It’s impressive how duckduckgo manages to be so much better than bing despite being a frontend for bing
Here’s the UBlock filters for a better experience, on this day, 12-9-2024. Sadly, the results are still bing results, and the MS data vacuum is still in effect. (there’s a chance this get’s filtered cause of all the urls, so if there’s nothing below, oh well, woulda been nice, huh.
edit, image now
Can you paste as text?
Need to enshittify it enough to make the AI features feel like an improvement.
it’s Microsoft. You don’t need to edgelord censor yourself.
SearXNG
Your search query is garbage incidentally. Unifying is a “feature” not the name of any particular software. You should have searched for the model of your hardware
Is there a ConfidentlyIncorrect in here already?
Unifying is absolutely the name of software
It’s a goddamn feature the software has never been called unifying.
False
Not as garbage as your critical thinking abilities it would seem.
note how searching for the words logitech unifying don’t go to any current release of any software you would actually want to install whereas searching for “logitech” “name of hardware” actually take you to the current software for your actual hardware? Shocking I know.
Maybe you should inform Logitech about that?
https://www.logitech.com/en-us/resource-center/what-is-unifying.html
Also your own fucking link says explicitly that you can achieve the feature it describes with Logitech Options Plus! From your own goddamn link
. You can now personalize the experience of your Unifying devices with the powerful Logi Options+ App that lets you customize your supported Logitech devices so you can get more done.
Where are your downloads for that! They don’t call it that any longer
It’s describing the FEATURE! There are no downloads listed for a feature for a reason… you don’t load the actual software for instance “logitechoptions” “logitech options+” “G hub”
…Nnnnno, there is literally a tool from Logitech called “Logitech Unifying Software,” which is the applet you need to reassign a Logitech Unifying receiver to a different device.
https://support.logi.com/hc/en-us/articles/360025297913-Unifying-Software
It’s describing the FEATURE! There are no downloads listed for a feature for a reason… you don’t load the actual software for instance “logitechoptions” “logitech options+” “G hub”
That seems to be untrue.
💸 Microsoft 🤑 got 💰 paid 🫰 so… they managed to come out ahead of this whole ordeal just fine.
The rest of us can go suck a bag of dicks for all they care.
Is softonic actually malware or an unreliable repository that may contain malware? I’ve never actually clicked in lol
The latter.
My elderly dad fell for something similar trying to call HP support, he googled the number and the top result was some bullshit. They had him set up remote access and compromised all his data. Old man had to reset everything.
He called me saying what happened, I had him shut down and unplug. I recovered what I could but he lost a lot of data.
This shit should be illegal. Like, I’m sure it is technically but there shouldnt be unofficial sponsored results above legitimate sources.
Yeah… I get that you pay for ads, but ads should never masquerade themselves as legitimate content.
In a perfect world, they’d be legally/financially responsible for any ads they serve up like that.
Yes it is.
It’s just a mirror for software that is or was free. Though it’s been around for years, and hasn’t been relevant or needed by most people for a long time now so it very well could contain viruses and shit these days.
I unknowingly downloaded some software from there when I was a kid, and, from what I remember, it came bundled with some sort of update manager or something. Even if it’s not outright malware, I would wager most people who are looking to download logitech’s utility don’t want some irrelevant third-party garbage on their system. So AT BEST it’s crapware / bloatware
They had some issues with their downloader in the past but that thing has been canned a long time ago. It’s not a great site but it isn’t malware.
That’s the beauty of the internet. There’s always a competitor. I don’t have to use someone who had a bad reputation at one point but is fine now. I can just use someone else.
If you know you want Logitech software, why not go directly to the Logitech site and search there?
Most of the time, a search engine can get me to the relevant page faster than it takes to click through someone’s website.
Which I suppose might be something of a damning statement on the web design industry.
This is rapidly becoming less and less true unfortunately
Given the “unfortunately”, I assume that you’re talking about search engines becoming worse rather than product manufacturer sites getting better.
I use Kagi; they’re commercial and don’t do ads, so they don’t have the malware ad stuff. They do have some generative AI feature to try to answer questions directly, but I don’t think that generative AIs are nearly at the point where they’re better than looking at search results, and I can turn that off.
If I weren’t using Kagi…I don’t personally want to create an account with a search engine that doesn’t have a no-log policy. But some people don’t care, and sometimes with an account, you can turn off some features. So for some search engines, I bet that that gets the AI-generated answers out of the way. Google has a lot of hard-to-find parameters that you can insert into your search URL to toggle search functionality without needing an account – in Firefox, by editing your quick search bookmark, and while I don’t know if that includes stuff like AI-generated answers and “featured snippets”, which appears to be the latest thing, I’d guess that Google might have a way to toggle things.
