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)

google doesnt give a shit what you're trying to search any more. it's like "I didnt bother using half of your search terms but here's pinterest and wikihow. enjoy"

I don’t know anything at all abut computers but

You know how, when you first talk to a new chatbot (the kind that are designed to be trained as they go), it’s kind of limited and stilted and obviously AI? And then, once it’s been online and trained up and tweaked for awhile, it gets really convincing and talks mostly like a person? And then after a golden period it rapidly descends into incoherence, with a few phrases dominating regardless of conversation context and everything else being sentence fragments and non-sequitors?

The last few years of using google have kind of felt like slipping into that incoherence stage.

it pretty much is what the above person is saying. a few years ago they switched to usimg the 'bidirectional encoder representations from transformers' (BERT) algorhythm, which used AI to scan your quety f9rwards and backwards searchong fpr intent, rather than just using the meaning of the individual words ypu type. few problems with this. one, it's shit. two, it is actively ignoring what you say in favour of trying to figure out what it THINKS you're trying to say. great leap forwatd for AI, and great slip backwards for clear communication vs essentually being gaslit by your computer. three, it is trying to work out ypur meaning according to the indescribably vast pool of search data from all of history, around the world. which is great if you want to search for the same things as everyone else in history arpund the world has. it's using previous searches to predict your intent. so if yoy want to search for 'can the measles vaccine cause blood clots', congratulations, ypy're going to get a load of results about the covid vaccine. you didn't mention it but millions of other people did, so that's probably what you wanted, right? how on earth could google have made such a niave mistake? simple. it's no longer invested in showing you what you want; it's trying to show you what you should want. looking for an independant crafts shop? nobpdy searches that, you're having amazon instead. searching for a specific live journal, by name? yeah wrll it isn't so bothered abput names now, and your intention is presumably to read a blog, so here are 50 links to the same huge blog sites owned by the same huge multimedia corporations. you asked for a biography of a local photographer but running your query against every similar one in history, turns out more people use pinterest and wikipedia than that random guy you mentioned, so obviously you meant to search for 'photographs' on pinterest or 'photography' on wikepedia, right? essentially, the old algorhythm was like ordering grocery delivery by saying what you want to buy and accepting that sometimes they won't have certain items in stock and will send something similar instead. the new one is saying what ypu want to buy and it analyses your shopping list to figure out which items you're most likely to want, according to how previous shoppers have purchased, and sending ypu that instead. and call me cynical, but i think the latter method is going to lead to an awful lot of 'you want coca cola, you just didn't know it'. sooner or later ypu won't even bother to search for that off-brand cola you used to drink, it never comes up anyway. what a shame. you can read abpit the model at google's own blog at https://blog.google/products/search/search-language-understanding-bert/ which is a simple, clear explanation of the algorhythm and also the answer to the question 'what will happen when AI starts correcting humans?'. the answer is profit.

thank you for this explanation! but now I want to start killing people at google

I found this resource and it's already giving me better results.