Technology

Google's been garbage for years now, I kind of miss Copernic Pro which is what I used before Google it searched all the search engines available and combined and resorted all the results.

Google was perfect at launch but in recent years it's worse than Yahoo!.

!lemmysilver

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.

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.

I work in an education setting and in the last month, Google started preloading the contents of other sites directly on the search page. It is wreaking havoc when combined with our blocking tools because kids will do a Google search for something innocuous and the page will immediately get blocked because it tried to load a result from Reddit or coursehero or something else we have blocked.

It's incredibly frustrating.

Who knew if your product was mostly shit people would stop using it?

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…

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]

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.

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.

Been using Ecosia for up to a year now probably. I like it and I don't need anything else.

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.