here’s a direct link to the site:

here’s his explanation of how it works and ways you can change your browser settings to make the default google search be text only:

Guys, it's time to drop Google.

Google isn't the only search engine in the whole internet, there are others! And we need to diversify our search engine usage or we're gonna end up where we were a decade and change ago with the Internet Explorer issue. We can't let a single brand monopolize everything! This is why Google Search can afford to suck so hard: because people use it regardless! And there are alternatives.

A little bit about search engines, there are 3 types: crawlers, which work by scraping the web and developing their own indexes; metas, which get their results from the crawler-type search engines and therefore depend entirely upon them; and mixed, those which have their own (small) index but also pull results from the crawlers.

Right now, there are a couple of independant crawlers apart from Google, Bing (from Mycrosoft) and Yandex (the Russian one): this are Mojeek and Wiby.

Supporting independant crawlers is the easiest way to fight the shittyfication of the internet.

Mojeek.com is an independant british search engine with its own growing index commited to fighting internet censorship. It's small, and therefore it's usability isn't as good as that of the Big Three, but it doesn't censor, it's fairly respectful of people's privacy, and it doesn't drown you in adds. For those old enough to remember, it's a lot like early 2000s Google: you can find what you need, but if you write "dig shelter" instead of "dog shelter", that's what it's gonna search for. That said, please try to use it and support it as much as you can before we end up entirely dependant on Google, Bing and big corps adds. [click here to go to Mojeek]

Wiby.me is a new indie project that is literally dedicated to bringing back the old-school web. It's goal is to index as many personalized websites as possible, and NOT commercial sites. So, for those of you who can't find any answers to technical questions beyond highschool level because Google buries them under a gazillion commercial sites and other meaningless shit, keep an eye on this project! It has a lot of potential. And, if you know of any personal websites that have great stuff but have been murdered by Google, you can go over to Wiby and submit it to their index. [click here to go to Wiby]

Aside from those, there are also meta search engines you can use to ween yourself off Google and search for random, day to day stuff.

Qwant.com is my go-to here—it has its own index and pulls from Bing, has relatively little censorship, and is fairly private. This is the one I use on my phone for everyday stuff. [click here to go to Qwant].

Historically, DuckDuckGo has always been a go-to for those who want a search engine that respects your privacy and doesn't censor. Personally, I've never been a fan, and there have been a LOT of scandals in recent years. It supposedly has its own index and pulls from Bing, much like Qwant, but I don't know. I just don't like it. Still, I've added it here for completeness' sake.

If you have Firefox Mobile browser, you can set any of these search engines as your default search engine and you can also add the others as secondary search engines and switch quicky from the navigation bar. If you don't have firefox mobile though, what are you doing with your life??? Go get it!! It is So. Much. Better. You can have add blockers and watch YouTube add free, for free! You can have reader mode and dark mode add-ons! You can have the world oh my goshhhh, drop Chrome!!

4get.ca is my last recommendation: it works a lot like SearX, but honestly better. It doesn't have its own index, but pulls from many others. I think it's the best for reaserch, since it allows you to search for answers from different indexes, is easy to configure, add free, and avoids censorship as much as it can. It's also very privacy conscious, so that's an other plus, and it has that late 90s / early 2000s vibe that I totally dig. [click here to go to 4get]

If you wanna learn more about the topic, you can over to the Search Engine Map [click here] which shows you a bunch of Search Engines and how they relate to each other. Or you can also go over to this one dude's personal website whose done A Lot of reaserch into the topic (way more than me) and seems to be pretty legit, if a little extra. [click here to go to digdeeper.neocities.org] Hope this infodump is useful to someone =D

PS: here's to hoping all the links work!

EDIT: eliminated the "read more". Figured there are enough mega long posts in tumblr, one more won't make no difference lol (tho the version w the read more has been reblogged already, in case you'd rather)

Hey all, you know how internet searches suck now? When the results are awful, full-of-AI, death-of-the-internet levels of bad?

Start appending date constraints to your searches - "before:2023".

My results have gone from 90% AI bullshit to ~60% usable - which frankly at this point is a huge improvement.

Source @ X

ID: tweets from @boulevarddouble:

okay SO. Just FYI i have an insider contact and i asked him about this new google drive nsfw scare.

"What I think has happened is that drive has made several updates to its spam/abuse filtering and one of the focuses is trying to catch spammers who share explicit things in docs with random emails. Which is good in theory, but has the potential to hit false positives."

his recommendation is to keep NSFW words out of your doc titles and instead of sharing the "open link", share directly with you beta's email addresses.

It is also more likely to flag up explicit images, though that is less likely to be a fic problem.

/end ID

Okay, so, looks like Google Docs might actually start implementing their rule about not sharing explicit content. (This includes writing.) How in the ever loving fuck am I supposed to back up 1,000+ stories that equate to 3 million+ words into fucking Microsoft Word????? And efficiently, for that matter?! HELP.

I figured out how to move all my stuff onto Microsoft Word!

See those three dots next to the folder name? Click on that.

