Google SEO has homogenized the internet with vapid marketing content. The internet is one big commercial. The reason Reddit got popular was because communities found and shared good content and created more by talking about it. Now ads are disguised as posts and memes.
The internet is getting as bad as radio.
The internet is getting as bad as radio.
Lemmy kinda feels like the 2000's internet and I love it
edit: formatting
i didn't get to experience the 2000s internet and I've been loving lemmy
The whole internet used to be like this and it was lovely.
Let's not romanticize the old web too much. It had its problems too:
Half-done html pages with under_construction.gif or cliparts copypasted from Word. Some went through multiple editors like Frontpage and Dreamweaver which ended up producing spaghetti HTML.
Autoplaying midi from songs probably from Limp Bizkit, Metallica, Blink 182, etc. Did I mention that MIDI volumes count as separate from normal 'Media' volumes, and were often cranked to the MAX?
It was a time when HTML/CSS/JS would chaotically intertwine with proprietary plugins like Flash and ActiveX. "Best viewed from Internet Explorer at 800x600" was a thing. Readability? Accessibility? Forget about it.
You paid by minute on dial-up connection until ADSL appeared. Good luck trying to download that tenchi_muyo_hentai.jpg.
That was more the 90s - the time of things like Geocities - than the 2000s.
By the 2000s there had already been one Internet Boom & Bust and things on the Internet were way more comercialized than is earlier times of handmade sites, pre-CSS webpages and ActiveX components.
Cries in 2001 birth year.
Same
Hello fellow... are we considered as gen-zedders or tail end millennials? Because I have friends born in 97 and they are definitely not Gen Z
Millennials, according to Wikipedia,
The generation typically being defined as people born from 1981 to 1996
After that is Gen Z and Gen Alpha starts somewhere around 2010.
So 1997 would be an older Gen Z
That generational 'designation' has been changed so many times it's not credible.
Gen X was originally they 'children of the baby boomers'. If someone was born in 1981, they were young Gen X for most of their life, now they are told they are 'Millennials'
The older you get, the more you see generational cuttoffs as a load of bullshit.
I grew up around cousins who were all older than me, so I think I was influenced more by 90s culture than most of my peers. I think you and I are the awkward in-between.
Yes this is how I feel as well
1997 is a funny birthyear 😀 on one hand you grow up in "traditionell way" and thus you understand older folks who don’t understand new slang but on the other hand you understand the digital natives who grow up with all that attention grabbing BS.
Yeah, I feel like people born up until around the early 00s still got to experience what life without smartphones & social media was like
For just a few years, yes.
Imagine content creation that was done purely for the fun of creating content and sharing info, albeit with literally zero hope of receiving any money. Better in some ways, worse in others.
this seems perfect
Pretty much.
As soon as people realized you could make money generating content, it all became homogenized shit.
Same thing with video games. I miss the days when people didn't treat them like a job.
Now every gamer thinks and plays like they can go pro, similar to elementary schoolkids on the basketball court thinking they'll go pro.
It just reminds me of early reddit before it was taken over by the dumbs.
Eh, I'd be careful with this sentiment. A significant part of internet's decline comes from people who think of themselves as too smart and rationalize their own nonsense.
And also nothing prevents people who ruined Reddit from coming here, and they do.
It makes me wonder tho: is Lemmy sustainable? I never want to get invested in something like Reddit again when there's no proper and respectful end game for all the communities that make up their lifeblood.
In my experience all good things on the internet come to an end. Usually when big money starts meddling.
The most "2000s internet" I get is me and my internet pals hosting our own websites)
I'm hosting my instance and website in my basement and its awesome
Yeah. I'm noticing when things get too big, undesirables start creeping in.
'Undesirable' in this sense would be people with more money than sense and incredibly low standards for what they spend it on. They are the kinds that are proud to be ripped off and businesses will cater to them over smarter folk.
Yup and hopefully only the beginning. The fediverse is like a better internet without big tech.
Oof, that last sentence hits home.
The internet is one big commercial.
So fucking true.
Thanks, capitalism.
The only REAL replacement I'm still looking for is YouTube. Sure, Peertube and proxy sites for YouTube exist. But the amount of content I am interested in is by dozens of decimals larger an YouTube than on any other alternative combined.
And, yes, of course, the search engine.
I'm hoping that as the fediverse grows it will start to accrue enough capacity to sustain a strong video hosting platform like peertube.
Social media has a network effect where the more people use it the more attractive it gets, and because the fediverse can interconnect between different formats I see it as inevitable that eventually it will take over, because it can manage a much more comprehensive network than any centralised site.
Once it becomes more mainstream, server capacity should increase until it can handle the world's video sharing as well.
