Has search gotten worse?

[BootlegPopeye]

Considering all the issues documented in this thread, there is a huge opening for a new, better search engine. Every one of the alternatives has some issue that prevents it from being a total replacement for what Google used to be.

But there still isn't really any alternative to Google Books, maybe not as important for most users but it is for me.

I know brave has something called 'Brave Search', but I don't really know anything about it. The temptation for monetization/politicization of results is huge, and I have my doubts that such a thing could last long.

 

[Bongocat]

Brave Search

I had not heard of that. It looks to be just a work in progress right now, but I'm looking forward to seeing what comes out of that.

And yeah, there's a rapidly forming power vacuum in the search world. Google could easily refill it if they wanted to, but they apparently just aren't willing (which is for the better, really). DDG works great for me, but I can't quite recommend it to normies yet.

 

[BootlegPopeye]

At this point, I wouldn't trust Google on to do anything except liquidation via antitrust. They started to do everything on the internet and successfully convinced alot of people that they basically are the internet. The Android system should have been the flashing warning light that they were violating the Sherman Antitrust Act, if not earlier.

 

[Bongocat]

liquidation via antitrust.

God, I wish. They basically own the government at this point because they choose who gets elected. All of those anti-trust suits are going nowhere and the party in power would be batshit insane to try and move against them. There is no legal solution to "big tech".

 

[melty]

I signed up for early access for Brave search, but as much as I love Brave, I'm not too hopeful. Making a good search engine is clearly a Herculean task and asking any entity to match even the Google of 10 years ago seems to be too much of an ask or we would have had an actual competitor sometime since its inception. But, I still hope I'm able to try it out.

 

[HumanHive]

At this point, I wouldn't trust Google on to do anything except liquidation via antitrust. They started to do everything on the internet and successfully convinced alot of people that they basically are the internet. The Android system should have been the flashing warning light that they were violating the Sherman Antitrust Act, if not earlier.

Google may eventually be a self solving problem. Their dominance is due to their search engine and ads, the former of which they are increasingly lobotomizing to serve the latter. Too bad ublock exists.

Tell a friend about ublock and its many features. The best resistance is silent.

 

[Bongocat]

Google may eventually be a self solving problem. Their dominance is due to their search engine and ads, the former of which they are increasingly lobotomizing to serve the latter. Too bad ublock exists.

Tell a friend about ublock and its many features. The best resistance is silent.

Google probably gets more revenue through paying for search ranks at this point. Not only that, but adblocking on phones is not easy, and google is making sure it's not getting any easier. You and I know how to do it, but that's 1% of the population.

The only way google search falls is if they become SO censorious that their search results become objectively inferior to other services on just about any topic. Thankfully, that really does look like the path they're going down.

I signed up for early access for Brave search, but as much as I love Brave, I'm not too hopeful. Making a good search engine is clearly a Herculean task and asking any entity to match even the Google of 10 years ago seems to be too much of an ask or we would have had an actual competitor sometime since its inception. But, I still hope I'm able to try it out.

Thankfully, they just have to be better than google as they are now... which is a significantly lower bar. I'm not sure 6-years-ago google is ever coming back in any form. It probably won't be from the United States, anyway.

 

[Dick Justice]

Google may eventually be a self solving problem. Their dominance is due to their search engine and ads, the former of which they are increasingly lobotomizing to serve the latter. Too bad ublock exists.

Tell a friend about ublock and its many features. The best resistance is silent.

They're working to undermine that to. EFF has an interesting article series on their proposal for the successor to cookies. Serving ads to fewer people isn't a big deal when you can datamine everyone harder.

 

[BootlegPopeye]

I also worry about the direction of 'brave today', they made all kinds of promises about what it is and what it will do, I turn it off normally but reenabled it just to check and its the same kind of propaganda that Firefox throws in your face by default (political 'news' + shitlib opinion pieces the troons at Mozilla like).

It's one thing if its just a glorified RSS feed, but so far as I can see it is not yet customizable, The 'source' choices are nothing but MSM glorified propaganda outlets and tech sites for the most part. Will it allow wrongthink or 'hate' sites? At the top of it reads: "Brave Today matches your interests on your device so your personal information never leaves your browser. New content updated throughout the day." Oh, so they are still tracking my 'interests', but they swear it's not leaving my browser. Swear.

 

[Bongocat]

I also worry about the direction of 'brave today', they made all kinds of promises about what it is and what it will do, I turn it off normally but reenabled it just to check and its the same kind of propaganda that Firefox throws in your face by default (political 'news' + shitlib opinion pieces the troons at Mozilla like).

It's one thing if its just a glorified RSS feed, but so far as I can see it is not yet customizable, The 'source' choices are nothing but MSM glorified propaganda outlets and tech sites for the most part. Will it allow wrongthink or 'hate' sites? At the top of it reads: "Brave Today matches your interests on your device so your personal information never leaves your browser. New content updated throughout the day." Oh, so they are still tracking my 'interests', but they swear it's not leaving my browser. Swear.

Realistically, they can't have anything outside of mainstream war propaganda because they'd bet OY VEY'd into the abyss real fucking fast. They're already flying pretty close to the sun with blocking ads on websites and replacing them with their own. I imagine they're one nasty ADL letter away from actual legislation preventing that. They already have knives out for Eich (who I do trust more than the other bay area scumfucks).

That said, 'Today' is about the only thing I won't defend Brave on. it was a fucking horrible idea and it shouldn't be there in the first place. The fact that it's on my default tells me they're probably getting paid to have it on there.

 

[BootlegPopeye]

Yeah, and they said they'll allow customization of the feeds, so you can add Daily Stormer or any hate blog you so choose. Supposedly. For now I turn that shit off.

