this post was submitted on 26 Jul 2023
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Privacy

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[–] [email protected] 10 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Yeah I don't think this comment is accurate, the only website that gives you a subpar experience to incentivize you to use a Chromium-based browser that I've come across is, well, google.com on mobile.

Luckily you can download a plugin on Firefox to trick google.com to show you the Chromium experience, or you can just use something like startpage.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 11 months ago (1 children)

That's true. Luckily I removed Google Search Fixer from my browser this week, as I finally gave up on Google search (hopefully this time it's permanent).

In my opinion its results have been getting so bad (including boolean searches) in the last months that I feel that other search engines don't provide a significantly worse experience anymore. I was unable to find content on Google that I know I found there before and where I know that it's still on the internet, as I was able to find it with other search engines. I actually found that for example Bing gave me much more results when filtering by date range, e. g. searching for web content dated before 2005.

Google's web DRM project was the final straw for me to finally be serious about trying other search engines again (all my previous attempts eventually failed due to my boolean search requirement) and use as little Google services as possible. I have also tried to lower my usage of YouTube over the last couple of months by primarily subscribing to channels I know from YouTube on PeerTube and by using the Piped frontend more. Since I subscribed to YouTube channels via RSS already, it wasn't difficult to switch the RSS feed over to PeerTube instead. ;)

[–] [email protected] 3 points 11 months ago

I selfhost SearXNG. Its pretty good. And you can turn on and off different search engines (e.g Google, Bing, Yahoo)