I'm still skeptical whether the fediverse will get as big as the current social media now. We already had a big problem with the recent CSAM spamming by trolls.
Not to say it's a bad thing. I think having a contraction of social media is better for our mental health because it fosters a better sense of community. Like when you live in a smallish town vs living in a big city. Each has its own drawbacks. But with the loneliness epidemic we're experiencing right now, it's better to have something that we can use to feel like we belong to something.
Maybe it's not like that for everyone. I'm a person who's always valued quality over quantity interactions. I kept my social circles small but I kept in touch with everyone. Especially now with the abundance of tools, like Discord. Even after having my own family I still show up at the Discord call with my friends after the kids are all asleep just to check in with my friends.
Yes the CSAM attack is a problem, but there are already tools to automatically flag potential CSAM, we just need to integrate them. Unfortunately social media is a natural monopoly, and there are corporate entities that currently make up that monopoly, and that is causing a lot of social problems. The only way to combat those problems is to create something that displaces those monopolies.
Like facebook released a report that compared different personal feeds, one that creates an algorithmically generated mix of all the crap that facebook currently shows you and selectively ignores friend updates, versus one that just gives you just your friends' updates.
They found people stayed on the site longer with the algorithmic feed than the simple friends feed, and they inperpreted that as meaning people like the algorithm better. Of course they ignored the fact that maybe people like seeing the updates they asked for and then getting on with the rest of their day because they are sated.
Facebook doesn't care about that, they want retention, so they interpret retention as user "desire" to justify pushing this algorithm on them. There's a whole spiel here about how capitalism operates on addiction but this comment is long enough already.
It's enough to say that these algorithms contributed to a genocide in Myanmar because facebook established themselves as the de facto internet in that country. They knew the algorithm was exacerbating racial tensions, but also turning down the genocide dial would make them less money, so they kept it turned up.
I think it's worth creating an alternative where people have control of their own feeds because the algorithms are open source, and it's worth working hard on. The information ecosystem is maybe one of the most important things we need to fight things like climate change. Like the stakes are more than just our personal comfort.
Did you use reddit 10 years ago or longer? The Fediverse is already significantly more stable and a better user experience in comparison.
Odysee seems to be doing relatively well. Probably 20-30% of the YouTubers I watch are also on there.
I legit didn't know about this service, looks cool, but I don't fully understand how it works.
I hope alternatives to youtube like Nebula and peertube find their footing, but I can't help but suspect that youtube has and will continue to find the successful path in this social media era. I'm not a youtuber or anything, so I don't really know any details about how it works, but the way they seem provide a platform with monetisation and brand building possibilities built in seems pretty effective/pragmatic for a platform that needs to find someway to work within capitalism.
Just use duck duck go. Its better in all regards.
Its better in all regards.
I wish it was true. My strategy is to use ddg in first try to find something and switch to google when ddg ducks in wrong way. Currently google is better in images and searching for "this particular site" instead of answer on any site
I truly wish this was true. But for work, everything I search on ddg is just not useful
I tried DDG many times for work. Often I don’t find the result I want at all. I try different queries and all, but I only find barely relevant shit. I switch to Google, and immediately the top result is exactly what I want.
Exactly the opposite for me
Try Nebula! It's a bunch of YouTube creators who got together to make their own platform for video content. The price is quite reasonable and the videos are the same you would see on YouTube but often a few days early and with the sponsorship ads removed.
I use nebula more than youtube now tbh, only reason I hop on YouTube is to watch people that aren't on Nebula
Nebula is excellent! If you have more money, you can try Floatplane too.
I would rather not support Linus.
StartPage is a good engine if you want cleaned up Google results. But I highly recommend subscribing to Kagi.
Seriously. I hate the censorship going on on youtube.
Duck Duck Go has been nothing but great since I switched a few months ago. It's like Google from 10 years ago.
If I need to find really obscure stuff Google is still better.
I like Google products but the search engine really has become shit. I'm not sure there's anything they can do about it though.
They simply need to change the way relevancy is measured. They need to implement some mechanism that can evaluate the quality of the page. The algorithm should penalize sites that have content very similar to other sites (like those that scrape github or stackoverflow), low effort sites, or sites that are infested with too many ads.
And since so much quality information is in youtube videos, and they already generate transcripts, why can't you search through those?
Any metric that isn't direct human curation can be gamed.
Yeah. The whole 'search engine optimization' scam has really messed things up.
I feel like, aside from a top few sites, most results just spit out content mill bullshit.
Ever notice how just about every explanatory article is structured the same way? They're trying to repeat the same shit as much as possible to get higher in search results.