Then it'll give you the download option.

Once downloaded, it'll save the folder as a compressed zip file! All the documents inside are changed to Word files, and you can view and edit them now.

Now I know how to move 3 million+ words onto my laptop. It'll still take a bit, but not nearly as long as I'd imagined.

I would like to add that I am not trying to fear-monger. However, it is part of Google Drive’s TOS to not share explicit material, be it sexual or violent. (So, basically what I write.)

This occurrence seems to be rare. Read about it here.

Besides, it is better to have everything on your own hard drive vs Google docs. You retain more ownership over your work that way.

Someone pointed out that I did not provide the ToS, which, my bad. Again, not trying to cause a panic or anything. Just saying that Google is not a safe place to keep your writing/art.

This is the specific part of the ToS that I was looking at:

And this is the part that says they can restrict access to your writing or remove it entirely for breaking the ToS:

So, yeah. An author lost access to their writing due to sharing it with beta and alpha readers. It seems like an isolated incident as far as I’m aware, but you can never be too careful. Back up your stuff if you can.

Reblogging mostly for the How To Backup From Gdocs info too many don't know about; this also works with Libre and others, as that's what I have.

Still investigating for more than anecdotal evidence this is actually a new concern with Gdocs, or if someone got hit with a ban for something weird with the automation.

Yes, the TOS information is still there and always has been, but whether the auto-mods are trying to catch out private writings and fiction shared or not, I'm still digging for more than screenshots from 1 group chat. The links in the screenshots (linked by OP in one of the reblogs) are the monthly Search updates report and the basic TOS info.

It's also possible someone simply reported the writer which is how they got hit, given the policy page linked.

@thebibliosphere

Good info on how to do the backups.

My money would be on someone reporting them, tbh. I've seen quite a few stories on Twitter recently about a few NSFW artists and writers who have managed to fly under Ko-fi's extremely strict NSFW ban for years suddenly up and losing their accounts (and access to PayPal, because Ko-fi is essentially a PayPal wrapper) because people were reporting them.

This is one of the worst sentences I’ve read in my entire life

Actually the worst part is that if you click on the answer, Google is so broken that it gives you a paragraph from a random blog that is talking about a completely different book. Not even a different book with the same name, just a completely different book that happened to be mentioned in the same post that mentioned the poppy war

I DONT THINK THATS TRUE GOOGLE

me: hmm time to google something

google every time: can i PLEASE have your location PLEASE 🥺🥺🥺 I need to know where you live so BAD 😫😫😫😫 Where do you fucking from?????? 😩😩😩😩😩😩

google siting ao3 as a source is so unhinged

Google is quickly approaching a fucking unusable state

So I started using duckduckgo a little over a year ago. At my research job I was advised to be careful about what I googled (versus looking up in reference documents), because Google is data mining all of us and the company is concerned that Google might sell data on what we are searching about to competitors. Which is its own level of creepy cyber dystopian hell.

Anyway I figured I'd just bypass that entire problem by using a search engine which didn't datamine me, a thing which apparently never occurred to our data security team because Google has sunk its claws into every aspect of our lives. And at first it felt a little bit clunky because it has different searching priorities than Google and I found myself having to relearn subtleties of search term optimization and how to parse results which I never realized were unique to Google in the first place. Meanwhile at home I was using Google and duckduckgo in unequal proportions because I hadn't really committed to making the switch you know?

And this means I got to be the frog with one foot in the slowly boiling water and one foot in a nice bath of room temperature water for reference as Google rotted from the inside. I don't know how long this process has been going on and how much I missed. But from 2022 to 2023, Google has gone to hell. It is almost unusable compared to what it was a year ago.

Nonsense pay to play search engine results now consume more than half of the first page, which we all know, but the stuff below that has gotten less and less useful too. It's gone from duckduckgo being a slightly less powerful search engine (with a bit of a learning curve that compounds the effect) to being objectively head and shoulders better than Google, and it's not because duckduckgo has gotten better! In just over a year!

I feel almost crazy because I don't think I would have noticed it if I hadn't had one foot in and one foot out of Google like I have, simply because of how often we all use Google and how slow that makes the enshittification process from search to search. But it's real! Google has gotten so much worse! It is eating itself alive!

this leaves out the most crucial tip you'll ever need:

-site:pinterest.*

excludes the entirety of pinterest's evil domainverse from image search

Reblogging for the Pinterest addition

Big news: Google has lost its first antitrust case. Via Matt Stoller:

So what happens now? In this case, the judge will come up with remedies next year. The order could be broad, and will likely loosen Google’s control over the mobile app ecosystem. Google has already announced that it will appeal, so the case isn’t over.

That said, Google is likely to be in trouble now, because it is facing multiple antitrust cases, and these kinds of decisions have a bandwagon effect. The precedent is set, in every case going forward the firm will now be seen as presumed guilty, since a jury found Google has violated antitrust laws. Judges are cautious, and are generally afraid of being the first to make a precedent-setting decision. Now they won’t have to. In fact, judges and juries will now have to find a reason to rule for Google. If, say, Judge Amit Mehta in D.C., facing a very similar fact-pattern, chooses to let Google off the hook, well, he’ll look pretty bad.

