be given to express vs. local services.
True, but on main lines and in congested areas the problem can be worked around by having multiple tracks in each direction where trains can overtake each other. Stations used to be very common for this as you'd have your stopping or slow train in the platform (stopped, naturally) and the express would continue through on the through tracks running between the slow lines in the platforms. In some cases stopping trains also used to be shunted into sidings to let express trains go past.
These days we don't do any of that, because the sidings are mostly gone and the express tracks through stations have been ripped up to "economise" on track maintenance. We do still have fast and slow lines though so some services can overtake others.
Stations used to be very common for this as you'd have your stopping or slow train in the platform (stopped, naturally) and the express would continue through on the through tracks running between the slow lines in the platforms. In some cases stopping trains also used to be shunted into sidings to let express trains go past.
These days we don't do any of that, because the sidings are mostly gone and the express tracks through stations have been ripped up to "economise" on track maintenance. We do still have fast and slow lines though so some services can overtake others.
Well yes, which is why opposition to HS2 was so asinine. The entire point was to provide a segregated route for express trains because quad-tracking the West/East Coast/Midland Mainlines would involve demolishing a lot of houses to widen the corridors (even in towns where the train isn't stopping) and rebuilding stations to accommodate extra lines/platforms. Which would be far more expensive than HS2.
Much of the problem is rising line speeds. A nippy local train can mix with an 80mph express train much easier than a 120mph express train, which is why various stations on the WCML closed in the 2000s when the WCML Route Modernisation pushed speeds up past 100mph - even if the stopping service can peak at 100mph, it spends most of it's time accelerating/decelerating. So the disparity in average speed got larger.
Shoving a slow service in a siding is a dreadful option though. Aside from all your local passengers being sat in a siding, you then have to reverse the train out onto the mainline, and then the driver changes ends again to take it forward. Which only works if you are running a very low timetable. Reversing trains murders your trains-per-hour throughput on a line. Most journeys are local/regional so you want to prioritise your local services (in the UK we do the exact opposite - prioritise long-distance and assume people can drive short trips).
The answer is a dedicated inter-city network (TGV, etc), and then you can dedicated your legacy network to high frequency local services (4+tph), regional trains and freight (which will just match its average speed to mix with other traffic).
Like a lot of EU ideas this one sounds like a good one right now. Once the various multilingual committees have added their six-pennyworth we will have a totally unworkable scheme that will cost loads of Euros and will, therefore, be silently dropped. Ditto the EU chip scheme which recently lost Intel's interest and no other EU company has stepped into the breach have they?
You cannot just replace Google overnight as they are too far ahead of any other search engine (sorry Bing). When people use the web they want the URL of their answer. Google is now accepted as a verb; no one says "shall I bing for it" do they?
And the downside of the udm14 approach, effective though it is at the moment, is that you're just asking Google nicely not to return AI results. If enough people use it, Google will either remove the option, or repurpose it to return the results they want you to see. No matter what any politicians try and do, companies like Google will always find a loophole to work around it, it's just a giant game of whac-a-mole.
I use the Brave search engine* in my primary browser, and Google in the secondary. So most of the time I use Brave but sometimes randomly Google. Both of them work well enough for general stuff, however they will both have that "no, that isn't what I wanted" problem. l simply try the other and will normally get the result I wanted.
I was using a temporary laptop at work today. I was on a call with a colleague and I "googled" something we were discussing. I sort of zoned out of the conversation a little, confused. Why was I getting such crap results? Took me a few seconds to spot that I had also instinctively scrolled past the normally blocked ads.
A pint (at your own expense) for everyone who immediately realised the significance of the first part. Those who didn't, try bing'ing it (at your own mental expense)...
*Brave use an independent index according to their website, the results do seem to differ from others.
The add button used to be in Firefox's search settings by default, so I guess what this means is we're part way through the frog boiling process. What usually happens is the setting (therefore the add button) disappears completely.
Also, the big news is that tab groups are here... the ones they got rid of in 2016.
But it's either Firefox or a Chromium based browser, so Firefox it is.
I think we need to rethink what a search engine is for. At least a quarter of my "searches" are actually questions that I use an AI for instead. The rest - it's a nuisance getting decent results. I don't want adverts most of the time. But the Google AI responses are for the most part useless.
I'm seeing Bing's results about as good as Google's now. Not because it's getting better (it isn't), but because Google is getting worse.
> let me know if/when it becomes reliable.
Good gods. *Horrified expression*
I am AI abstainer, a refusenik. I don't use it for anything at all ever, and I do not intend to. There is nothing here I want.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c15q5qzdjqxo
If you're happy with it, then this method is probably not for you.
It's a lot more reliable and quicker than googling. And it really does save time. Just like with googling, you need to discard the wrong answers. So you need to have some subject matter knowledge or you'll get nowhere.
