I stopped using Google at the same time I closed my accounts with Facebook, instagram, Reddit and Amazon. Currently I’m using Ecosia which I think is German. I’m dumping all the US companies I can based on all the Trump crap. It is taking time and effort but I should be able to actually close the Google account soon and I replaced windows with Linux on all but one of my PCs.
These numbers underline the current trend to choose European services instead of American ones, which followed the trend to deGoogle.
[the chart shows stats for American Google, American Bing, Russian Yandex, American Yahoo!, American DuckDuckGo, and Other]
Yeah, that statement wasn’t supported by the data at all. It seemed to only be included as a way to link to their other articles about European alternatives and de-Googling.
Russian Yandex
Exceptionally good at finding torrent sites and other piracy outlets, because they aren’t working hand-in-glove with American broadcasters to censor and shadowban these links. Google, Bing, DDG, and the other American mainline search sites all focus on feeding end-users into a discrete set of Web2 mega-site sponsors. Yandex uses the older web crawlers and indexing tools, so it gives more honest (abet fuzzier and less reliable) results. And since nobody really gives a shit about Yandex, the efforts to game its algorithm have been comparatively minimal.
Yandex also has the benefit of being relatively English-friendly, while other popular non-English search sites like Baidu, Qwant, and Naver don’t cater too quite so freely.
Thanks for mentioning Yandex, bringing is back onto my radar.
And they have really good products - the Navigator is great, and Yandex Music was better than Spotify (until the war started and a lot of labels/artists disappeared).
I’m not using their products now as I don’t want to feed the government, but they do(did?) some great stuff.Who still uses search engines to find torrent, though?
Sites periodically get taken down or rendered less than useful. Especially for live streaming.
Yandex was invaluable when I was looking for Olympics streams, for instance. Also really depends on which communities are hosting to which torrent sites. I found nyaa.si off Yandex, because I couldn’t find the anime I was looking for on 1337x.to.
What would be a good EU alternative?
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the discussion is about search engines, not browsers.
Who knew if your product was mostly shit people would stop using it?
77% still using it though
This might be very non-linear, like ice breaking under your feet.
Sure, but this is a process that takes time; that said, he trend is downward and that will likely continue unless things improve.
And if tech people are no longer recommending it, or actively recommending against it, it is possible to get people to start switching. This is largely how chrome became so popular in the first place, and that required getting people to change from the default option.
The recent duckduckgo ad campaign will surely help rescue googlers and so does my mission to ensure everyone I know doesn’t use google search.
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I switched when the answers I got started to become bullshit. I’d google a simple question just to double check if it was correct, but it gave me something completely different. Something so out of the realm of possibility that I was baffled.
I check the sources for the answer and they were not even related. After that I started paying more attention to how messed up google had become, and I had enough.
Google scholar however is still something I need… even though I dislike American corporations.
Why would I google something when the first answer is an inferior AI to chatgpt. I’ll just use a better AI.
I went long enough without using Google (probably a year-ish) that, when I accidentally made a Google search a few days ago, it was a jarring experience.
It felt wrong the same way other search engines did when I first deGoogled. It was kind of nice actually.
The irony is Gemini is really good (like significantly better than ChatGPT), and cheap for them (no GPUs needed), yet somehow they made it utterly unbearable in search.
Gemini is really good at confidently talking nonsense but other than that I don’t really see where you get the idea that it is good. Mind you, that isn’t much better with the other LLMs.
So it’s really good at the thing LLMs are good at. Don’t judge a fish by it’s ability to climb a tree etc…
No, it is mediocre at best compared to other models but LLMs in general have a very minimal usefulness.
I get the desire to say this, but I find them extremely helpful in my line of work. Literally everything they say needs to be validated, but so does Wikipedia and we all know that Wikipedia is extremely useful. It’s just another tool. But its a very useful tool if you know how to apply it.
But Wikipedia is basically correct 99% of the time on basic facts if you look at non-controversial topics where nobody has an incentive to manipulate it. LLMs meanwhile are lucky if 20% of what they see even has any relationship to reality. Not just complex facts either, if an LLM got wrong how many hands a human being has I wouldn’t be surprised.
