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PaperclipPerfector  18d ago (text post)   2256 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for September 1, 2024

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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What search engine and browser are you currently using for your default?

I've been using Google and Chrome due to decades of inertia, but the deterioration in result quality and ever escalating frequency of intrusive pop-ups for new nonsense functions I don't want have finally hit activation energy for a switch.

Chrome seems to be pushing in a strong anti-ad-blocker direction lately, so I'm on Firefox.

On the rare occasions I need to search for something, it's usually a Google search using "site:reddit.com" to eliminate SEO spam. I haven't seen any real gains using alternative search engines, and Google is at least familiar.

Brave and Google (for now).

  • Brave: Someone recommended it to me last year and I love it. It’s quick, light, syncs pretty well across devices (although I don’t do a lot of syncing) and most of the Chrome extensions I had been using are compatible. I love its playlist feature where you can force it to download lots of media from different places (YouTube, podcasts etc) and play them while offline.
  • Google: I still search lots, but usually for something that I know has a specific destination page/answer. I.e. I don’t Google-then-browse-and-scroll, which I probably did for years and a lot of people probably still do now. I also use lots of advanced search operators both on Google and in other “search engines” like Twitter/X and Reddit.

On my laptop, Vivaldi, because I have too many tabs. Duckduckgo for the default search engine.

Did they fix the "moving the mouse in the menu crashed the browser" issue? I loved it aside from that: most functional out of the box browser I've ever used. Didn't need to install a single addon.

I don't know about that bug, so no idea.

Brave (browser), DDG/Startpage (search engine). I've heard about Kagi but haven't actually tried it yet.

Also worth noting that Brave is a great mobile browser given how few adblocking solutions there are for mobile platforms.

I don’t use a search engine I just ask AIs to search for me

Safari + Perplexity.

Safari is simply because it works great on the iPhone and I like the syncing functions enough to endure the somewhat worse desktop browsing experience.

I am surprised nobody mentioned perplexity actually. It works great for a certain type of query especially with the pro mode enabled.

Firefox and DuckDuckGo.

Using Google Search and Google services on a Google browser (i.e. all of them except Firefox and Safari) is a bit too centralized and vulnerable for my tastes, so I went to the closest alternatives.

Using Google Search and Google services on a Google browser (i.e. all of them except Firefox and Safari) is a bit too centralized

I mean, yes and no. Having a lot of orgs have some of your data is worse from a privacy perspective than one org having all your data, because usually "some" is enough and then you have more possible points where somebody could use it against you (or be hacked by somebody who will).

From a "transition cost" perspective... well, Google's unlikely to block you from search and I'm not sure they even can block you from Chrome.

Sure, Mozilla, Google, and DuckDuckGo each know about me, but what are they going to do with it?

In the Google-Google-Google world, they can gather data from the services, put ads and "customization" in search, and prevent adblockers in the browser. I made the switch before AMP and Manifest V3 existed, so I'm feeling pretty vindicated with my decision.

Brave + Kagi

There's no point in going on the internet now without an ad block - that's like going naked for a run over a landfill full of medical waste. Thus Brave + Privacy Badger.

Google as the search engine has been going down in quality lately. I've used duckduckgo and brave search, but Kagi seems to be cleaner and results for me are better, and I like the search engine when I'm the customer, not the raw material to be processed and sold.

Does Kagi do the same political filtering on search like google and duckduck? (sorry, I mean, "helpful weeding out of misinformation")

They actually took a stance against doing that. Vlad is CEO and responding to arguments in that thread.

Most relevant:

The very basic question of what do you police (or don't) next is not answerable. For example 'how to kill an animal?', 'how to rob a bank?', 'how to hack a computer?' - although objectively less impactful than the original example, would eventually draw attention from sufficently large groups of people who will passionately call us out on not doing something about these queries on the same moral grounds. And again this never ends, you end up being in the business of pleasing everyone. Good luck with that.

Thus the best option for us is to simply refuse to make the first precedent no matter what the pressure is and stick to search being search. Perhaps one day Kagi may become your 'assistent' with personalised biases, but for now it is just a search engine.