"What is X?"
"Why would you want to do X?"
"Here's how to do X."
I just want to know how to do X, guys. Enough with the fluff.
Just out of curiosity what google products do you use?
I guess it's gmail, drive, calendar and YouTube mainly
Edit - and maps
I personally want to degooglify as much as I can, just saying what the other person probably uses
Thanks. The only one left for me is YouTube now. On a WAN show Linus asked Luke what product released less than 10 years ago by google he was using and they couldn't think of one. It was the same thing for me. I've been asking friends and colleagues ever since, the answers are interesting.
Most of the big ones. Gmail, calendar, maps, YouTube, YouTube music, photos, tasks, pixel...
It's more interesting to say the ones I don't use tbh: Drive and Chrome.
I avoid Google products as much as possible these days, especially anything launched within the last 2-3 years, because it will soon be abandoned and unsupported. Their search results are worse than they have ever been. The only Google app I actually like is Google Maps.
Try magic earth instead of gmaps
All the alternatives work great for cycling, driving etc... but collapse instantly when you try and use them for public transport
Yeah, I find Maps the best for getting around regardless of the mode of transportation.
Only thing I really dislike about Maps is that it doesn't make it very easy to explore businesses. Like, try to look at a random strip mall and it won't show you what all the store fronts are. Some things only seem to show up if you search for them (not if you look at exactly where they are).
Google Maps saved me when I had to work in Japan for several months without knowing not a lick of Japanese. I just bought a Suica card and just stood on which color Google Maps told me.
In Poland we have OSM based jakdojade.pl
OSM is awesome. It keeps getting better and better.
I've always wondered, does Google Maps link into each city's public transport API manually after contacting the city, or do they have some sort of AI scraper?
There's a somewhat universal standard for publishing transit information. Not all agencies are fully compliant, but most are on some level.
Oh I didn't know about that. Where can I find more information?
Maps is also seriously going down the gutter.
There are ads in maps now.
It works OK if you know a name, but not the location, but not the other way around. If there's any concentration of businesses, you can zoom in all you want but it will only show 1 in 2 places.
Many search terms now result in residential places near the top results. I suppose these are mostly small webshops run out of homes for the same terms, but that isn't usually what one is looking for when using maps.
Yeah the search has gone to shit. I've been using Duck Duck Go but I guess that is Bing based?
Also been trying out Kagi. The format is unsettling at first but it is nice to see the results I am looking for at the top instead of a bunch of bullshit ads / sponsored results and whatever along with crappy results below the fold.
I've been using Kagi for two months now and I can't recommend it enough. Whatever I search is always on the first results, no need to filter SEO crap.
Also it's incredibly fast.
I'm not a heavy search user so their lowest tier (5$, 300 searches) is more than enough for me. I can see how the costs can add up for someone that is a heavier user tho
I'm still figuring out what tier I should go for before I decide what to do.
But yeah it is quite zippy fast!
Try the low one for a month and set a soft and hard limit, then evaluate. That's what I did, but I didn't go beyond 260 searches hahaha
Any idea if its good for non US users?
I'm in Europe but I don't see why wouldn't it be good
translation: Google Search is still an important tool, but it is no longer the only way people find information.
there’s been a shift to entertainment-based video feeds like TikTok — which is now being used as a primary search engine by a new generation of internet users.
I hate when journalists use data from Arse Research Institute to boost sensation
But if that last 25 years of Google’s history could be boiled down to a battle against the Google bomb, it is now starting to feel that the search engine is finally losing pace with the hijackers. Or as Marwick put it, “Google has gotten shittier and shittier.”
“To me, it just continues the transformation of the internet into this shitty mall,” Marwick said. “A dead mall that’s just filled with the shady sort of stores you don’t want to go to.”
Worth citing
Dash is one of the web’s earliest bloggers. In 2004, he won a competition Google held to google-bomb itself with the made-up term “nigritude ultramarine.”
I always wondered if "using X app instead of Google as search engine should be interpreted as sign of generalized computer illiteracy (not being able to distinguish between two different contexts/products) or a product of our own doing (convergence between desktop and mobile, interfaces harder to visually differenciate between apps and its functions).
Either way we have a long way ahead.
They're bloggers, not journalists.
In fact, the site’s original name, BackRub, was a reference to the backlinks it was using to rank results.
Oh, I'm so gonna be using the original name from this moment on. "Have you backrubbed it?"
Too long. We need to shorten it. I know... "I can't find any information on grasshoppers." "Have you rubbed one out?"
"What ingredients do I need for thick pancakes again?"
"Hang on, I'm rubbing one out now?"
