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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DuckDuckGo doesn’t ;)
By the way, in my browser, the title of this post shows up as
Google now requires Javascript in c/mildlyinfuriatingwhich shocked me a little.
i use startpage ;)
Sundar Pichai is the admin for this community, didn’t you know?
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.
Why do you think you have to go through a checkout?
They could just pool your owed money and then charge you that at the end of the month, or let you maintain a pool that you throw money into that they take from as you use it.
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.
null
Doesn’t it require JavaScript?
Can’t tell if because of spyware or because the poor intern they hired to maintain the site for the next month only knows JS frontends lol
These are also just fun:
I also use Mojeek when I want a (serious) different set of results that I’m not getting from those pulling from google, bing, etc. It’s not the best but it’s getting better over time.
thanks a lot for mentioning us; you can send us in searches which could be better via the submit feedback button on results pages, if you’d like :D
I like the SearX search engine. It gives old-school, relevant search results, not google ranked ones.
It’s also spread out over many separate instances, so you can pick the one that best suits your search needs:
Smells a bit Musky
It’s open source and can be self-hosted. I use something similar called Whoogle that I run in a local Docker container. Strips ads, javascript, tracking, and amp links
I think they were just referring to the X in the name.
why are you using google in 2024 grandpa
Any reccos over duckduckgo? Been quite pleased with it.
I use ddg, despite the horrible name it’s very useful for me. I’ve been thinking about kagi the paid search engine but haven’t committed yet.
Google is no longer a Search Engine. It is a commerce/purchase search. It’s nothing more than ads and corporate results to purchase goods & services. Google Shopping has taken over Google.
Back in the day it was the best at what it did, but there’s less demand these days for that kind of old fashioned search.
Its still better than the competition at finding the URL of a corporate or government entity. Its still helpful for searching other websites for particular content - for example, the wikis for some games have an obtuse layout and unhelpful search function, and google can be the best way to find a particular page in that wiki.
Before ChatGPT existed, and before the enshitifaction of Reddit reached the critical level its at today, google searching site:reddit.com was pretty good at finding organic human conversations that provide actual answers to your questions.
Today however, ChatGPT is better at providing useful answers to whatever questions you may have. And Bing is better at image search.
I guess ublock origin is doing wonders then, for me it’s still the same…
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Something I find annoying is that being effective at SEO means being in a constant war with people whose literal job it is to be good at SEO to trap me in useless crap.
rip lynx browser, unless- alternative search engine?
You’re still using Google search?
I don’t think I used Google in the last 5-6 years. It’s duck duck go all the way.
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
Yep. I use Noscript and DDG Lite by default. Just putting into duckduckgo: !g <your search goes here> will search google without having to turn JS on…looks like Duckduckgo wins again, even when it comes to using google, lol.
So like !g <squirrels holding nuts> and I’ll get googled?
Yes, the brackets were just there to emphasize it was a search query. Apologies if that was confusing.
No need to apologize, mate. Your comment was super helpful.
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.
Who still uses Google? DDG has been way better for a long while now. Join the duck side.
Kagi is also good. Better imo really
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.
It really isn’t
Giving up your payment information is not great for privacy
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.
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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.
…and who also has JS off? That seems like a weird combination.
Its gaining ground very quickly
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.
Yeah, I should have said “by default” because that is how most people will use it, but the power users will use other engines.
searxng? Anyone?
Hell yeah
Brave search 🤙
Edit: I forgot that Lemmy hates Brave and doesn’t want anyone to use it. Be warned, there are some concerns people have about the organisation.
It isn’t half bad
I hate how these kinds of messages never explain WHY. It’s just “Do it. Do what we tell you.” 💀
Probably because 99.999% of users already use JS and dedicating a web page to it is already more work than they needed to put into it
I think it’s just to avoid explaining why, and how they harvest your data. That said, I also hate how a lot of errors of the big corpo are just like “This site has an error” no error-code, no further feedback what to do etc.
It probably logs the error automatically. There’s nothing you can do on your end to fix their code problem in most cases which is why there is no feedback on what you should do…
No no it’s more interesting if it’s for evil corporate reasons! Lmao
Because they dont need to
For ads, tracking and spying of course.
BOW TO YOUR MASTERS, AND SUCK OUR DICK!!!
I remember 10 years ago looking at a calculator app in the android app store, and seeing the permissions. And thinking “WHY THE FUCK DOES A CALCULATOR NEED MY LOCATION, AND ACCESS TO MY PHONE CONTACTS???”
Fuck THAT.
What dick? pretty sure it’s fallen off from all the STD’s.
All those years, and I still have no explanation why some apps want my browsing history.
I found out yesterday the Samsung system camera app will not function without “Nearby Devices” permissions. Utterly ridiculous.
It needs to be able to tell nearby devices to “say cheese”, so they can blink their LEDs prettily before you take a photo.
A lot of websites are react which doesn’t function without JavaScript. It’s a more powerful tool for web dev and can be a better experience for the user if used right.
Great. If that was their reason, they could explain that. But they didn’t and that’s my beef.
But since you seem to be tech savvy, you also already know why they don’t explain which great features of react they want to use on this page. And we all already know it’s not for the user’s benefit. It’s for money they receive from data mining every minute of our lives.
In google’s case, you might be right. However in general what are you expecting the website to say? An explanation of why react was chosen over other languages? Otherwise the reason you have to enable JavaScript on a react website is because the site doesn’t work without it. I see that like complaining that your gas light on your car doesn’t provide an explanation as to why gas is required for it to run.
If you are curious why a lot of sites use languages like react instead of plain html, there are a few reasons. Prior to react like languages, web servers would generate the page, send it to you, and then anytime you interacted with the site it would send you a whole new page to display. I.e. if you opened a popup for uploading a file, it would send you a whole new page to display which is why older sites flicker on basically any interaction. Newer sites that use things like React are downloaded once. It basically downloads the code to make the website and then runs entirely on your machine. The benefit to this is that if you sort a list, open a drop-down, open a popup to download a file, etc. it all happens on your computer instead of some remote server. No need to wait for a server to respond or download a new page, it can update that specific part of the page instead. Some sites are even fully functional offline because of this which is really cool in my opinion.
This makes a far better user experience because everything is instant and doesn’t trigger page reloads on every interaction with the site.
It’s good for developers because it allows code reusability and vastly increases what you can do. Many of the critical features I have on my site are not possible without JavaScript/React. I actually first developed the site using the old style and changed it over to React because of those limitations.
Google could have updated their site to one of these languages to open up new possibilities in what they can do on their site. That or they might be making it more consistent with their other products for maintainability reasons. I find it unlikely that the people who have JavaScript turned off are a large enough portion of the population for them to care about their data but I could be wrong.
Because if they typed out an honest reason why, you would avoid them like the plague.
I just disabled Javascript and Google still works fine. It might be only Google’s mobile site that requires it.
Where are you? The JavaScript block also seems to disable reader mode, so maybe they serve a different page in places with accessibility requirements
California.
Could very well be a mobile thing. I was pretty annoyed recently when logging into gcal for work on my phone, it refused to let me sign in without giving them my cell phone number. When I switched to wifi, it stopped bugging me, so clearly they pay attention to that sort of signal.
