Just started getting this now. Hopefully it’s some A/B testing that they’ll stop doing, but I’m not holding my breath
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Use any of the following:
lol. nope. not happening. that’s not how to get me to even think about using your search again (having quit over a decade ago).
What, you don’t want to interact with a CIA asset?
You’re still using Google search?
Sometimes, yeah. My default is DDG, and I also use Kagi, but Google is still good at some stuff. Guess I’ll take the hit and just stop using it completely though. Kagi has been good enough, and also lets me search the fediverse for finding that dank meme I saw last week. Google used to be able to do that, but can’t shove as many ads in those queries I assume, so they dropped that ability.
Use the bangs in DDG, eg !g asks DDG to search google
I use ddg. But that just uses Microsoft’s bing on the backend right?
Unless you use the bangs. !g tells it to use google
As a former web dev, good. I didn’t get paid enough to care about the people that block JavaScript
as a web dev graceful degregation should be the first thing you learn
I’ve been happy with Qwant lately, they have their own index so using them doesn’t support the Google + Bing hegemony. They’re also EU based and regulated by the gdpr.
Who still uses Google? DDG has been way better for a long while now. Join the duck side.
Uses Bing results.
So that’s why it’s so good at finding porn.
Configurable, though, to use many other engines and results.
Lots of overlap, but there are a couple other indexes out there.
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…and who also has JS off? That seems like a weird combination.
I agree, but if you want js off while web browsing, you’re already in that advanced tech circle and are a part of that demographic.
Kagi is also good. Better imo really
Love how you’re getting downvoted for suggesting a great search engine which doesn’t require JavaScript. Stay classy, everyone.
Probably because they didn’t mention that it’s not free.
Nobody asked. We were talking about g about good search engines, of which Kagi is one.
It really isn’t
Giving up your payment information is not great for privacy
Got about half way through this, yikes. I thought their pricing was already a bit steep per search, but considering the company decisions, it does not fill you with confidence.
searxng? Anyone?
Hell yeah
Brave search 🤙
It isn’t half bad
No offense intended, but why are you still using Google? Startpage has anonyomized results from Google. DuckDuckGo is good enough for most people as well. Brave search also exists if you don’t mind supporting that shitty company.
why are you using google in 2024 grandpa
Any reccos over duckduckgo? Been quite pleased with it.
Just use SearXNG.
Btw it’s possible to fingerprint people with JavaScript disabled. I found this article explaining and demonstrating if you’re curious.
Yeah, it’s not impossible, but it’s much harder and you get a lot less info. You can also counteract the JS-less tracking with Firefox’s privacy.resistFingerprinting, or by using the Tor Browser, which enables a lot of anti-surveillance measures by default. Here’s also another good site for discovering how trackable you are: https://coveryourtracks.eff.org/
It’s been a year or so since I’ve gone down this rabbit hole, but what I remember, the more you block ads and tracker, the more unique your browser becomes, and the more fingerprintable it is.
Tor’s approach is to make every instance if the tor browser look as identical as possible to websites. But Tor is pretty niche. If Apple did the same with Safari, you would be an identical device in a match larger pool of devices.
I think Apple has taken some measures, but not as well as Tot has.
There are so many alternatives
Switch to Kagi
I get a notification every month telling me that they will charge me for my monthly Kagi subscription and every single month i feel the same:
‘Totally worth it!’
I feel like their pricing would make more sense if you could just pay for your usage, rather than forcing a subscription
They do have different tiers depending on your search volume and features, so in a way they already have this. I’d hate to have to go through checkout every time i did a search.
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They have 100, 300, and unlimited for $0, $5, and $10
How much would you be willing to pay per search? And do you know how many searches you make every month?
For me, i pay not for the searches as such, but to not be tracked and be shown more ads than search results
I haven’t been using kagi long enough to really understand how it works yet, but it’s my understanding that they want you to pay every month, even if you had remaining searches from the previous month.
If I pay $5 for 300 searches, why does it matter if I do them within a time frame? When someone isn’t’ searching, they aren’t really costing Kagi anything.
Alternatively, let people pay 1.6 cents per search (or 1.8 cents or something).
Basically because the product they’re selling isn’t “You get to do a search whenever” but “You get to do a search this month”.
The reason for that, based on my experience with various web startups, is they want to maximize the predictability of their resource usage in terms of staff and servers.
If millions of people pay their $5 and then don’t use their searches, then in the extreme case Kagi could be maintaining servers twenty years later in anticipation that their customers might use those searches.
It’s an edge case, but it illustrates the point.
Also, on the customer side, there’s a psychological benefit to free things. Free as in “already paid for; no cost to using it”.
If you have something that can be used this month but not any other month, then using it is free. If using it now means you can’t use it next year, then there’s still a cost to it despite it already being paid for.
Doesn’t it require JavaScript?
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A large majority of modern web applications are built with Javascript… Both frontend and backend. You do still have a large majority of websites using plain HTML or PHP, with some features requiring JS to function (modals, realtime stats, data input, etc).
You also have alternative languages like Java or C# (and more), but also may use bits of JS on the frontend to drive functionality.
You can bet that the majority of websites you visit nowadays will use some form of JS, unless it’s a static webpage to display basic information.
A lot of the web is powered by JS, but much less of it needs to be. Here’s a couple of sites that are part of a trend to not unnecessarily introduce it:
The negative implications for Google requiring JS is that they will use it to track everything possible about you that they can, even down to how you move your cursor, or how much battery you have left on your phone in order to jack up prices, or any other number of shitty things.
JS is like a disease where it does not need to be. I would honestly welcome an Internet alternative that was all web 1.0 (with up-to-date security updates and methods). There’s good uses for it in interactive websites that provide cloud services, but most of it is fud and breaks the whole notion of HTTP GET URLs you can just share and cache.
Htmx does use javascript under the hood, but just makes it so the developer can use html markdown for more a more interactive environment that’s driven sever side. So the initial page load should render, but UI elements might not work as intended.
htmx is more a move back to REST as it was originally defined (aka not json backend).
They’re also working with browser developers to push htmx into web standards, so that hopefully soon you won’t even need htmx/JS/etc, it’ll just be what your browser does by default
Jesus Christ no.
As a web developer, nooooooo.
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Oof ouch my Lynx.
Oh well, there’s always DDG and friends.