The only thing I still use from Google is their Pixel phones, and then I immediately flash them with GrapheneOS. That, and Google maps which I can't find a good replacement. I've tried every single OSM app and none of them remotely compare.
Google Maps was painful enough to me (on GrapheneOS) that I bought a Garmin - a dedicated physical navigation device.
I thought it would be a compromise, but I'm hooked on Garmin now. It's much nicer than Google maps.
The only thing I miss is the real-time traffic updates along my route.
For me it's mostly for looking of businesses. I can pull them up, see pictures, check their website, even check their menu if it's a restaurant, and also their phone number. Also with my gym I can see how busy they are on average at different times of the day so I know when to go when it's less busy.
Yeah. I still do most of that through Google Maps in a browser. Google's solutions to those are really nice.
If Google blocks those services behind an app, I'll stop using them, because the (if experience so far continues) app likely won't work in the GrapheneOS privacy sandbox.
I use GrapheneOS and can confirm it works. It even works if you don't have sandboxed play services installed. If you do install it, I'd set the battery usage to restricted, and disable background data in network settings.
Cool. Thanks.
I wish. Unfortunately it will probably live on for all eternity like Facebook is somehow living on.
It's no surprise that Facebook is hanging on, the average nerd might avoid it like the plague but the average person doesn't care
I only use Facebook for local community info as I can't get that anywhere else. My fake profile works wonderful for that.
I use it for ice cream. There's a place that makes their own flavors in house and one of the best ways to find out what they have besides checking in (they're not exactly super local to me) is to check their Facebook page. That and occasionally family contact in the event that someone loses a phone or something. That's literally it.
It's far from over
We had some good variety of search engines back in the day. Alta vista, Hotbot, Infoseek, Yahoo... Now it's just Google, or slightly worse versions.
I know people say to use DuckDuckGo but I never get as useful results there as on Google. I just have to scroll past a lot more ads on Google to get to the actual links.
The fact you're saying you're still getting useful results on Google means you haven't used Google for the past year to me.
They said as useful as Google. Not that Google gives objectively very useful results. And I agree with them. I use DuckDuckGo every day and pretty much every time I have to add !g to send my query to Google because the DDG results are shit in comparison.
I'm talking about on the desktop btw. With adblocking and script blocking. I accidentally used Google on my phone yesterday and I think I got cancer.
What's the difference between using !g and going to Google directly?
The results are still tailored to you on Google, based on past usage and tracking history. They aren’t with a bang.
Thanks, nice to know!
This is incorrect.
DDG just just performs a simple redirect to Google with the query, where the latter has access to cookies, past usage (especially if one is logged in to Google), etc.
So you say that there is no difference in googling on Google.com or using DDG with !g?
Yes. The !bangs in DDG are for convenience and not for privacy. The convenience of not opening the intended website, and typing/pasting the query to perform the search.
Same boat here. I set DDG as my default but still end up using !g around half the time.
Seriously. If I want to hope to get any result that is mildly useful, I'm obligated to add a specific site on the query, either wiki or reddit.
There is brave search, which seemed pretty good to me, even though i am using kagi search now. And to be honest, so far kagi seems really solid, and if you go past the fact that you have to pay for it (on most other search engines you are the product) then give it a try, the first 100 searches are free.
I hope it's true, but honestly I don't believe sites and opinions that have to do with google from sites like the verge.
Because sites like the verge are in reality rivals to google. For example verge is owned by voxmedia which has an advertising company and a web advertsing platform. They are rivals to google which also is an advertising company. They hate google because they want google's money lol. I seriously doubt they can be objective especially to google.
The point of the article is that whatever is replacing Google is not going to be better. It’s not Google that is broken. The entire web is.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
A writer for the site, interviewed under the pseudonym Michael Hugedisk, told Wired in 2007 that their three-person team linked to a webpage selling pro-George W. Bush merchandise and was able to make it the top result on Google if you searched “dumb motherfucker.”
Per Sullivan’s logic, Google Groups added better discovery to both Usenet and the myriad other message boards and online communities creating proto-meme culture at the time.
Alex Turvy, a sociologist specializing in digital culture, said it’s hard to map our current understanding of virality and platform optimization to the earliest days of Google, but there are definitely similarities.
Alice Marwick, a communications professor and author of The Private Is Political: Networked Privacy and Social Media, told The Verge that it wasn’t until Myspace launched in 2003 that we started to even develop the idea of internet fame.
In 2004, he won a competition Google held to google-bomb itself with the made-up term “nigritude ultramarine.” Since then, Dash has written extensively over the years on the impact platform optimization has had on the way the internet works.