However it is getting better [AI]. I find more and more that it can save a considerable amount of time doing what I'd call "drudgery" on the internet. Or, it saves time proofreading a document not just for grammar errors but for inconsistencies.
AI is a genuinely useful tool that overall is a good thing. And no, I didn't write or check this post with AI. My grammar checker is suggesting that I remove the word "really" from the second sentence and that I put a comma after However in the second paragraph. I will ignore it.
AI is no different from "real" intelligence. If another person tells you something, you don't automatically assume they're infallible, do you?
I was shopping the other day - in an actual brick and mortar shop, I was looking at electric shavers. I looked at the selection and the prices, then I asked my AI assistant to "compare Remington, Braun, Philips". It gave me a one page digest which seemed to be helpful.
If you ask someone who has proven to be an expert in whatever field you're asking about, you usually get very good and correct information. If they're not sure of the answer, they'll tell you which parts they aren't sure of.
AI is too good at sounding totally confident of its answers, regardless of whether the answers are actually correct. It is very good at "seeming".
I've asked it about things I do know a lot about, and the answer looks good... but part of it is entirely wrong and in the same overconfident tone of "AI knows what AI'm doing" as the rest of the answer. It's harder to know what part to check, when it's all "confidently correct" all the way through.
If AI is NOT infalliable then why is it being sold as the be all & end all of finding answers ???
If I want an answer that is a best guess ... then I can make that guess and KNOW that it is possibly not 100% correct. !!!
No AI states that the answer you are getting is a 'Best guess', it is stated as the 'Answer' to your question !!!
It is NOT good enough to make some vague statements that the AI may create 'hallucinations' [Lies], equally it is NOT good enough that I am expected to be able to filter out the 'Wrong' answers.
People ARE going to take the answers at 'face value' and there will be consequences that are NOT good !!!
AI is a scam ... 'Clever pattern matching' pretending to be intelligence !!!
More fool you IF you accept this now, as the end result will be all Search and knowledge queries will be 'Best guesses' pretending to be truth.
How is going backwards an improvement ???
:)
What it's "being sold as", I frankly neither know nor care. I assume its evangelists are trying to make money, and to that end will talk it up as much as they can get away with in the moment. Plus ca change.
I don't expect it to be infallible. I know it will get, to put it kindly, confused sometimes. I'm not looking to have lengthy conversations that will deepen my understanding of the world or human nature with it. I don't think that would be valuable. Nor would I put any reliance on its opinions about controversial topics, or its understanding of history.
But sometimes none of that matters. Sometimes what I want is a summary of what to look for and what to expect in a particular product. Or a summary of some celebrity career, or the year of the Boxing Day Tsunami. For questions like that, it's handy to have this "friend" whose recollection is second to none, even if its intelligence and motivation are both pretty suspect.
But it is too easy typing my queries into the Search box on Firefox and Safari. I haven't bothered to figure out if I can make ChatGPT an option or use an equivalent of "!g" in DDG to force use of a different search engine.
I kind of understand the author's reluctance to give in to AI but I felt the same way about using the little microphone button on Safari when searching because the first time I tried it many years ago it didn't always understand what I said especially with technical search terms so it was too frustrating. I recently went back to it and man is that one heck of a lot easier than trying to type search terms on a phone's keyboard. I used speech for other things for a long time but for some reason those initial issues 10+ years ago blinded me to the idea of ever trying it again in Safari lol
The EU's web index looks suspiciously like a pre-search censorship filter. And if it wasn't designed as one, that will still be how it is used.
Plus, we don't want regional limits on search unless we choose them in an options menu. The net should not be viewed as national infrastructure but as international infrastructure by default.
Distributed search is actually a lot more flexible and much more useful that was previously mentioned as it dodges all of the blocks and censorship that website based search engines are subject to.
The search extensions are useful, but by now we really should be able to choose one or more contextualisations for our searches. There are loads more options search engines could offer, particularly combining with metadata on web pages. There is no reason why we cannot be searching dynamically generated web pages. We should have persistent search options too. The search engnes we have remain rudimentary. Very much v.1.0.
If you want good results, ALL the search engines have to censor some results. Otherwise you'd get lists of dictionaries, spam from every spammer that matched your keywords, and other completely junk results that most people these days don't see... due to "censorship" as you might call it.
I had a friend who would insist that manipulating people is a good thing. You act how they expect, you act intentionally to put them at ease, you act to calm them down or inform them - and so you are "manipulating" them.
I called him an asshole because he couldn't differentiate between treating people decently, and *manipulating* them to do what seemed to make them feel good but hurt them in the long (medium) run in order to obtain his personal desire. (But they felt good about it!)
Overly pedantic. Missed the context. Ambiguities of the English language.
I mostly use SearXNG nowadays (I used to use SearX).
I run my own instance in a Docker at home but often just use https://priv.au/ directly. I have other instances set up as browser search engine options as well, in case some are down.
