Google gets its way, bakes a user-tracking ad platform directly into Chrome

Rimu@piefed.social to Technology@lemmy.world – 950 points –
Google gets its way, bakes a user-tracking ad platform directly into Chrome
arstechnica.com

If you can, use Firefox.

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Duck duck go has become a pretty good viable alternative to google using it full time now.

I’ve been using it as my main search engine for around a year now. I accidentally used google today to look up “best screwdriver sets” and the results were all ads instead of results with screwdriver set reviews. I put the same thing in DuckDuckGo and immediately got relevant results.

Googled the pirate bay and it wouldnt.

Unless the first link after a link to the wiki, www. piratebayorg.org is the correct place to go..

Duckduckgo first result was the correct result

Odd. I just tried to google "pirate bay" and the top result was correct. Personalized results?

I use it for everything except maps, there is no real alternative to Google maps as far as I know

Magic Earth is neat

I will check it but I doubt it will be as good for a rural european city as Google maps is.

Have you tried open street map? The geography nerds building that have a surprisingly up to date and high quality map of the rural midwestern region I live in so you might be pleasantly surprised

Maps

Which is getting worse now too.
It now searches "related" locations to what you searched for to show you more bought ads for locations instead of what you looked for originally. Get ready for the slow crawl of enshitification of maps now too.

Their maps are pretty bad, there are better alternatives although it can depend on your region. Navigation and POI search wise though they still seem the best to me.

37 upvotes for a completely off-topic comment. Yay!

Interest of avoiding Google's ad platform which is arguably more invasive you should use a browser in search engine that is not developed by Google thus use duck duck go. I mean it's at least tangentially related.