M*crosoft's search engine is borderline unusable

renzev@lemmy.world to Mildly Infuriating@lemmy.world – 1449 points –

It's impressive how duckduckgo manages to be so much better than bing despite being a frontend for bing

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Oh my god that's amazing. Instructions on how to do what you're literally doing, dead internet theory is so correct. Instructions for robots by robots

Unpopular opinion: dead internet is not only real, but GOOD. Once robots get good enough to autonomously sign up for websites and make convincing posts, this will force us humans to go actually outside, make friends, form deep social relationship, and build lasting, resilient communities. Meanwhile on the internet, websites that are willing to allow AI content for money will eventually die out due to lack of actual users. The only remaining websites will be run by individuals and organizations with non-profit motives, and a strict human-only policy with verification based on word-of-mouth / invite system.

The economy was always bots buying from other bots...

this will force us humans to go actually outside, make friends, form deep social relationship, and build lasting, resilient communities

There is no chance it goes that way, how is talking to people outside even an option for someone used to just being on the internet? Even if the content gets worse, the basic mechanisms to keep people scrolling still function, while the physical and social infrastructure necessary for in person community building is nonexistent.

Enshittified internet and software made me no longer obsessed with technology, and instead I focused on other hobbies. And it also made my socialize more.

I'm a geek, always around computers, gaming, tinkering, etc.

Once I moved for work, to Spain, didn't know the language. My laptop broke, like, when opening it, the plastic was fatigued and the screen just bent.

I was broke, expensive training... Couldn't replace it before a few months.

So I went to the bar of the inn I was starting at. And just, tried to pick up some words.

Long story short, after a while I knew everyone in town, had many friends, and after work, laptop or not, I would go to the bar. I got fluent in Spanish too.

Happiest time of my life. I don't think my mental health has ever been as good as back then.

I'm extremely wary and nervous about how disruptive LLMs can/will be but one relief is just getting an answer directly for things instead of wading through page after page of SEO optimized BS. Just really nice when you can get a quick answer and get back to the things you want to be doing.

I suppose the AI overlords will screw that up somehow too but IMO it's at a brief moment of usefulness.

If the answer is even correct. Friend tried to use it to see what laptops with 4k screens cost and all 3 options were in fact, not 4k at all because the AI is dog shit :)

No that's very true, I had it look up leather repair shops not too long ago and it listed six completely fictional shops with fully fleshed out trip-advisor style blurbs for each one. It was hilariously convincing and a complete waste of my time. But it does seem like that happens less and less lately.

Thing is, you never have any clue whether the AI is telling you something even remotely true unless you go behind it and trawl through six pages of shitty SEO-optimized bullshit anyway. So you can either take its word at face value and potentially be completely wrong, or else just do the research yourself anyway and ignore the AI answer.

Personally, I choose the second. I find it to be less frustrating if I just assume the AI is wrong.

This is kinda how I've come to look at it. You cannot ask questions of fact to a machine that works in probabilities.

Boooo, this is just diet accelerationism! Let me have genuine online connections in addition to my IRL ones.

Okay, totally off topic...what is it with this annoying trend of censoring a company/name with an asterisk when it's a subject of ire? It just bugs me - and not in a way that focuses my anger to Microsoft.

With stuff like Tesla and Twitter, it can keep away the weird nerds who search those terms in hopes of white-knight-sealioning a conversation into oblivion. I think it just became part of the lexicon.

The inverse of this is that people who filter out specific words in their feeds will be tricked into seeing it. You get to piss off 2 groups of people by doing it!

Sealioning?

Have you ever heard a sea lion? They're super loud and they all get together and bark.

https://amp.knowyourmeme.com/memes/sea-lioning

Sea-Lioning is an Internet slang term referring to intrusive attempts at engaging an unwilling debate opponent by feigning civility and incessantly requesting evidence to back up their claims. The term was coined in September 2014 by anti-GamerGate Internet users to mock perceived online discussion tactics employed by GamerGate supporters.

I gotta be honest, the sea lion is not the bad guy in this comic. Lady randomly says some racist shit, and a member of the group she's being racist against calls her out for being racist. And then the fact that the sea lion called the racist out is apparently justification for the initial racist statement.