On top of it all, OpenAI’s massively successful ChatGPT has dragged Google into a race against Microsoft to build a completely different kind of search, one that uses a chatbot interface supported by generative AI.
The original article contains 3,695 words, the summary contains 215 words. Saved 94%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
This is a terrible tldr. Just go read the article.
Michael Hugedisk 🤣
The article is very long and this bot doesn't properly summurizes it. It looks like it just takes some random sentences from the article and puts them together.
Ok, but I liked the pseudonym Hugedisk > Hugedick
He definitely has bolts of steel! to properly mount such a huge disk)
Google SEO has homogenized the internet with vapid marketing content. The internet is one big commercial. The reason Reddit got popular was because communities found and shared good content and created more by talking about it. Now ads are disguised as posts and memes.
The internet is getting as bad as radio.
Lemmy kinda feels like the 2000's internet and I love it
edit: formatting
i didn't get to experience the 2000s internet and I've been loving lemmy
The whole internet used to be like this and it was lovely.
Let's not romanticize the old web too much. It had its problems too:
Half-done html pages with
under_construction.gifor cliparts copypasted from Word. Some went through multiple editors like Frontpage and Dreamweaver which ended up producing spaghetti HTML.Autoplaying midi from songs probably from Limp Bizkit, Metallica, Blink 182, etc. Did I mention that MIDI volumes count as separate from normal 'Media' volumes, and were often cranked to the MAX?
It was a time when HTML/CSS/JS would chaotically intertwine with proprietary plugins like Flash and ActiveX. "Best viewed from Internet Explorer at 800x600" was a thing. Readability? Accessibility? Forget about it.
You paid by minute on dial-up connection until ADSL appeared. Good luck trying to download that
tenchi_muyo_hentai.jpg.That was more the 90s - the time of things like Geocities - than the 2000s.
By the 2000s there had already been one Internet Boom & Bust and things on the Internet were way more comercialized than is earlier times of handmade sites, pre-CSS webpages and ActiveX components.
Cries in 2001 birth year.
Same
Hello fellow... are we considered as gen-zedders or tail end millennials? Because I have friends born in 97 and they are definitely not Gen Z
Millennials, according to Wikipedia,
After that is Gen Z and Gen Alpha starts somewhere around 2010.
So 1997 would be an older Gen Z
That generational 'designation' has been changed so many times it's not credible.
Gen X was originally they 'children of the baby boomers'. If someone was born in 1981, they were young Gen X for most of their life, now they are told they are 'Millennials'
The older you get, the more you see generational cuttoffs as a load of bullshit.
I grew up around cousins who were all older than me, so I think I was influenced more by 90s culture than most of my peers. I think you and I are the awkward in-between.
Yes this is how I feel as well
1997 is a funny birthyear 😀 on one hand you grow up in "traditionell way" and thus you understand older folks who don’t understand new slang but on the other hand you understand the digital natives who grow up with all that attention grabbing BS.
Yeah, I feel like people born up until around the early 00s still got to experience what life without smartphones & social media was like
For just a few years, yes.
Imagine content creation that was done purely for the fun of creating content and sharing info, albeit with literally zero hope of receiving any money. Better in some ways, worse in others.
this seems perfect
Pretty much.
As soon as people realized you could make money generating content, it all became homogenized shit.
Same thing with video games. I miss the days when people didn't treat them like a job.
Now every gamer thinks and plays like they can go pro, similar to elementary schoolkids on the basketball court thinking they'll go pro.
It just reminds me of early reddit before it was taken over by the dumbs.
Eh, I'd be careful with this sentiment. A significant part of internet's decline comes from people who think of themselves as too smart and rationalize their own nonsense.
And also nothing prevents people who ruined Reddit from coming here, and they do.
It makes me wonder tho: is Lemmy sustainable? I never want to get invested in something like Reddit again when there's no proper and respectful end game for all the communities that make up their lifeblood.
In my experience all good things on the internet come to an end. Usually when big money starts meddling.
The most "2000s internet" I get is me and my internet pals hosting our own websites)
I'm hosting my instance and website in my basement and its awesome
Yeah. I'm noticing when things get too big, undesirables start creeping in.
'Undesirable' in this sense would be people with more money than sense and incredibly low standards for what they spend it on. They are the kinds that are proud to be ripped off and businesses will cater to them over smarter folk.
Yup and hopefully only the beginning. The fediverse is like a better internet without big tech.
Oof, that last sentence hits home.
So fucking true.
Thanks, capitalism.
The only REAL replacement I'm still looking for is YouTube. Sure, Peertube and proxy sites for YouTube exist. But the amount of content I am interested in is by dozens of decimals larger an YouTube than on any other alternative combined.
