The Mediocrity of Modern Google
om.co
These days, whenever I think about Google, I recall a line from Madame Bovary. “She wanted to die, but she also wanted to live in Paris,” Flaubert writes, capturing Emma Bovary’s provincial reality…

These days, whenever I think about Google, I recall a line from Madame Bovary. “She wanted to die, but she also wanted to live in Paris,” Flaubert writes, capturing Emma Bovary’s provincial reality and her romanticized dreams of escape. That is Google in a nutshell, isn’t it?

  • Pirata@lemm.eeEnglish
    29·
    2 days ago

    I’ve tried SearXNG and stayed there. And it costs me a whole 0€ per month. 10€/month for a search engine is insane.

    • taladar@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      7·
      2 days ago

      The Wikipedia page for SearX claims it has been discontinued in 2022. The GitHub repository being archived in 2023 would seem to support that.

    • OmegaSunkey@ani.socialEnglish
      1·
      2 days ago

      I only use SearXNG because it loads faster than DDG for me. It parses very very fast on my low end pc, and thats what I wish.

      • Pirata@lemm.eeEnglish
        2·
        1 day ago

        Yeah, that’s the thing about Sear. You can customise it how you want and that’s it. No need to let some corpo be in control of what and how you see your results.

    • enkers@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      4·
      2 days ago

      Yeah, searx and no looking back here too. The only downside is it’s OotB experience isn’t the best, so you should spend a minute configuring it to add more engines than just google. Oh, that and the occasional outages, but they seem to be less common lately.

    • dreadbeef@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
      11·
      1 day ago

      It’s gonna stay free forever, you’re totally not externalizing those costs to someone else. You can’t break the laws of thermodynamics

      You know what they say about when you don’t pay for a service…

      • Pirata@lemm.eeEnglish
        3·
        1 day ago

        Do you know how SearXNG works? It literally pulls search results from whatever other SEs you define it should pull from. You just get to reap the perks of all engines, without having to deal with their antagonistic design.

        Who pays for all of it in the end? The people who still want to use Google’s service and feed their all-reaching tentacles. But that is their choice.