Sea lion is slang for a type of behavior a person exhibits not an immutable characteristic of the person like the color of their skin. They didn't have to prove the behavior because the behavior expressed IS the behavior.

Racism justifies harassment and home invasion? I don't think I can necessarily agree with that. Consequences, yes. But harassment? I'll have to think about it.

The point Malki was making, I think (and the way I take it) is less about the purpose or content of the discourse and more about the harassment veiled in false civility as a means of silencing discussion.

There's also an element of Person C inserting themselves into a private conversation between Person A and Person B, even if that conversation is being held in a public place.

Pretend he's not a sea lion, but a conservative, and you'll get the intended effect.

Racism justifies harassment and home invasion?

You realize internet sealions don't actually invade homes?

You realise the harassment stops if you don't respond?

I realize that. The person above seemed to think that everything in this clearly allegorical comic is somehow intended to be taken literally.

Racism justifies harassment and home invasion?

Yeah. Not gonna cry over what the victims of racism do to racists.

and more about the harassment veiled in false civility as a means of silencing discussion.

How is the sea lion silencing discussion? They weren't discussing anything, they were having a racist circlejerk. The racist lady said a racist thing and the sea lion invited discussion by asking, "Why did you say that racist thing?" and then they refused to actually explain why they're racist against sea lions, treating it as self-evident that being racist against sea lions is correct and thus that it is unreasonable to question it.

Pretend he’s not a sea lion, but a conservative

He can't choose not to be a sea lion. This is kind of incoherent. "Pretend he's not black, but a conservative." This sea lion could also be conservative, that doesn't really have anything to do with the fact that he's being criticized for immutable properties he was born with, not for anything of substance.

Again sea lioning is a type of behavior not a type of person or being. As a form of humor they rather than have a person embody the behavior be a literal sea lion because whimsical tension between the metaphorical sea lion also being an actual sea lion is funny.

That just doesn't work, because the sea lion's behavior in the comic is entirely reasonable, and it is the other characters who are being unreasonable. If the point of the comic is that the sea lion's behavior is bad, they should have actually made the sea lion do something bad instead of call out someone being racist against him

How would you have written this comic to get the idea across, then?

I literally already explained that in the comment you're replying to. The sea lion should have done something bad to deserve being criticized.

Not gonna cry over what the victims of racism do to racists.

Eh...I dunno. I'm not going to tone police anyone, and consequences for bad actions are definitely good, but do two very-wrongs make a kinda-right? I'm not sold.

[the rest]

Look...if you don't vibe with the comic, that's fine. It's just obviously not about all the stuff that you seem to think it's about.

It’s just obviously not about all the stuff that you seem to think it’s about.

But it literally is? You're the one coming up with weird interpretations about "what if it was actually about xyz"

What is actually happening in the comic is that a character is being racist and the victim of that racism is portrayed as being wrong and annoying for calling out the racism. That's literally what's happening in the comic. It doesn't require any kind of gymnastics or interpretation, that's the surface level reading of what is occurring in the comic.

No. What is actually happening in the comic is that a character is having a discussion with another person (not a racist conversation, because sea lions are not sentient beings despite what is about to happen). Treating it as anything more than that is reading something into the story not intended by the original comic. Not everything is so literal, particularly with Malki comics.

not a racist conversation, because sea lions are not sentient beings despite what is about to happen

sea lions literally are sentient beings in the context of the comic. the only justification the comic gives for why sea lions are bad requires them being sentient beings so that they can speak up against random racist tirades about them.

are you literate

I'm a simple man. You go into ad hominem territory, I leave the conversation. See ya.

It's mocking the type of people that try to turn anything and everything into some sort of formal debate when it was just a casual conversation then act like they've won some sort of argument when you don't engage.

It conveys "I have such a disdain for that thing that I'm asterisking its name like it was a slur or swear word".

I'm not a big fan either, even if you can find some secondary roles for that (as keeping someone from finding it, like ilinamorato exemplified). It distracts the reader from what is being said to the author's personal opinion about what is being said.

It's ironic, except for when we're talking about the Fr*nch. It's self aware humor that you're being ridiculous. The tone it's supposed to convey in situations like thisis that you're being hyperbolically obtuse.