And, yes, of course, the search engine.
I'm hoping that as the fediverse grows it will start to accrue enough capacity to sustain a strong video hosting platform like peertube.
Social media has a network effect where the more people use it the more attractive it gets, and because the fediverse can interconnect between different formats I see it as inevitable that eventually it will take over, because it can manage a much more comprehensive network than any centralised site.
Once it becomes more mainstream, server capacity should increase until it can handle the world's video sharing as well.
I'm still skeptical whether the fediverse will get as big as the current social media now. We already had a big problem with the recent CSAM spamming by trolls.
Not to say it's a bad thing. I think having a contraction of social media is better for our mental health because it fosters a better sense of community. Like when you live in a smallish town vs living in a big city. Each has its own drawbacks. But with the loneliness epidemic we're experiencing right now, it's better to have something that we can use to feel like we belong to something.
Maybe it's not like that for everyone. I'm a person who's always valued quality over quantity interactions. I kept my social circles small but I kept in touch with everyone. Especially now with the abundance of tools, like Discord. Even after having my own family I still show up at the Discord call with my friends after the kids are all asleep just to check in with my friends.
Yes the CSAM attack is a problem, but there are already tools to automatically flag potential CSAM, we just need to integrate them. Unfortunately social media is a natural monopoly, and there are corporate entities that currently make up that monopoly, and that is causing a lot of social problems. The only way to combat those problems is to create something that displaces those monopolies.
Like facebook released a report that compared different personal feeds, one that creates an algorithmically generated mix of all the crap that facebook currently shows you and selectively ignores friend updates, versus one that just gives you just your friends' updates.
They found people stayed on the site longer with the algorithmic feed than the simple friends feed, and they inperpreted that as meaning people like the algorithm better. Of course they ignored the fact that maybe people like seeing the updates they asked for and then getting on with the rest of their day because they are sated.
Facebook doesn't care about that, they want retention, so they interpret retention as user "desire" to justify pushing this algorithm on them. There's a whole spiel here about how capitalism operates on addiction but this comment is long enough already.
It's enough to say that these algorithms contributed to a genocide in Myanmar because facebook established themselves as the de facto internet in that country. They knew the algorithm was exacerbating racial tensions, but also turning down the genocide dial would make them less money, so they kept it turned up.
I think it's worth creating an alternative where people have control of their own feeds because the algorithms are open source, and it's worth working hard on. The information ecosystem is maybe one of the most important things we need to fight things like climate change. Like the stakes are more than just our personal comfort.
Did you use reddit 10 years ago or longer? The Fediverse is already significantly more stable and a better user experience in comparison.
Odysee seems to be doing relatively well. Probably 20-30% of the YouTubers I watch are also on there.
I legit didn't know about this service, looks cool, but I don't fully understand how it works.
I hope alternatives to youtube like Nebula and peertube find their footing, but I can't help but suspect that youtube has and will continue to find the successful path in this social media era. I'm not a youtuber or anything, so I don't really know any details about how it works, but the way they seem provide a platform with monetisation and brand building possibilities built in seems pretty effective/pragmatic for a platform that needs to find someway to work within capitalism.
Just use duck duck go. Its better in all regards.
I wish it was true. My strategy is to use ddg in first try to find something and switch to google when ddg ducks in wrong way. Currently google is better in images and searching for "this particular site" instead of answer on any site
I truly wish this was true. But for work, everything I search on ddg is just not useful
I tried DDG many times for work. Often I don’t find the result I want at all. I try different queries and all, but I only find barely relevant shit. I switch to Google, and immediately the top result is exactly what I want.
Exactly the opposite for me
Try Nebula! It's a bunch of YouTube creators who got together to make their own platform for video content. The price is quite reasonable and the videos are the same you would see on YouTube but often a few days early and with the sponsorship ads removed.
I use nebula more than youtube now tbh, only reason I hop on YouTube is to watch people that aren't on Nebula
Nebula is excellent! If you have more money, you can try Floatplane too.
I would rather not support Linus.
StartPage is a good engine if you want cleaned up Google results. But I highly recommend subscribing to Kagi.
Seriously. I hate the censorship going on on youtube.
Duck Duck Go has been nothing but great since I switched a few months ago. It's like Google from 10 years ago.
If I need to find really obscure stuff Google is still better.
I like Google products but the search engine really has become shit. I'm not sure there's anything they can do about it though.
They simply need to change the way relevancy is measured. They need to implement some mechanism that can evaluate the quality of the page. The algorithm should penalize sites that have content very similar to other sites (like those that scrape github or stackoverflow), low effort sites, or sites that are infested with too many ads.
