These days, whenever I think about Google, I recall a line from Madame Bovary. “She wanted to die, but she also wanted to live in Paris,” Flaubert writes, capturing Emma Bovary’s provincial reality and her romanticized dreams of escape. That is Google in a nutshell, isn’t it?

  • baggachipz@sh.itjust.works
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    20
    arrow-down
    2
    ·
    2 days ago

    People keep pushing Kagi because they love it. I know, I’m one of them. Anybody acting like there’s no way out of google’s clutches is following the “we’ve tried nothing, and we’re all out of ideas” mantra.

    • Pirata@lemm.ee
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      27
      ·
      edit-2
      1 day ago

      I’ve tried SearXNG and stayed there. And it costs me a whole 0€ per month. 10€/month for a search engine is insane.

      • dreadbeef@lemmy.dbzer0.com
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        1
        ·
        edit-2
        22 hours ago

        It’s gonna stay free forever, you’re totally not externalizing those costs to someone else. You can’t break the laws of thermodynamics

        You know what they say about when you don’t pay for a service…

        • Pirata@lemm.ee
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          3
          ·
          21 hours ago

          Do you know how SearXNG works? It literally pulls search results from whatever other SEs you define it should pull from. You just get to reap the perks of all engines, without having to deal with their antagonistic design.

          Who pays for all of it in the end? The people who still want to use Google’s service and feed their all-reaching tentacles. But that is their choice.

      • taladar@sh.itjust.works
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        7
        ·
        2 days ago

        The Wikipedia page for SearX claims it has been discontinued in 2022. The GitHub repository being archived in 2023 would seem to support that.

      • OmegaSunkey@ani.social
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        1
        ·
        1 day ago

        I only use SearXNG because it loads faster than DDG for me. It parses very very fast on my low end pc, and thats what I wish.

        • Pirata@lemm.ee
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          2
          ·
          24 hours ago

          Yeah, that’s the thing about Sear. You can customise it how you want and that’s it. No need to let some corpo be in control of what and how you see your results.

      • enkers@sh.itjust.works
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        4
        ·
        2 days ago

        Yeah, searx and no looking back here too. The only downside is it’s OotB experience isn’t the best, so you should spend a minute configuring it to add more engines than just google. Oh, that and the occasional outages, but they seem to be less common lately.

    • NOT_RICK@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      3
      ·
      2 days ago

      I take it that means you feel it’s worth the cost? I have a hard time since search is something I’ve been so used to being free

      • Sprinks@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        2
        ·
        20 hours ago

        For me, yes, but thats because im a heavy search engine user and like the customization features. We pay for the duo plan for both my husband and I. My husband doesnt use it much, maybe a handful of searches a week, but me on the otherhand I far exceed the free search limit with how often I search for things. I also love having the ability to block, lower, or raise a specific site in my results. Very satisfying to open up a shit site, see its shit, and then block it from ever appearing in my search results again.

      • baggachipz@sh.itjust.works
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        8
        arrow-down
        1
        ·
        2 days ago

        Absolutely, I do. You have been paying Google: with your privacy, viewing tons of ads, and manipulation via rigged search results. Fixing that is worth the price to me. I admit it requires a shift in mindset, but I couldn’t go back now.