Yeah, that Franch dipping sauce in Breaking Bad was crazy!

Honestly, it's better than: fck, blly and s*icide

Those are generally used for bypassing filters on TikTok and Instagram

But like, come on man, no matter how much you censor it I know the word and I get the message. Because that's why you wrote it, you want me to read and understand it

And here we are, not on TikTok or Instagram, and still seeing it

speak of the devil and he shall appear

And to add insult to injury...

People are going to see this, so here's the answer.

Logitech's web UI is crap. See that tiny, unlabled triangle on the list on the left?

Click it and pick your OS version.

Then you get the download.

...huh. TIL.

The last time I had to download the unifying software it was more obvious than that.

Is softonic actually malware or an unreliable repository that may contain malware? I’ve never actually clicked in lol

I unknowingly downloaded some software from there when I was a kid, and, from what I remember, it came bundled with some sort of update manager or something. Even if it's not outright malware, I would wager most people who are looking to download logitech's utility don't want some irrelevant third-party garbage on their system. So AT BEST it's crapware / bloatware

They had some issues with their downloader in the past but that thing has been canned a long time ago. It's not a great site but it isn't malware.

That's the beauty of the internet. There's always a competitor. I don't have to use someone who had a bad reputation at one point but is fine now. I can just use someone else.

My elderly dad fell for something similar trying to call HP support, he googled the number and the top result was some bullshit. They had him set up remote access and compromised all his data. Old man had to reset everything.

He called me saying what happened, I had him shut down and unplug. I recovered what I could but he lost a lot of data.

This shit should be illegal. Like, I'm sure it is technically but there shouldnt be unofficial sponsored results above legitimate sources.

In a perfect world, they'd be legally/financially responsible for any ads they serve up like that.

Yeah… I get that you pay for ads, but ads should never masquerade themselves as legitimate content.

It's just a mirror for software that is or was free. Though it's been around for years, and hasn't been relevant or needed by most people for a long time now so it very well could contain viruses and shit these days.

How is Softonic still allowed to advertise it's literally Malware

Just so I understand. I should not be downloading anything from there?

I clicked a link just yesterday, but something felt off so I backed out and went to the MSI page to download afterburner.

No never. Softonic repackages existing programs with a malware bundle.

Why is that even allowed and why are search engines not held accountable.

Like piracy bad, but this is cool I guess.

It's all free software, so nobody cares because they don't stand to gain any money from fixing it. #CapitalismRocks

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Softonic be like every app you want we have it, even the non exist ones. But once you installed our apps you already have made a pact with the devil

Does anyone know exactly what malware they are serving? I'm tempted to run it though virustotal.

It's not malware it's more adware. At least it used to be

Wow reading through these comments makes me a little sad. Most people still don't know jack about search engines or how they differ under the hood, or eve just how to add them into your browser search bar. Looks like all the effort I put into that that simple search engine guide was in vain.

Well that was a spectacular read in your link, keep calling attention to it, 'cause it's gonna be a constant drip-drip-drip of people finding out. I didn't know, but starting today, I'm gonna experiment with SearXNG as my primary search engine, see how that goes!

Thanks

Yacy seems to be what I want but I am worried about the content that would get indexed

Thanks for making such an interesting guide! I'll read through this and hopefully learn more about search engines and what would work the best for me.

Not to defend Bing in anyway, but I typed logitech unifying software and the first result is the download page on logitechs site.

I am not doubting you, but why is it so different for me? I see non of the ???? section, no ads, just a link at the top like you would expect.

What are you using or doing different?

Do you have uBlock or some similar ad blocker installed?

EDIT: I went and looked myself. I do have an ad-blocker installed. I don't see the ad. But I do see more noise than OP (desktop, Firefox):

  • There's a set of steps at the top left telling me to download and install the software, which is what OP was complaining about.

  • At the top right, there's a large, blue button with a link that guesses incorrectly that I want to know about Logitech Unifying Receiver Pairing, and just sends me to another Bing search.

  • Beneath that, there are a list of several questions that Microsoft incorrectly thinks I might be wanting to task and their answers.