And since so much quality information is in youtube videos, and they already generate transcripts, why can't you search through those?
Any metric that isn't direct human curation can be gamed.
Yeah. The whole 'search engine optimization' scam has really messed things up.
I feel like, aside from a top few sites, most results just spit out content mill bullshit.
Ever notice how just about every explanatory article is structured the same way? They're trying to repeat the same shit as much as possible to get higher in search results.
"What is X?"
"Why would you want to do X?"
"Here's how to do X."
I just want to know how to do X, guys. Enough with the fluff.
Just out of curiosity what google products do you use?
I guess it's gmail, drive, calendar and YouTube mainly
Edit - and maps
I personally want to degooglify as much as I can, just saying what the other person probably uses
Thanks. The only one left for me is YouTube now. On a WAN show Linus asked Luke what product released less than 10 years ago by google he was using and they couldn't think of one. It was the same thing for me. I've been asking friends and colleagues ever since, the answers are interesting.
Most of the big ones. Gmail, calendar, maps, YouTube, YouTube music, photos, tasks, pixel...
It's more interesting to say the ones I don't use tbh: Drive and Chrome.
I avoid Google products as much as possible these days, especially anything launched within the last 2-3 years, because it will soon be abandoned and unsupported. Their search results are worse than they have ever been. The only Google app I actually like is Google Maps.
Try magic earth instead of gmaps
All the alternatives work great for cycling, driving etc... but collapse instantly when you try and use them for public transport
Yeah, I find Maps the best for getting around regardless of the mode of transportation.
Only thing I really dislike about Maps is that it doesn't make it very easy to explore businesses. Like, try to look at a random strip mall and it won't show you what all the store fronts are. Some things only seem to show up if you search for them (not if you look at exactly where they are).
Google Maps saved me when I had to work in Japan for several months without knowing not a lick of Japanese. I just bought a Suica card and just stood on which color Google Maps told me.
In Poland we have OSM based jakdojade.pl
OSM is awesome. It keeps getting better and better.
I've always wondered, does Google Maps link into each city's public transport API manually after contacting the city, or do they have some sort of AI scraper?
There's a somewhat universal standard for publishing transit information. Not all agencies are fully compliant, but most are on some level.
Oh I didn't know about that. Where can I find more information?
Maps is also seriously going down the gutter.
Yeah the search has gone to shit. I've been using Duck Duck Go but I guess that is Bing based?
Also been trying out Kagi. The format is unsettling at first but it is nice to see the results I am looking for at the top instead of a bunch of bullshit ads / sponsored results and whatever along with crappy results below the fold.
I've been using Kagi for two months now and I can't recommend it enough. Whatever I search is always on the first results, no need to filter SEO crap.
Also it's incredibly fast.
I'm not a heavy search user so their lowest tier (5$, 300 searches) is more than enough for me. I can see how the costs can add up for someone that is a heavier user tho
I'm still figuring out what tier I should go for before I decide what to do.
But yeah it is quite zippy fast!
Try the low one for a month and set a soft and hard limit, then evaluate. That's what I did, but I didn't go beyond 260 searches hahaha
Any idea if its good for non US users?
I'm in Europe but I don't see why wouldn't it be good
Maps isn't doing too hot either.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37030044
translation: Google Search is still an important tool, but it is no longer the only way people find information.
I hate when journalists use data from Arse Research Institute to boost sensation
Worth citing
DarkBlue.com is not Google
https://web.archive.org/web/20071011225539/http://dashes.com/anil/2004/06/nigritude-ultra.html
I always wondered if "using X app instead of Google as search engine should be interpreted as sign of generalized computer illiteracy (not being able to distinguish between two different contexts/products) or a product of our own doing (convergence between desktop and mobile, interfaces harder to visually differenciate between apps and its functions).
Either way we have a long way ahead.
They're bloggers, not journalists.
Oh, I'm so gonna be using the original name from this moment on. "Have you backrubbed it?"
Too long. We need to shorten it. I know... "I can't find any information on grasshoppers." "Have you rubbed one out?"
"What ingredients do I need for thick pancakes again?"
"Hang on, I'm rubbing one out now?"
The only thing I still use from Google is their Pixel phones, and then I immediately flash them with GrapheneOS. That, and Google maps which I can't find a good replacement. I've tried every single OSM app and none of them remotely compare.
Google Maps was painful enough to me (on GrapheneOS) that I bought a Garmin - a dedicated physical navigation device.
I thought it would be a compromise, but I'm hooked on Garmin now. It's much nicer than Google maps.
The only thing I miss is the real-time traffic updates along my route.