There’s spam – maybe a year back, when I was using Google more, I remember Google really melting under a shit-ton of AI-generated spam sites. I mean, a significant proportion of my searches included not-very-useful-and-sometimes-wrong AI-generated text sites in the top results. Was the first time in a long time that Google was starting to lose to the spammer crowd. I haven’t been using Google much since, but the few times I’ve hit it, I haven’t seen that, so my impression is that they’ve managed to push the spammers back.
In some cases – and I realize that a lot of people just aren’t going to bother with this – the GreaseMonkey addon permits pages to be mutated, and people often write scripts to hide unwanted content.
On the company website side of things getting better, which I assume isn’t what you mean…
Well, the world does appear to have adopted some conventions for navigation. I don’t like all of them, but at least it makes various sites somewhat more predictable.
To find software associated with a product, it’s almost always possible to go to the support section, maybe select your region of the world. Then sometimes you choose a product category, sometimes just search the product catalog directly. For very small companies, sometimes there’s no search, just a list of products. Sometimes the search can be very obnoxious, like requiring one to look up a model number, but that’s in a minority of cases. That will take one to the product page, and then there’s usually some sort of links to firmware and manuals and such. It’s not common these days to require registration to get access to them.
Another downside is that it’s very common for companies to want to have large promotional images and sometimes video on their main page and sometimes product pages. That’s obnoxious if I’m on a slow cell link at the time.
So…it’s not terrible. But a search engine can generally get me to the relevant page in the top results, without needing to traverse the rest of the website.
Finally, while it’s not an issue with Logitech, it’s not always obvious where a company lives. For the US, yeah, it’s usually companyname.com. But that’s not always true. For the UK – and sometimes I buy products from abroad – it’s often in
.co.uk. In the US, due to an infamous trademark fight, “nissan.com” is owned by a small auto company who the much-larger auto manufacturer tried to take the domain from. After an acrimonious fight, the small company is now determined that Nissan Motors is never getting the domain, so Nissan Motors is at nissanusa.com. Sometimes companies spin things off or sell divisions; Thinkpad used to be an IBM product line, until it was sold to the Chinese Lenovo. And one of the more-convenient ways to find a company’s domain name is, well…to hit a search engine. Yeah, I know some domains off the top of my head – kernel.org, microsoft.com, apple.com. But for most manufacturers of most products, I don’t. The domain name is still useful, helps me validate that this is an official site. But it’s not necessarily the ideal way to get there. So if you’re potentially already going to hit a search engine to find the company domain, you might as well just jump directly to the product support page.
I typed the URL that was literally printed in the packaging of a [new] Logitech mouse, and the page didn’t exist! Like, how?!‽
OR install it via Chocolatey:
WinGet is slowly replacing Chocolatey :)
I know both but didn’t know this. Why and how is it?
Winget is built-in, doesn’t require an elevated command prompt, and will actually update stuff installed from outside of winget if you want.
I use chocolatey for some kubernetes tools (fluxCD and helm) because they get updated a little bit faster (like a day or less) but it’s pretty much been made obsolete for my use.
That being said, if my job didn’t require me to use windows, I’d probably just use NixOS full time.
No it isn’t
Not sure about Logitech, but most other companies where I need to download driver software it’s an absolute crapshoot. Search engines used to be good for implementing complex search on your site without need to spin up a custom search logic yourself.
Google still have an API and SDK for if you want to use Google Search on your own site.
Sometimes brand websites are done well and you find what you’re looking for within a few clicks, but more often than that, the website will be a horrendous experience.
Google search results used to usually bring up the direct link to the download page on that brand’s website. Pretty much as the first search result.
To be fair, that also was a time where brand websites were really bad.
That’s… what they’re looking for.
Because we have been conditioned for 30 years to use a search engine
5 seconds later
Welcome to Logitech global! It looks like you’re searching for this article that talks about how Logitech is the global leader in ending climate change and ending world hunger! Here’s a link to our press releases.
Oh my god that’s amazing. Instructions on how to do what you’re literally doing, dead internet theory is so correct. Instructions for robots by robots
On robots.net too
Unpopular opinion: dead internet is not only real, but GOOD. Once robots get good enough to autonomously sign up for websites and make convincing posts, this will force us humans to go actually outside, make friends, form deep social relationship, and build lasting, resilient communities. Meanwhile on the internet, websites that are willing to allow AI content for money will eventually die out due to lack of actual users. The only remaining websites will be run by individuals and organizations with non-profit motives, and a strict human-only policy with verification based on word-of-mouth / invite system.
Boooo, this is just diet accelerationism! Let me have genuine online connections in addition to my IRL ones.
I’m a geek, always around computers, gaming, tinkering, etc.
