Technology

Google begins recommending DuckDuckGo.

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.

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.

Feels good not to care anymore about the unrelenting enshittification of Reddit, Twitter and Google since I switched away from them.

Cool. As if the over-promotion of AI garbage wasn't enough of a reason to stop using it.

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?

Doing this to combat bots like they aren't also using bots to scrape data from the internet is interesting.

I wonder how this affects modified/custom search engines (like udm14).

why no one quotes searx instances? https://searx.space/

or even paid search engines : kagi.

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.

You can use these instead of Google:

1. SearXNG
2. MetaGer
3. Brave
4. Mojeek
5. PriEco
6. SwissCows
7. Yandex {It's really good for Torrenting}
8. LibreX & LibreY {Gives you google search results in a privacy-respecting way Without JavaScript}

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 fucking hate how these companies get so bloated and then start doing whatever the fuck they want.

the widely used programming language to make web pages interactive

I hope we aren't talking forms and input fields, right?

Me, to Google right now:

May I suggest https://mojeek.com/ as a privacy respecting alternative that actually has its own web crawlers and indexers.

Never use google to search. There are many other options and all of them are better than google.

If only I could replace YouTube...

Being a parasite is the Google business model