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I have a long-running conspiracy theory that Google deliberately makes the UI's of their various services (Android, Google Docs, Youtube etc.) baffling and they hide important features away so that you have to use Google to search how to do things.
You may be interested in this video by Gamers Nexus from about 10 months ago:
"Google is Getting Worse," ft. Wendell of Level1 Techs
Basically, Google has made their search engine results purposefully worse, so that users need to keep scrolling to find the correct search results, while they feed more ads to users.
Lots of other search engine options.
Kagi seems good.
I'm currently using duckduckgo and it's roughly as good as google search at this point. I remember it being considered a joke when it first launched.
God forbid, bing is also an option.
if you self host, or if you can find an instance your trust, searxng is great imho.
I thought duckduckgo used bing's API?
It does, it's completely anonymised tho, and they pull in results from Yahoo and other sources (even Yandex). So while they do use the Bing API their results can be pretty vastly different from Bing's.
Is there a search engine that doesn't leech off of some huge corporate API?
Brave uses their own index. Qwant and Ecosia have partnered to build their own index as well.
"Since google doesn't have any real competition" Thankfully those days appear to be behind us. At least partially because of the shit they pulled.
I'm 100% convinced their internal testing is flawed and possibly suffers from confirmation bias. The strategy might work for a couple of years but in the long term they are killing their brand. Once people start migrating to other search engines Google will be beyond rescue.
Guess it's time to start thinking about Android and Chromecast alternatives because when Google becomes desperate they will turn everything they touch into shit.
The alternatives are iOS (bad) and Harmony OS (Chinese Android distro. Very bad)
So it's either some Linux based distro customized beyond recognitiom by the manufacturer or a complete new OS like Microsoft (bad) tried.