  • Then there are two "Explore more" links linking me to pages describing how to pair with the software. One appears to link to "logi.com" with apparently is a Logitech business support page that links to the software, albeit only the Mac version, which I'd guess isn't what OP wanted.

  • Back on the left, I have what appears to be an AI spam question-answer site at thewindowsclub.com and another page on "how to unify" at robots.net.

  • Beneath that, I have a link to the Logitech download section. So it's in my top results and on my laptop, visible on the first screen of results, though beneath some not-really-desirable stuff.

The screenshot is from Microsoft Edge running in Windows 10 (virtual machine) with no/little browsing history and no account connected. I'm hypothesizing here, but maybe these are the reasons:

  • You don't see the ??? section because you're not on Edge. Bing AI only works on edge (it checks your user agent)
  • You don't see the ad because you have an adblocker

Just tried it in Edge, with no ad block.

The first link was what I was searching for. None of that extra stuff showed up. The ad (for something unrelated) was in a column in the right.

There is no account associated, little browsing history. This machine was completely wiped 2 weeks ago.

I think the difference is, I am not in the US.

I would give startpage.com a shot i find it works even better than duckduckgo

Thanks for the tip! I use startpage already, it's pretty good. From what I understand, it uses Google's search index under the hood.

There's also Brave search which (claims to be) privacy friendly and (claims to) have their own independent search index, so you could give that a try as well. I wouldn't say it's better that startpage or google tho

and (claims to) have their own independent search index

AFAIK their index is very small, so they use Bing to supplement it. Most search engines and voice assistants that aren't Google use Bing in some way, since it's the largest search index that has an official public API that anyone can use.

I’ve been using Brave search for a while as a daily driver. It’s usually pretty decent, but I fall back to google when looking for commercial stuff like local stores and products.

Damn I'd love to use it but it does not have my country as an option to select region so pretty much useless to me sadly. Stuck to DDG abd google/bing it seems.

still looks better than the average Google search

Borderline?

There's still DuckDuckGo, or Kagi if you are rich.

Doesnt Duck use bing?

Yes, and DDG has really been degrading over the last few months in quality of results imo.

I noticed this as well. It's a shame as I still use it as my daily search driver.

I'll be honest, DDG has never blown me away and I've been using it for roughly 5 years. It's not awful or anything, but maybe once every month or two I need to resort to Google because it can't find something. I'm absolutely willing to sacrifice some quality for privacy in the general case, though.

Yes, it has never been the best in terms of relevance or depth of index. But lately when I do searches for something like "cherry shrimp aquarium water quality requirements" I've been overwhelmed by AI-written SEO blogs. Where google still pulls up results from forums, reddit, other relevant actual humans talking.

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Hey now, that malware has paid to be the top result! Probably using the proceeds scammed out of somebody who downloaded it.

💸 Microsoft 🤑 got 💰 paid 🫰 so... they managed to come out ahead of this whole ordeal just fine.

The rest of us can go suck a bag of dicks for all they care.

Stract.com open search engine a guy built in his basement. It is not perfect but feels like Google used to in the late 90s, when you had real results

Mainstream search engines (google and bing) are completely useless. Alternatives ftw.

sadly it seems that most other search engines (like ddg) can be quite lacklustre in their image results

DDG image search feels a lot loke Google image search 20 years ago. Absolutely wild stuff that isn't even related, or just straight up porn in the reaults.

It’s gone really downhill ever since co-pilot

It’s hard to call it better than Google now

Is it still good for porn, at least?

Yall use a search engine to search for porn? Like you don’t just open a private tab, go to PornHub and then click something.

No :’(

Arbitrarily it will cut off your search and now they just add irrelevant “search for this next” garbage to make it look less barren

Damn is it ugly...

That's disgusting.

As someone who uses dark mode on everything and Dark Reader, using that looks like staring into a headlamp. I wonder if Bing actually has native dark mode support if the browser requests it with prefers-color-scheme?

goes to look

Nope. Need Dark Reader.

Yeah, I use dark reader too. I opened this up in "private" mode as to have non modified page to display.

tbf it seems to be a common issue with search engines atm. brave also has the stupid ai response topmost, and startpage without adblock pushes in so many sponsored results that you need to scroll to get to anything else

I feel like most commenters here would think "no one wants the stupid ai response", but obviously some people like it or they wouldn't do it. I think if your searches are more general kind of "can I catch chicken pox from chickens" type questions it might be helpful ?

