I’m still trying to de-Google my life, little by little. I don’t trust Bing for similar reasons. DDG is feeling shady of late. What’s the search engine you all recommend that I can inject into my daily life? Is there perhaps a search engine that is focused on code, or have we just all moved on to AI for searching?

Edit: I meant to also express my frustration that most browsers do not let you select a “default search engine” that can be used in the address bar aside from 3-5 pre-chosen engines. Seems like 2023 we should be able to customize that to our own liking.

Edit 2: Thanks for the recommendation of Kagi. I’m going to roll with it for a while. I see they have an extension for Safari that allows them to hijack the address bar, which is just what I needed.

  • TonyTonyChopper@mander.xyz
    72·
    6 months ago

    If you’re not spending some money then you’re not the customer, you’re the product. Would you really prefer the web continue to be supported by ads and people who sell data about you?

    • mammut@lemmy.world
      3·
      6 months ago

      It’s also important to keep in mind that you can still be the product even when you’re paying. A lot of companies like to double dip. They’ll charge you to use the service and then also make additional money by selling your data. Or make additional money by having ads (even on a paid service).

      And it’s further complicated by the fact that paid companies often know more about you than unpaid ones. If I go to Bing and do a free search, they don’t know my billing address, credit card number, real name, or any of that (probably, unless you linked an account). If I pay for Kagi, they probably know all of that information that Bing doesn’t. To me, this also raises questions with government surveillance. The government can potentially force Kagi to monitor all of John Doe’s searches, but if John Doe is using a VPN and not logging into Brave Search (or Bing or Google or whatever), they probably can’t monitor that because they don’t know which search session belongs to John Doe.

      If they could find a way to have people pay without having any technical way to connect the searches with the paid account that made the searches, it would be much better IMO. (I don’t know if this would be possible, but there might be a way they could do something like generate anonymous search keys that authorize searches but aren’t tied to an account, kinda like one time use API keys. This would also allow you to “gift” a search to other users by sharing keys, which would be both good and bad.)

    • MadhuGururajan@programming.dev
      35·
      6 months ago

      People can do without search. Most will find better uses for 10$ an hour. Those who can’t probably won’t buy search. So, lose-lose for you who tries to convince people in every post.