Once I moved for work, to Spain, didn’t know the language. My laptop broke, like, when opening it, the plastic was fatigued and the screen just bent.
I was broke, expensive training… Couldn’t replace it before a few months.
So I went to the bar of the inn I was starting at. And just, tried to pick up some words.
Long story short, after a while I knew everyone in town, had many friends, and after work, laptop or not, I would go to the bar. I got fluent in Spanish too.
Happiest time of my life. I don’t think my mental health has ever been as good as back then.
I’m extremely wary and nervous about how disruptive LLMs can/will be but one relief is just getting an answer directly for things instead of wading through page after page of SEO optimized BS. Just really nice when you can get a quick answer and get back to the things you want to be doing.
I suppose the AI overlords will screw that up somehow too but IMO it’s at a brief moment of usefulness.
If the answer is even correct. Friend tried to use it to see what laptops with 4k screens cost and all 3 options were in fact, not 4k at all because the AI is dog shit :)
No that’s very true, I had it look up leather repair shops not too long ago and it listed six completely fictional shops with fully fleshed out trip-advisor style blurbs for each one. It was hilariously convincing and a complete waste of my time. But it does seem like that happens less and less lately.
Thing is, you never have any clue whether the AI is telling you something even remotely true unless you go behind it and trawl through six pages of shitty SEO-optimized bullshit anyway. So you can either take its word at face value and potentially be completely wrong, or else just do the research yourself anyway and ignore the AI answer.
Personally, I choose the second. I find it to be less frustrating if I just assume the AI is wrong.
This is kinda how I’ve come to look at it. You cannot ask questions of fact to a machine that works in probabilities.
Well said, I like that.
this will force us humans to go actually outside, make friends, form deep social relationship, and build lasting, resilient communities
There is no chance it goes that way, how is talking to people outside even an option for someone used to just being on the internet? Even if the content gets worse, the basic mechanisms to keep people scrolling still function, while the physical and social infrastructure necessary for in person community building is nonexistent.
Enshittified internet and software made me no longer obsessed with technology, and instead I focused on other hobbies. And it also made my socialize more.
The economy was always bots buying from other bots…
High-frequency trading has entered the chat.
What chat?
On most chat platforms when a person joins the channel/room/whatever a notice will be sent to all users indicating the user entered the chat. It comes from old IRC servers.
https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Has entered the chat
It’s gone really downhill ever since co-pilot
It’s hard to call it better than Google now
Is it still good for porn, at least?
Yall use a search engine to search for porn? Like you don’t just open a private tab, go to PornHub and then click something.
It’s a meme, Bing was apparently actually good when looking up porn.
Was it or was that guerilla marketing?
Y’all use incognito mode?
“Hmm, share on Facebook? Don’t mind if I do!”
furiously searches for that one video from 5 years ago
No :’(
Arbitrarily it will cut off your search and now they just add irrelevant “search for this next” garbage to make it look less barren
If you are interested maybe look at this post I made comparing search engines
Borderline?
There’s still DuckDuckGo, or Kagi if you are rich.
So tempted to try and get a family plan together.
what about concepts?
Doesnt Duck use bing?
Yes, and DDG has really been degrading over the last few months in quality of results imo.
I’ll be honest, DDG has never blown me away and I’ve been using it for roughly 5 years. It’s not awful or anything, but maybe once every month or two I need to resort to Google because it can’t find something. I’m absolutely willing to sacrifice some quality for privacy in the general case, though.
Yes, it has never been the best in terms of relevance or depth of index. But lately when I do searches for something like “cherry shrimp aquarium water quality requirements” I’ve been overwhelmed by AI-written SEO blogs. Where google still pulls up results from forums, reddit, other relevant actual humans talking.
I noticed this as well. It’s a shame as I still use it as my daily search driver.
Yes.
I would give startpage.com a shot i find it works even better than duckduckgo
Thanks for the tip! I use startpage already, it’s pretty good. From what I understand, it uses Google’s search index under the hood.
There’s also Brave search which (claims to be) privacy friendly and (claims to) have their own independent search index, so you could give that a try as well. I wouldn’t say it’s better that startpage or google tho
and (claims to) have their own independent search index
AFAIK their index is very small, so they use Bing to supplement it. Most search engines and voice assistants that aren’t Google use Bing in some way, since it’s the largest search index that has an official public API that anyone can use.
I’ve been using Brave search for a while as a daily driver. It’s usually pretty decent, but I fall back to google when looking for commercial stuff like local stores and products.
Damn is it ugly…
That’s disgusting.
As someone who uses dark mode on everything and Dark Reader, using that looks like staring into a headlamp. I wonder if Bing actually has native dark mode support if the browser requests it with
prefers-color-scheme?goes to look
Nope. Need Dark Reader.
paid ActivityPub updooterer wen