Except AI is famously unreliable with the accuracy of its answers.

AI: to catch chicken pox from chickens rub live chicken on face

Hm. Let's see what I get.

And here's another one for good measure:

That's true, but I think people still appreciate it... like it's accurate enough, enough of the time, for people to find it helpful.

That's why it's dangerous. If it were wrong 99% of the time people wouldn't trust it. But being right most of the time risks people depending on it and acting on bad information which can have severe consequences.

My point is, it seems like moat people disagree with you given that search providers put this stuff in their results.

Most states charge a regressive sales tax. By your logic, the fact that people don't refuse to pay sales tax at the register proves that people enjoy it!

Nonsense. Your metaphor is not analogous.

Sophisticated tech firms do extensive analysis with reference groups, A/B testing, et cetera.

Guaranteed, they've found that they get better engagement with their product through these AI results.

This might shock you but a group of 14 year olds complaining on Lemmy is not an indicative sample of opinions.

group of 14 year olds complaining on Lemmy

I can't roll my eyes harder, dude. Just drop it and move on. It's okay to disagree with people and not try to fucking debate them about it.

And they force windows users to not use chrome

They do?

they try to make you not download chrome

True, I've even agreed to switch to Edge before realising what I've done.

At least what you are looking for, is on the first page. With Google you get half a page of ads not relevant to your search, and two pages of SEO garbage, before you get to a relevant search.

Kagi

This is the first time I've seen Kagi, I'll check them out. I've been pretty happy with SearxNG.

I really love Kagi, it's been worth the money for me!

I can block results, re-order result priority, enable or disable any feature I want, and their AI summary feature is actually good and is locked behind a click (Quick Answer) so it doesn't trigger on every search. Also obviously no ads and no tracking.

The only thing bing is good for is watching porn and I will stand by that opinion.

How?

Just do a video search for whatever your kink is and turn off safe search

Oh I thought it has some hidden proxy feature to access porn in workspace.

"Do you guys not have phones?"

We prefer the big display wall at work, that's the point of workplace. Anyone can watch anything on phone anywhere, why would I go to work for that?

If you are interested maybe look at this post I made comparing search engines

Thank you so much for this! I did not know Kagi was doing that, and I was about to cave in and start trying it out!

I don't get malware and AI on firefox, but uBlock count's continually up. I know this behavior only from trash dump sites.

SearXNG is also amazing. The only reason I don't use it more is because it doesn't have an integration into the URL bar in Firefox.

Can't you add it manually?

Yes, but you may need to mess with about:config. I just added Jira as a search engine so I can type ticket numbers.

Dude. When you're looking at whatever search just right click in the url bar and there will be an option to add that search engine. Then in settings you can make it your default if you wish.

The reason I don't use SearXNG is because the public instances always seem to be slow and or broken.

So, did it never occur to you that you can manually add custom search engine into Firefox?

Settings>search>manage alternate search engines>add search engine

we got woogle which is a frontend for google

It does, look it up in the addon marketplace- been working great for me

If you know you want Logitech software, why not go directly to the Logitech site and search there?

Not sure about Logitech, but most other companies where I need to download driver software it’s an absolute crapshoot. Search engines used to be good for implementing complex search on your site without need to spin up a custom search logic yourself.

Google still have an API and SDK for if you want to use Google Search on your own site.

Another problem with everyone doing a search engine is that they can have a widely-disparate featureset, and I'm very unlikely to spend enough time on any one site to familiarize myself with a given featureset. Maybe one or two sites, like github.com. But if I'm just looking for a download of software for a given product? Nah.

Maybe if everyone used local Search Engine X -- like Harvest or something. Or if everyone agreed on a search syntax to support.

Google also used to, in their early days, sell a search appliance that companies could use locally to provide searching. I'd guess that that probably contains enough trade secrets and stuff now that they don't want to hand it out any more.

Most of the time, a search engine can get me to the relevant page faster than it takes to click through someone's website.