LLMs with access to the internet are usually about as factually correct as their search results. If it searches someone’s blog, you’re right, the results will suck. But if you tell it to use higher quality resources, it returns better information. They’re good if you know how to use them. And they aren’t good enough to be replacing as many jobs as all these companies are hoping. LLMs are just going to speed up productivity. They need babysitting and validating. But they’re still an extremely useful tool that’s only going to get better and LLMs are here to stay.
It can be grounded in facts. It’s great at RAG. But even alone, Gemini 2.5 is kinda shockingly smart.
…But the bigger point is how Google presents it. It shouldn’t be the top result of every search just thrown into your face, it should be a opt-in, transparent, conditional feature with clear warnings, and only if it can source a set of whitelisted, reliable websites.
After just trying it again a few times today for a few practical problems that it not only misunderstood at first completely and then gave me a completely hallucinated answer to every single one I am sorry, but the only thing shocking about it is how stupid it is despite Google’s vast resources. Not that stupid/smart really apply to statistical analysis of language.
Gemini 2.5? Low temperature, like 0.2?
The one they use in search is awful, and not the same thing. Also, it’s not all knowing, you gotta treat it like it has no internet access (because generally it doesn’t).
The one they use on gemini.google.com (which is 2.5 right now but was awful in earlier versions too).
Try it here instead, set the temperature to like 0.1 or 0.2, and be sure to set 2.5 Pro:
It is indeed still awful for many things. It’s a text prediction tool, not a magic box, even though everyone advertises it kinda like the later.
“Significantly better than ChatGPT” and “Good” aren’t the same. Like ipecac is significantly better to drink than sewage water.
I had that happen too. Couldn’t find something with DDG. Hopped over to Google and was shocked at how completely unusable it was.
I abandoned Google when they started throwing shopping links at the top of every search, even when searching for things that have no relevance to shopping, and they started artificially promoting scams and paid material above actual results.
Google Search was best around 10-15 years ago when their only focus was providing the best results they could (remember when you could actually click the top result and you would be taken to the most applicable page instead of some unrelated ad or scam?). Now their focus is on providing the best product possible for their actual customers (paid advertisers) even when it means trashing their own product in the process.
they also ruined their own platform by creating and encouraging an entire business around gaming search results.
I almost never use them now.
Google been degrading as time has gone on. The other search engines (like all of them) are getting or surpassing google in certain subjects. AI has really made them look like fools in all of this. Googles AI sucks for results and (while I dont like it) others are using chatgpt for search results.
I would say it is just the opposite. Google used to be good before they tried to post-process results in this extreme way and AI is just an even more extreme way to do that. ChatGPT and all the other LLMs just increase the noise to signal ratio (noise coming first because there is so much more of it than signal these days).
I actually agree. Others use chatgpt for just about everything. I dont like it for many…many reasons.
Google was much better pre-2020.
People use chat gpt to tell them what to buy. We are doomed. Our brains are about to shrink to the size of a pea in 10 years. All is going to plan for the elite.
Its funny because you can totally run good LLMs on local systems but people are just going to chat because its what they know and its easy to work with. Like I get it, but they are starting to put ads in the prompts now.
I’m glad to contribute to that metric.
Been using Ecosia for up to a year now probably. I like it and I don’t need anything else.
Is Ecosia any good for the privacy-minded folks among us?
It’s more privacy focussed than Google, but less than others. Personally I use Ecosia at work and Qwant at home.
For a growing number of users, we can provide search results and ads from Google. For the eligible users, we will provide Google results by default. When your search results and ads are provided by Google, Google will use essential cookies and local storage to help defend against fraudulent traffic. Beyond this, the cookies Google uses will depend on where you are searching from: If you search from the EU, UK or certain US states (for example California), Google will not set additional cookies without your consent. If you search from elsewhere, Google may place additional cookies and the functionality of these cookies will depend on whether you have a Google account
Seems like using Ecosia is about as private as using Google directly.
Nice to see this choice is making an actual difference.
I still include Google results in my Searx.
Definitely miss the good ol’ days where it was optimized to give the best results. Same goes for Netflix recommendations back in the the DVD mailer days…
Didn’t read the article but use Qwant since Trump.
Or Ecosia
!lemmysilver
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I ditched it around 2014 when I noticed it had effectively become the yellow pages. Its pretending to be one thing to the ‘user’ when its actually serving someone else. This is transparent of course but the balance/compromise or tradeoff of it still providing some utility to the user despite this is what may vary for different people. My threshold was low. That and the privacy violations. Unfortunately its a corporation.
