Google paid a whopping $26.3 billion in 2021 to be the default search engine everywhere

Timely_Jellyfish_2077@programming.dev to Technology@lemmy.world – 548 points –
Google paid a whopping $26.3 billion in 2021 to be the default search engine everywhere
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And it fucking blows now. You don't get shit but ads.

They’re somehow WORSE than duckduckgo nowadays like how? You were the search leader, people used DDG for privacy reasons but they passed you??? Did you forget why you’re a company? It’s because you were the best fucking search engine ever and you decided to sell that title for ads or some shit. Incredible how Google fell off the fucking side of a mountain they themselves built!

Yes, but have you considered, line must go up?

For me it went from "great" to "usable" over the course of a decade or so, and then from "usable" to "worthless" over the course of six months. It's a remarkably awful trajectory.

And DuckDuckGo lacks basic stuff such as keyword exclusion. (It's my main search engine for the last few years after Startpage got bought, but lacking keyword exclusion sucks!)

you can -something , but it isn't full exclusion. It's generally been good enough for me. I agree the full fat version would be nice.

So far I haven't had any luck with -something "soft" exclusions either.

Yea I bailed after they nerfed exclusions and whatnot but not like the others are slam dunks

Kagi is even better than DDG. Google is absolutely horrendous.

It’s interesting, but $120 a year is just too much for me.

The lowest plan is only $54 a year and it’s most definitely worth it for the results.

300 searches a month is just way too little for my usage

When you use 1/10th the searches because you get it all in the very first query your usage goes wayyyy down. even then, you aren't limited to 300 searches. you can go over, you just pay per search. and even with that if you can't do that then just default to DDG then. I found DDG to be terrible, not at all better than Bing by itself, so Kagi was something I tried and immediately fell in love with. It just works. And I don't have to worry about any of my data going anywhere at all, to any advertisers for anything, or for tracking, etc.

I've done 418 searches today and it's still noon. That's ~1254 a month. Even if my searches went down by 90% I'd still be 4.18 times over.

... Kagi was something I tried and immediately fell in love with. It just works.

Does it also work with very specific technical searches? Could it for example search for the behavior of atol when it encounters an alphabetical character? Neither Google, Bing nor DuckDuckGo provide me with an answer. Google doesn't even show cppreference in the top 5.

Sorry I’m having trouble understanding what you’re asking for. You’ve done 418 searches in a single day? That would be 12958 a month so I’m not sure I’m reading your comment correctly.

Does it also work with very specific technical searches?

That’s pretty much exactly what I use it for.

Could it for example search for the behavior of when it encounters an alphabetical character?

I’m not sure what you’re asking here.

My comment wasn’t that clear. 1254 is with a 90% reduction and the example question about atol’s behavior was just an example. I looked it up earlier that day but was unable to find it using Google.

atol is a C/C++ function that takes in a char pointer and returns a long. I was trying to figure out if it would gracefully stop when it encountered non-numeric characters, if it would skip them or if it would cause undefined behavior.

It's pretty wild how Google search has degraded. The push for SEO has really ruined useful results.

Is ddg actually good now? I remember it feeling nearly useless waay back when it was first hitting the scene. Might have to give it a shot again

I'm not a power user, but I've used DDG exclusively for a while now and I often forget that I'm using it. I'd say it's a pretty seamless transition nowadays.

You actually get the results you are looking for without the sponsored links. Sometimes you end up searching for reddit results but that's every search engine.

Not kagi. I haven’t specified Reddit once since switching to kagi. It really is that much better than DDG and Google.

I only use Google if DDG can't find what I'm looking for. Usually Google doesn't either if DDG can't so lately I've been giving up after the DDG results. I can't stand Google anymore. The first page of results is just ads and the next page is all irrelevant nonsense.

Yeah it's so bad, the auto predictions dont even make sense any more.

the auto predictions always give me more words than i need, so i have to type normally, like it wasn't there, or select, hope it doesn't load, and delete the extra words

And when i go to click on an auto prediction it changes it at the last damn second too. That drives me mad

This is my beef with basically all modern interfaces. Stuff changes and moves with just enough of a delay to cause me to miss click. Autocomplete changing recommendations on phones, UI elements shifting on web pages, etc.

I thought i was getting old. I mean, i am, but this just enough delay miss-clicks make me feel even older

This has been something so frustrating that nobody seems to talk about. They really need to provide autofill that only adds the one next word, rather than two or three. Because otherwise, the autofill becomes useless.

And they want to force us to whitelist youtube from adblockers.