Which I suppose might be something of a damning statement on the web design industry.

This is rapidly becoming less and less true unfortunately

Given the "unfortunately", I assume that you're talking about search engines becoming worse rather than product manufacturer sites getting better.

I use Kagi; they're commercial and don't do ads, so they don't have the malware ad stuff. They do have some generative AI feature to try to answer questions directly, but I don't think that generative AIs are nearly at the point where they're better than looking at search results, and I can turn that off.

If I weren't using Kagi...I don't personally want to create an account with a search engine that doesn't have a no-log policy. But some people don't care, and sometimes with an account, you can turn off some features. So for some search engines, I bet that that gets the AI-generated answers out of the way. Google has a lot of hard-to-find parameters that you can insert into your search URL to toggle search functionality without needing an account -- in Firefox, by editing your quick search bookmark, and while I don't know if that includes stuff like AI-generated answers and "featured snippets", which appears to be the latest thing, I'd guess that Google might have a way to toggle things.

There's spam -- maybe a year back, when I was using Google more, I remember Google really melting under a shit-ton of AI-generated spam sites. I mean, a significant proportion of my searches included not-very-useful-and-sometimes-wrong AI-generated text sites in the top results. Was the first time in a long time that Google was starting to lose to the spammer crowd. I haven't been using Google much since, but the few times I've hit it, I haven't seen that, so my impression is that they've managed to push the spammers back.

In some cases -- and I realize that a lot of people just aren't going to bother with this -- the GreaseMonkey addon permits pages to be mutated, and people often write scripts to hide unwanted content.

On the company website side of things getting better, which I assume isn't what you mean...

Well, the world does appear to have adopted some conventions for navigation. I don't like all of them, but at least it makes various sites somewhat more predictable.

To find software associated with a product, it's almost always possible to go to the support section, maybe select your region of the world. Then sometimes you choose a product category, sometimes just search the product catalog directly. For very small companies, sometimes there's no search, just a list of products. Sometimes the search can be very obnoxious, like requiring one to look up a model number, but that's in a minority of cases. That will take one to the product page, and then there's usually some sort of links to firmware and manuals and such. It's not common these days to require registration to get access to them.

Another downside is that it's very common for companies to want to have large promotional images and sometimes video on their main page and sometimes product pages. That's obnoxious if I'm on a slow cell link at the time.

So...it's not terrible. But a search engine can generally get me to the relevant page in the top results, without needing to traverse the rest of the website.

Finally, while it's not an issue with Logitech, it's not always obvious where a company lives. For the US, yeah, it's usually companyname.com. But that's not always true. For the UK -- and sometimes I buy products from abroad -- it's often in .co.uk. In the US, due to an infamous trademark fight, "nissan.com" is owned by a small auto company who the much-larger auto manufacturer tried to take the domain from. After an acrimonious fight, the small company is now determined that Nissan Motors is never getting the domain, so Nissan Motors is at nissanusa.com. Sometimes companies spin things off or sell divisions; Thinkpad used to be an IBM product line, until it was sold to the Chinese Lenovo. And one of the more-convenient ways to find a company's domain name is, well...to hit a search engine. Yeah, I know some domains off the top of my head -- kernel.org, microsoft.com, apple.com. But for most manufacturers of most products, I don't. The domain name is still useful, helps me validate that this is an official site. But it's not necessarily the ideal way to get there. So if you're potentially already going to hit a search engine to find the company domain, you might as well just jump directly to the product support page.

I typed the URL that was literally printed in the packaging of a [new] Logitech mouse, and the page didn't exist! Like, how?!‽

Sometimes brand websites are done well and you find what you're looking for within a few clicks, but more often than that, the website will be a horrendous experience.

Google search results used to usually bring up the direct link to the download page on that brand's website. Pretty much as the first search result.

To be fair, that also was a time where brand websites were really bad.

5 seconds later

Welcome to Logitech global! It looks like you’re searching for this article that talks about how Logitech is the global leader in ending climate change and ending world hunger! Here’s a link to our press releases.

OR install it via Chocolatey:

Choco Install Unifying

WinGet is slowly replacing Chocolatey :)

I know both but didn't know this. Why and how is it?