Funny, with piHole and Ublock I got better results using google.com than your modified search. google.com got me international results while the modified search got me only local results.
Could it be because I've searched for some specific terms rather than asking a question?
Oh, and no AI bullshit in either.
I use search so often (dozens of times a day), and need it to work, so it is easily worth $100 / year to me. Yes, we have been trained to expect search to be free... but free search gets you to the current state of Google Search. You are the product and they have incentive to serve you tons of ads and then sell all your browsing history to facebook.
I've been trying both tonight, and Kagi is still way better than Google with the udm hack because Google search results are deliberately enshittified even before AI gets involved.
If you never search much then sure, just use DuckDuckGo. But I regularly get way better results than DDG or Google from Kagi searches because they are the only search engine that has any incentive to actually give you the best results up front. At work yesterday my boss asked me 'hey, I'm trying to find [x] and not finding anything useful' so I just searched '[x] in Kagi and boom, second result (and the first result was relevant, just not the exact thing he was looking for).
Anyhow, just consider what 'free' search entails while you're blaming this on American capitalism. Who exactly is going to step up in Europe with tens of millions of Euros for free unshittified search? I would certainly like to see this, but not holding my breath.
The Wikipedia page mentions "back of the book" or A to Z indexing (though oddly, to me a least, not KWIC) and metadata indexing.
I never really thought about that aspect of search engines.
The EU idea is I think that by making a distributed (clustered) index available through some reasonable Index query API the search engine ecosystem will diversify with more domain specific engines being developed.
Some of the techniques used in training LLMs might be profitably reused to generate indices that retain more context or even generate categorical metadata from the content.
All search engines but especially Google are producing so much codswallop to the point that even a query that obviously demonstrates an intent to purchase something drops you into a collation of irrelevant and frequently unrelated nonsense topped off with the rancid cherry of Googles AI results.
Much worse and even the great unwashed will stop using it. I reckon Polloi would be a fantastic name for a decent engine and instead of Googling something one might hoi it.. :)
..the heavy shift towards corporate search manipulation means that even without AI slop, we already seem to have lost the will to produce independent, useful content or services. It's just not worth creating a blog or an independent shop on the internet today, since only global-scale productions are visible to users.
I'm not sure that the EU is in a position to reverse that tide...
Been using Brave and Mojeek increasingly, when the Bing/Google scrapers regurgitate shit.
If this UDM14 thing catches on, you can bet the Chocolate-Flavoured-Shit Factory will find a way to re-enshittify it. So I won't be removing the above pair from my toolbar any time soon.
Mind you, the AI summary can be useful for some searches, so what I'd really like is a widget to click, which brings it up. Deffo not displayed by default.
I stopped using Google search about a decade ago. Not as a protest or anything, I was doing a lot of coding work, and I found DuckDuckGo's bangs so useful, I just ended up drifting over to DDG full time. So, I pretty much missed the enshittification of Google Search that everyone is complaining about now.
I did discover a lot of other non-Google search tools in my travels, however, and not all of them are just wrappers for Bing.
For those interested, you can take a look at:
- Andi
- Brave Search
- Dogpile
- Ecosia
- eTools.ch
- Gibiru
- MetaGer
- Mojeek
- OneLook
- Peekier
- Qwant
- SearXNG
- SwissCows
- Whoogle
- Yippy
Some are wrappers, some are aggregrators, some are politically slanted (which doesn't really affect searches for C++ template rules, but does matter if you're looking up politics and/or current events), but if you're not using Google, and Bing goes offline, there are lots of options for you to try.
I use Bing/Edge (I have my reasons) and today I looked for flowchart software (Visio being only for professionals apparently)
Not only did the search return some results but an AI generated image of the search topic was generated for me. If I wanted an image, I'd have specified that - I didn't need an AI image generated, there was no way to stop it generating the image once it started and having delivered the image, there was no way for me to tell it "don't do that again".
It's what made Apple successful.
Steve Jobs said, 'I don't care what users want, users don't know what they want. We'll decide and give them what we know they {need|want}.'
Now every other company sees Apple's success and they're trying the same thing .... badly. Apple, too, is getting much, much worse.
After 35 years of use, Google just whined at me that I now had to declare I was over 18 or it would turn shit off. That meant logging in. So, natch, I left it to turn shit off.
And it did! No more targeted advertising! No more AI summaries! Bugger all enshittification left! Almost a half-decent search engine again!
Thanks for the tip how to add custom search engines with `browser.urlbar.update2.engineAliasRefresh`. I tried adding Wayback Machine that way and it works for stuff like "example.com" as a search term but not "https://example.com" which gets translated into `https://web.archive.org/web/20250000000000*/https%3A%2F%2Fexample.com`, so it doesn't know how to parse the ":" and "/" characters in the search term. Does anyone know a good workaround?
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