I don't know if Eich is wise to the fact that many of us use Brave for ideological reasons as well as privacy. One would hope, as a direct victim of unpersoning, he would be more sympathetic to our concerns. Aside from the man himself, you would think that if a dev is willing to do work for Eich at all, that alone sets them apart from the rest of the shitlib echo chamber that is the tech world. So those aspects would at least in theory make them less likely to do the very worst that we've come to expect from browsers/search engines.

 

[Bongocat]

I don't know if Eich is wise to the fact that many of us use Brave for ideological reasons as well as privacy. One would hope, as a direct victim of unpersoning, he would be more sympathetic to our concerns.

If his treatment of the Farms is any indication, he most certainly is sympathetic, even if he is taking necessary precautions to avoid burning his hands on a hot potato. See: NewProject2 for an example of what happens when you take an outright, public, principled stance.

I think Eich knows about the ideological stuff, but he'd be an absolute retard to talk about it like Torba or whoever ran Parler into the dirt. We've seen OVER and OVER again that taking any sort of 'free speech' stance publicly will get your site instantly nuked from orbit. The Brave foundation is absolutely right to avoid it and instead focus on 'openness and decentralization', which achieves exactly the same goals as the free speech people without saying as much. They're setting an example that I wish more people would follow.

 

[BootlegPopeye]

Parler is interesting, more so than Torba. That seemed like a panic move on the part of the establishment because Parler was on the verge of something Gab never got - normie/boomer userbase explosion. My mother had an account on Parler, and she is as boomer-con as you can get. In their collective mind, it had to be nipped in the bud.

I don't use social media so it was not of interest to me but they were not just another alt-platform. That move after Jan 6 struck me as real fear in a way I don't remember Big Tech acting before.

 

[Bongocat]

Parler is interesting, more so than Torba. That seemed like a panic move on the part of the establishment because Parler was on the verge of something Gab never got - normie/boomer userbase explosion. My mother had an account on Parler, and she is as boomer-con as you can get. In their collective mind, it had to be nipped in the bud.

I don't use social media so it was not of interest to me but they were not just another alt-platform. That move after Jan 6 struck me as real fear in a way I don't remember Big Tech acting before.

Yeah, on that same note, my giga-boomer mom uses Brave as well and loves it. She mostly just benefits from the faster page loading due to the adblocking stuff, but appreciates that it's (supposedly) not snooping on her because she genuinely finds all that stuff quite unsettling. Of course there's a million other ways she's spied on, but I try to keep normies who don't need it out of that rabbit hole.

I've been using Fediverse and I'm genuinely having a lot of fun on it. The userbase is, of course, smaller but it's just a big neutral infodump and you can find people with similar interests just scrolling the public feeds for a bit. It's quite interesting seeing this place where NOBODY has global admin power and it's just a bunch of unrelated servers interacting with eachother. A place where Moon Man would feel right at home is parked next to a radical feminist instance and they interface with eachother. That can be quite entertaining.

 

[Coffee Shits]

If there was a search engine that preemptively filtered listicles and downranked the sites that hosted them I'd switch to it in a heartbeat. It's nothing but SEO-optimized noise with no value whatsoever, even if you don't know what you're looking for.

It wouldn't even be that hard, you could write a regex that matches a leading number in the title in 15 seconds and be 98% accurate since they all follow the same format.

 

[Pinochet Was Right]

I nearly forgot about that, but I got legit mad when Brave started including "Brave Today" by default.

Yeah I know "Le Shill Lion" and they gotta make money somehow but god damn please do something... ANYTHING other than that.

The Google News app insists on putting front an center LE DRUMPF LE YAHTZEE headlines despite me living in a latrine-american shithole country. Edge's new tab page does the same, despite my microshit account being set to show local fake news in the windows 10 news app.

 

[7he47r0n]

The Google News app insists on putting front an center LE DRUMPF LE YAHTZEE headlines despite me living in a latrine-american shithole country. Edge's new tab page does the same, despite my microshit account being set to show local fake news in the windows 10 news app.

At the end of the day, search engines are a service directed towards advertisers and the owners of the engine itself, not the users. That's the problem. We are not the target audience, just clicks and views. Anywhere, I've signed up for the beta tests of "Brave Search". So far no updates since then.

 

[The Littlest Shitlord]

At the end of the day, search engines are a service directed towards advertisers and the owners of the engine itself, not the users. That's the problem. We are not the target audience, just clicks and views. Anywhere, I've signed up for the beta tests of "Brave Search". So far no updates since then.

I've said it before and will say it again: we need to get over our addiction to "free" stuff, because in the long run it costs more than it is worth. It costs us our freedom, and in the end we don't even get a good search engine out of it either. "Free" internet services like search engines should be treated as dumping by the government, because they are. It's "access capitalism"; they are willing to lose billions giving away free service to establish a monopoly, then once they have it, it's ruthless exploitation time.

 

[jje100010001]

The Google News app insists on putting front an center LE DRUMPF LE YAHTZEE headlines despite me living in a latrine-american shithole country. Edge's new tab page does the same, despite my microshit account being set to show local fake news in the windows 10 news app.

Same thing with twitter, the 'What's Happening' bar had a big article pinned to the top on DMX being a veggie for at least a week or two.

Was never interested in black rappers and generally got sick of Twitter attempting to shape my interests (as that panel was generally full of either irrelevant or hate-driven hashtags), and with no way to remove it directly, this was probably the proverbial straw that made me use uBlock to nuke that panel completely.

 

[Jones McCann]

Does anyone know how much space is required to index a large part of the web for searching?