The best part about this though is it’ll probably start a similar antitrust lawsuit with Apple

Apple already won a similar suit, and there's a good chance they would again.

The big difference between them, and the main reason why Google lost and Apple didn't, is that Apple's decision to not allow third party stores is entirely internal. Apple is choosing what's available on their own phones.

Google on the other hand advertised that Android was open, and that third party manufacturers could run their business on their platform -- and then once the majority of the phone market was dependent on their platform took steps that would prevent those third parties from pre-installing or allowing competing stores on the platform.

Apple only dictated rules for themselves. Google got other companies dependent on them, and THEN forced those companies to take steps that stopped competitors from being able to exist. Apple said "Hey, if you want to come into our house, you have to follow our rules." Google said "If you want to go in ANYONE ELSE'S house, you have to follow our rules."

And that anticompetitive move is so much bigger, since Android makes up 70% of phones worldwide.

googledocs you are getting awfully uppity for something that can’t differentiate between “its” and “it’s” correctly

oho and now you’re questioning my adverb usage? you? you?

you fucking dare?

you try to change ‘tears’ to ‘years’ for no reason but don’t catch ‘imporint’???

hey quick question gdocs

what the fuck

1. how the fuck did this post become so popular

2. everyone just commenting ‘QUERCHED’ is delightful

3. some people have suggested i use grammarly. this is letting the robots win and also would deprive me of the opportunity to complain about insignificant technical things instead of just wanting to scream over writing all the time

4. i use googledocs because i want access to my writing on multiple platforms and also because fuck microsoft 

5. the difference between [its] and [it’s] is that [it’s] is always used as a shortened form of [it is] and [its] is used as the possessive of [it]. yes, this goes against the usual practice of just tacking on an [‘s] when you want to indicate ownership. yes, english is absolutely a trash language.

btw, gdoc’s most recent transgression:

noooope

LITERALLY THE EXACT OPPOSITE MEANING OF WHAT I WANT, GDOCS

i’m sorry what kind of AI FUCKERY is going on here that you are trying to ADD IN ADVERBS FOR ME that could ENTIRELY CHANGE THE TONE from a neutral ‘He’d been young’ to something that would put emphasis on just how young he was and how long ago it was you cannot just THROW EXTRA WORDS IN LIKE THAT

‘he’d been so young’ I’LL FUCKING KILL YOU

OH MY FUCKING GOD ARE YOU SERIOUS

me @ everyone else using googledocs:

YOU

I just listened to a podcast with an A.I. research scientist. She said if you wouldn’t trust autocorrect to be in charge of a decision, then you shouldn’t trust another A.I. with it, so… that’s something to worry about

The reason “its” doesn’t have an added apostrophe is NOT because it’s an exception. It’s because “it” is a pronoun and follows the rules of pronoun possessives. For classic pronouns, it goes “that object is his/hers/theirs/its,” not “that object is he’s/her’s/their’s/it’s object.” If the first three of the latter group look wrong to you, so should “it’s” when you’re using “it” as a pronoun.

English is OFTEN a messy language, but this isn’t one of the reasons why.

the climate of youtube as a platform makes me so depressed

youtube shorts. beautifully drawn commissioned thumbnails replaced with clickbait shocked reaction faces and red arrows because the video wasn't doing well. all caps video titles that don't even tell you what the video is. youtube shorts. the mr beast-ification of youtube. every video has to outdo the next. one a scale of 1 to 10. risk is not rewarded. youtube shorts. clips channels. youtube shorts.

nvm Google won't let me have fun anymore

the Algorithm watching me search for increasingly unhinged shit like "boycow bopbees" until it decides there is no way a normal human would be doing this

good news there's a single hit on "catboy boycow"

Being irresistibly sexy is such a burden 😔

I've worked at big software companies long enough to know how this would play out as a bug. Users report the issue. Engineers think oh thats a simple fix. However this is Google so it's likely these tickets are triaged in a way that someone like a project manager has visibility into it before deciding to dedicate time into it.

the project manager asks "is this a bug, though?" not because of homophobia but because they want to know how many users experience this as being an incorrect suggestion vs a valid suggestion. so they call the data scientists in and run some queries, and lo and behold because there's more straight couples in the world of course the data shows this is only affecting a very small amount of users. this is working fine for most users.

but the engineers and other stakeholders point out why this isnt as simple as what the data days and it's more of a UX thing. call the project managers in for whoever's in charge of like, grammar analysis and not just the system that flags it. an epic is created in jira. meetings are scheduled. don't forget experts in other languages

five weeks later you're running an A/B test on not correcting users when they write "his husband" to see if DAUs drop when your grammar suggestion engine considers that gay people can be married

feel like pure shit just want her (good drill bits reddit) back 😔

literally literally

r/askhistorians 🫡🫡🫡