Not that I noticed any. Of course, I have my own bubble so I can only answer within what I tried to search for. Also, you can tune the rankings - e.g. say this site is more trustworthy and this is less, so it would rank according to your preferences. E.g. if you don't want to see a lot of reddit, you could downrank it, or vice versa. But I haven't noticed any helpfulness of the sort you mention there.

They have a free trial plan so I definitely would suggest to try it out before committing with payment. I upgraded to paid when I tried it out and saw that when trial was over I was upset I can't use it anymore.

Edge + Bing. This is a result of both a decision I made a while back to rebase my digital services with Microsoft, and a gradual comfort with the windows default settings from reinstalling windows many times.

Edge and DuckDuckGo. Google used to be better than DDG, but now both are equally full of SEO spam. I would use Firefox, but Edge is (or at least used to be) much less power-hungry, which is important when one of my primary PCs is a Surface Pro 9.

Google still has a lot longer archives than DDG if you're looking for old forum posts and such; I frequently wind up resorting to Google after DDG fails.

Firefox and Kagi, the best browser-search engine pairing in 2024.

Another vote here for Brave, both as browser and as a search engine.

I use Brave, and Kagi. Brave because it has the benefits of Chrome as a derivative (but with a built in ad blocker and at least attempting to care about user privacy). Kagi because I appreciate their attempt to align their incentives with users, even if there's no guarantee it will last (as plenty of paid businesses inject ads in a race to the bottom).

I just switched over to Firefox from Google Chrome. I agree that Chrome has gotten significantly worse, particularly the amount of ads on Google searches and YouTube. YouTube started becoming completely non-functional, so I decided it was time to switch over. I installed Firefox and downloaded uBlock right away. Now I don't experience any sponsored results when using Google search or YouTube. It's glorious. Firefox was also really easy to transfer over passwords and bookmarks so it was a fairly seamless transition. The more challenging part is that Firefox doesn't work as well for iOS, so I'm still using Chrome on my iPhone for now.

Have been using Floorp for several months as a browser. It's transparently Firefox with some enhanced security and features that I like.

Searching is now more about parameters than whichever engine. Learn how to use things modifiers like site, filetype, timerange etc.

I will admit the hole is still in finding good news articles. For me, that means a mixture of trusted twitter accounts, blogs, and pay legacy media (WSJ primarily, although even they have a slant and aren't immune to "current thing" dynamics).

Chrome should be avoided at all costs because of how invasive Google is. If you took all of the branding off of it, it would look like a piece of malware.

I'm still using Firefox, although it's increasingly nonfunctional. Tmk it's still the only browser with good tab management systems.
Been meaning to give Vivaldi another try. Heard they fixed the bug where moving the mouse too fast in the menu crashed the browser...

Google and Yandex for search, the latter whenever my "censored results" sense goes off.

yandex also just has great image search, for whatever reason. maybe because it isn't passing everything through a pc puree

I increasingly suspect that google's image search is artificially handicapped less for political reasons and more for copyright lobby reasons. Reverse image search barely works as originally conceived and the ability to find alternative crops and resolutions for an image you already have is long gone. I don't have much of a reason to believe this other than the fact that these two features seem like they'd attract a lot of ire from stock photo publishers and media publishers in general, and these two features are also the most conspicuously broken/absent.

Yandex notably still has perfectly functional versions of both features.

Brave as a browser (exactly same feel as Chrome, it's built off Chrome) and still Google for search engine. As for result quality, I'm not sure I've noticed a decline too much, but I mix Google up with Yandex and Bing and Brave search if Google isn't turning up what I want.

(exactly same feel as Chrome, it's built off Chrome)

Don't sell it short! It supports vertical tabs, which Chrome does not, and has a built-in adblocker that will survive the coming manifest v3 Apocalypse.

Vertical tabs are nice, btw, recommend to try it out. Takes a bit of time to adjust but surprisingly more convenient for a tab hoarder as myself.

I adjusted immediately. It's a feature I had no idea I needed, until I tried it out.

Guess I'm not a power user, I didn't know it supported vertical tabs! But agreed on the built-in adblocker.

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