Winget is built-in, doesn’t require an elevated command prompt, and will actually update stuff installed from outside of winget if you want.

I use chocolatey for some kubernetes tools (fluxCD and helm) because they get updated a little bit faster (like a day or less) but it’s pretty much been made obsolete for my use.

That being said, if my job didn’t require me to use windows, I’d probably just use NixOS full time.

Because we have been conditioned for 30 years to use a search engine

I've been using my own searxng instance for a few months now and my god I'm never going back.

Which search engines do you use with it? Google? Bing? Something else?

All of them.

It shows you which ones "agree" on a given entry, so you can tune it to your tastes.

According to the docs, SearxNG supports 209 search engines, and 85 are enabled by default (https://docs.searxng.org/user/configured_engines.html). I guess you mean you're using those defaults?

Does it work well out-of-the-box? I've been meaning to test it myself!

No, I did change it, IIRC I enabled a lot of the ones that weren't by default.

I haven't felt the need to use anything else in months, so I'd say it's very much fit for purpose.

You can always check out one of the instances available for free use to see how it performs.

I wouldn't say it's borderline unusable tbh...

The first adware result is blocked with any ad blocker, the fact you see it means you might not have your ad blocker on, or disabled in incognito mode.

The second and third copilot bullshit sections can be toggled off from any search result page, on the sidebar settings there's a toggle.

I do appreciate the bing rewards thing, basically every few weeks I get a gift card because you earn points by using bing

Um, acktually, all you have to do to use the product successfully is to follow my bespoke instruction set that I posted to the premiere federated platform where I carefully enumerated the steps necessary to…..hey wait why are you running away from me I’m actively helping you!!!!!

Everything you’ve proposed as an easy fix would not apply to the vast majority of end users; the target audience.

Also…gift cards? Wtf. Makes this comment sound fake af.

it's not fake, bing rewards has been a thing for many years. It's literally just using bing to search things, each search gives you points, and then you redeem giftcards (amazon, uber, etc)

I guess most here don't particularly care, but the points mechanic it's nice

I don’t think anyone was suggesting otherwise.

“THIS JUST IN!, credit cards offer reward points to soften the effects of data mining on individuals. It highlights the advantages of using custom lubricant on the broomsticks they are fucking you in the ass with.”

Some say it feels nice.

Here's the UBlock filters for a better experience, on this day, 12-9-2024. Sadly, the results are still bing results, and the MS data vacuum is still in effect. (there's a chance this get's filtered cause of all the urls, so if there's nothing below, oh well, woulda been nice, huh.

edit, image now

Also try to use Firefox (or a fork of Firefox) together with uBlock origin.

what’s even the point of a download link if you don’t have a guide that tells you how to click the link

If only they could make a functioning store. Laterally the only os now where you still have to go to a third party website for software.

Ugh. Do you really want that though? They do have a store don't they? Just no one wants to use it.

Debian has had a browseable catalog since forever but it's still waaay better to just go to a third party's website and see how they say to install whatever thing.

Yeah, but that's just because Debian's software catalog is deliberately full of outdated and/or broken packages. It's like that on purpose. On most other distros native packages trump third-party install scripts any day of the week. On Debian you can just use Nix or Flatpak to get good packages.

Can someone ELI5 how searx works and if it's worth the hassle of hosting? I'm privacy conscious but not paranoid.

Can someone ELI5 how searx works

It sends your search query to a bunch of different existing search engines, and shows you all of the results in one combined page

if it’s worth the hassle of hosting

Personally idk, maybe someone else can provide their opinion about this

Searx (as others have said) is an aggregate of multiple search engines all bundled into one, with very finetuned customization (ie: you can toggle every search option you want or not within each category).

You also don't need to host your own, though I'm not sure what the significance of being self hosted in this case is.

As far as usefulness over other search sites, it's generally better with some caveats. Search engines as a whole are in a pretty awful state, so combining them is better, but still not that good. It does offer some very niche search engines that can be extremely useful when pooled together though, which is nice.

Searx also has some captcha issues that I haven't quite figured out. My understanding is that essentially, search engines don't like when you use their engine without being on their site, and it'll stop working via searx (until you go to the site in question and do the captcha maybe?).