For me it's mostly for looking of businesses. I can pull them up, see pictures, check their website, even check their menu if it's a restaurant, and also their phone number. Also with my gym I can see how busy they are on average at different times of the day so I know when to go when it's less busy.
Yeah. I still do most of that through Google Maps in a browser. Google's solutions to those are really nice.
If Google blocks those services behind an app, I'll stop using them, because the (if experience so far continues) app likely won't work in the GrapheneOS privacy sandbox.
I use GrapheneOS and can confirm it works. It even works if you don't have sandboxed play services installed. If you do install it, I'd set the battery usage to restricted, and disable background data in network settings.
Cool. Thanks.
I wish. Unfortunately it will probably live on for all eternity like Facebook is somehow living on.
It's no surprise that Facebook is hanging on, the average nerd might avoid it like the plague but the average person doesn't care
I only use Facebook for local community info as I can't get that anywhere else. My fake profile works wonderful for that.
I use it for ice cream. There's a place that makes their own flavors in house and one of the best ways to find out what they have besides checking in (they're not exactly super local to me) is to check their Facebook page. That and occasionally family contact in the event that someone loses a phone or something. That's literally it.
It's far from over
We had some good variety of search engines back in the day. Alta vista, Hotbot, Infoseek, Yahoo... Now it's just Google, or slightly worse versions.
I know people say to use DuckDuckGo but I never get as useful results there as on Google. I just have to scroll past a lot more ads on Google to get to the actual links.
The fact you're saying you're still getting useful results on Google means you haven't used Google for the past year to me.
They said as useful as Google. Not that Google gives objectively very useful results. And I agree with them. I use DuckDuckGo every day and pretty much every time I have to add !g to send my query to Google because the DDG results are shit in comparison.
I'm talking about on the desktop btw. With adblocking and script blocking. I accidentally used Google on my phone yesterday and I think I got cancer.
What's the difference between using !g and going to Google directly?
The results are still tailored to you on Google, based on past usage and tracking history. They aren’t with a bang.
Thanks, nice to know!
This is incorrect.
DDG just just performs a simple redirect to Google with the query, where the latter has access to cookies, past usage (especially if one is logged in to Google), etc.
So you say that there is no difference in googling on Google.com or using DDG with !g?
Yes. The !bangs in DDG are for convenience and not for privacy. The convenience of not opening the intended website, and typing/pasting the query to perform the search.
Same boat here. I set DDG as my default but still end up using !g around half the time.
Seriously. If I want to hope to get any result that is mildly useful, I'm obligated to add a specific site on the query, either wiki or reddit.
There is brave search, which seemed pretty good to me, even though i am using kagi search now. And to be honest, so far kagi seems really solid, and if you go past the fact that you have to pay for it (on most other search engines you are the product) then give it a try, the first 100 searches are free.
I hope it's true, but honestly I don't believe sites and opinions that have to do with google from sites like the verge.
Because sites like the verge are in reality rivals to google. For example verge is owned by voxmedia which has an advertising company and a web advertsing platform. They are rivals to google which also is an advertising company. They hate google because they want google's money lol. I seriously doubt they can be objective especially to google.
The point of the article is that whatever is replacing Google is not going to be better. It’s not Google that is broken. The entire web is.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
A writer for the site, interviewed under the pseudonym Michael Hugedisk, told Wired in 2007 that their three-person team linked to a webpage selling pro-George W. Bush merchandise and was able to make it the top result on Google if you searched “dumb motherfucker.”
Per Sullivan’s logic, Google Groups added better discovery to both Usenet and the myriad other message boards and online communities creating proto-meme culture at the time.
Alex Turvy, a sociologist specializing in digital culture, said it’s hard to map our current understanding of virality and platform optimization to the earliest days of Google, but there are definitely similarities.
Alice Marwick, a communications professor and author of The Private Is Political: Networked Privacy and Social Media, told The Verge that it wasn’t until Myspace launched in 2003 that we started to even develop the idea of internet fame.
In 2004, he won a competition Google held to google-bomb itself with the made-up term “nigritude ultramarine.” Since then, Dash has written extensively over the years on the impact platform optimization has had on the way the internet works.
On top of it all, OpenAI’s massively successful ChatGPT has dragged Google into a race against Microsoft to build a completely different kind of search, one that uses a chatbot interface supported by generative AI.
The original article contains 3,695 words, the summary contains 215 words. Saved 94%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
This is a terrible tldr. Just go read the article.
Michael Hugedisk 🤣
The article is very long and this bot doesn't properly summurizes it. It looks like it just takes some random sentences from the article and puts them together.
Ok, but I liked the pseudonym Hugedisk > Hugedick
He definitely has bolts of steel! to properly mount such a huge disk)