There's also a few different domains for searx with varying degrees of availability as far as what engines they reliably connect to.

All in all, searx is great by comparison to mainstream trash, but it can be a headache to setup, and a headache to maintain. There's a masterlist of searx hosts somewhere, I'll try and see about finding it if someone else doesn't link it.

It scraps other search engines either locally or remotely from someone else's server. I used it for a while, then switched back to duckduckgo. Duckduckgo is what I recommend if you are lazy.

I like kagi more than ddg. It's not free but meh.

It's not free but meh

That is definitely not a "but meh" statement. Who the fuck pays for a search engine? Especially these days when every other aspect of life already requires a subscription?

I mean... you went to Bing to search for a program. That's something that a new or inexperienced user would do, and Bing tried to help. It gave a direct link to the software (a link which I just tested to be working and safe on a virtual machine), it instructed how to do it using the official website, and then as a third option, it gave a link to the website.

I know that a lot of people will automatically assume a site like Softonic is loaded with malware (and I don't have the time to refute all of those claims) but the download they provided of the software was just a mirror of the official download and came with no added malware, spyware, or adware. Use at your own risk, but OP is pretty clearly fearmongering in an attempt to get people to give them internet points.

This is absurd.

Typing "Logitech unifying software download" in the address bar is massively less effort than navigating their shitshow of a site. It's not a sign of inexperience in any way.

Allowing an ad with any third party download is an insane policy, and it is not a legitimate practice at all to use an unreliable third party with a well deserved bad reputation to download software in place of the manufacturer.

Next time just go directly to the domain. You don't need to rely on a search engine for all web navigation, you know.

Sometimes you just can't guess the domain name of a company you know. Also, it doesn't help that most companies website are fucking nightmare to navigate so having the relevant page on the first click is nice too

using a searchengine helps avoid domain squatting phishing. this is why I like domain bar as a search engine. if it's new I search it, if it's a place I've been to before it autocompletes the url.

I have to constantly remind myself that the average user today cannot tell the difference between a search engine and a web browser.

And we have the URL bar pulling double duty as a search engine entry form to thank for that.

I strongly fought for the Omnibar in the mid 2000’s as a pro-user feature and I regret everything. I was wrong.

Yeah but then I would have to navigate logitech's stupid website to find the download button... and then navigate it again, because turns out the software for pairing standard receivers is completely separate from the software for pairing unifying receivers... Sigh... But hey, at least it doesn't force you to make an account!

No joke, I hesitated to even click on the thumbnail. That's what this bullshit modern internet has conditioned me to do.

Bing does not allow for exclusion of specific phrases by using hyphens and quotes. You can put them in your query, but they will be ignored.

Searching for: Topic -TopicSimilar

Is identical to: Topic

is it based on your searches or something? both in the browser with fingerprint protection where it thinks im from Usa and from the one where it detects my correct location the first result is from logi.com. I really hate bing, specially since they started pushing ai, but dunno, doesnt seem like the normal user experience what you are getting.

Your search query is garbage incidentally. Unifying is a "feature" not the name of any particular software. You should have searched for the model of your hardware

...Nnnnno, there is literally a tool from Logitech called "Logitech Unifying Software," which is the applet you need to reassign a Logitech Unifying receiver to a different device.

https://support.logi.com/hc/en-us/articles/360025297913-Unifying-Software

Not as garbage as your critical thinking abilities it would seem.

note how searching for the words logitech unifying don't go to any current release of any software you would actually want to install whereas searching for "logitech" "name of hardware" actually take you to the current software for your actual hardware? Shocking I know.

you’re still butthurt about your downvotes? no one cares lol.

Maybe you should inform Logitech about that?

https://www.logitech.com/en-us/resource-center/what-is-unifying.html

Also your own fucking link says explicitly that you can achieve the feature it describes with Logitech Options Plus! From your own goddamn link

. You can now personalize the experience of your Unifying devices with the powerful Logi Options+ App that lets you customize your supported Logitech devices so you can get more done.

Where are your downloads for that! They don't call it that any longer

It's describing the FEATURE! There are no downloads listed for a feature for a reason... you don't load the actual software for instance "logitechoptions" "logitech options+" "G hub"