When you use Google or another ad-powered search engine, you're saying that it's okay for some company to pay to bias the results away from your best interests.
When you use, say, Kagi, you become the customer; they have a vested interest in providing you with the best experience they can, because they know they're relying on your continued patronage to be able to keep competing with those other free search engines which you already admitted are pretty good.
The other three answers to your question were dumb, so I'll try to do better. Kagi has a free trial of 100 searches without requiring a credit card to sign up. Honest to god, try it. Just bookmark it and search once or twice when Google or Bing is giving you meh results.
As an engineer... googling for stuff is a good fraction of your job. It's quite reasonable to pay to improve that experience. The only real question is what is reasonable to pay.
I don't think it's that amazing for an engineer. Google is much better if you're looking for things related to Intel compilers, for example. Try searching for «intel ipo fuse-ld=lld icx» on both engines.
Kagi allows you to permanently blacklist Pinterest from appearing in any search ever.
It also gives you exactly what you ask for. If you put words in quotes, you only get results matching that phrase. Same with +- modifiers, and all the other "advanced" search operators.
Meanwhile on any free engine, they often completely ignore your query to show you unrelated SEO slop. You can completely forget modifiers and advanced queried, they aren't even parsed. About the only thing that still works is the site: modifier. And I'm pretty sure they only keep that because 40% of google searches include site:reddit
As well, if Kagi can't find a result for your query, it returns nothing. Try searching something incredibly obscure on google or DDG. You get pages upon pages of results and they're all useless garbage or just straight up ads disguised as results.
That's why I pay for Kagi. It stays the hell out of my way and only gives me exactly what I ask for and absolutely nothing else.
You’re getting downvoted but I agree. I didn’t see the value and stopped after a while of paying. It is sad that basically any comment that isn’t pro-Kagi is downvoted but I guess that’s the Reddit-ification of this site.
Most people who complain about Google don’t even use it properly (e.g. PSE).
so do they mention if the old system would be better in comparison? cause short of just making you pay to use the products i dont know if it can be any worse.
at the end of the day it seems like 90% of people using google products dont even care. while some even prefer the convivence of some features that directly save your info. not sure what percentage that is compared to the people that practice a lot privacy.
but shown by the chrome market share google really doesnt have to care about this section of users. the fact theyre willing to try things is a good sign imo.
either way in 2024 to be complianing about google is funny to me. literally dont have to interact or use a google product, they already have your information and so does the internet better to not let them occupy any of your mind as well
brave a lot more shady and just wont say anything or let you opt out. many examples in the past. imagine if they were anywhere near a quarter of googles size it wouldnt be pretty imo.
All settings in Brave with an impact on user privacy are opt-in. They even inform you of their product metrics, when you first start it, despite having a paper on how they anonymize that data. Versus Firefox, which never bothered. Firefox, which also added metrics for ads, similar with Privacy Sandbox, without informing users.
I've never seen a browser with such a strong focus on privacy, the only contender it has being LibreWolf.
The hate against Brave on this forum is completely unjustified and based on falsehoods, as if the issue isn't about Brave itself.
> Brave has received negative press for diverting ad revenue from websites to itself,[30] collecting unsolicited donations for content creators without their consent,[43] suggesting affiliate links in the address bar[49] and installing a paid VPN service without the user's consent.[58]
These are the primary issues I hear about regarding Brave on this forum.
It's also founded by Brendan Eich who was forced out of Mozilla for his strong and vocal opposition of same-sex marriage. I tend to be a bit idealistic, but this is a strong reason for me to avoid Brave, especially when they are injecting content into pages.
Not that it makes him any less opposed to same-sex marriage, but I think 'vocal' is very much not the right word here. The only quotes I can find from him on the subject are him saying he's not going to talk about it.
Basically, we got played, Eich made a private political action, someone used that to get rid of him and then Firefox starting paying 10x as much to their CEO, doing all sorts of anti-user stuff, acting in advertiser's favour (but not too overtly), and ultimately ditching their engineers so they could maintain the CEOs stupid pay. All while begging users for money.
He was opposed to it as a private citizen, not as Mozilla CEO. His beliefs and supported causes as the former are nobody else's concern; had he been discriminating in terms of employment or otherwise making public statements it would be a different story. Or are we now witch hunting people for wrongthink?
I don't think it's "witch hunting people for wrongthink" to suggest that those in a position of power are able to use that power to influence public opinion.
Especially when that position of power is the CEO of a browser that replaces content on web pages.
Mozilla went hardcore political and Chrome copycat long after his time. There was no such controversy there under Eich, and even now as Brave's CEO he isn't doing anything to 'influence public opinion'. Browser CEOs aren't newspaper editors or activists, Mitchell Baker excepted.
This goes both ways for people. I switched from Mozilla to Brave when the latter first released because to me Mozilla's political positions seem at odds with an uncensored and privacy focused browser. I actually support universal marriage equality but don't consider it relevant to why I would choose a browser.
I can't remember all of the details but Mozilla made a blog post regarding 1/6 and their commentary didn't align with a browser that would try and protect users from state, NGO and "just research" edu adversaries.
BAT was what kept me from trying Brave for a very long time, but I eventually tried it nonetheless (I'm back on Firefox now). In fairness to Brave, you can disable the BAT stuff and never have to see it.
In terms of using BAT, yes. But at least when I started using Brave, you had to change things to get rid of the cryptocurrency-related UI elements. That's what I was referring to.
> "collecting unsolicited donations for content creators without their consent"
Those "donations" were from handouts of BAT. What they "collected" was their own BAT that they've donated to users of Brave. And it wasn't long lived. At least they've been trying to create a business model that's privacy preserving and that benefits content creators. Firefox has been selling their users to Google for years.
> "suggesting affiliate links in the address bar"
You mean like what Firefox also did?
> "and installing a paid VPN service without the user's consent."
I've never seen a VPN service installed with Brave. Is this a Windows thing? If you're talking about the VPN functionality in Brave itself, isn't this what Firefox also did?
> "It's also founded by Brendan Eich who was forced out of Mozilla for his strong and vocal opposition of same-sex marriage."
He never talked on the topic. And did you know that, at that time, both Obama and Hillary Clinton were also opposed to same-sex marriage? Times change, people's minds have changed. Whatever beliefs he still has, he keeps private, as he should.
But yes, this confirms my suspicion that this is a US-politics thing, and for non-US citizens, it's getting annoying. While we are on the topic, don't you find it problematic when Mozilla engages in political activism, promoting Marxism? Or when they promote cancel culture?
For me, these were never reasons to avoid Firefox, but seeing that this is how the world works now, maybe they should be. And I'm sorry for pointing at Firefox right now, I used it for years, but I'm sensing a serious double standard. So let's talk of Chrome ... have you surveyed the political beliefs of Chrome's developers? Because it's the big, faceless corporations that benefit from this kind of polarisation the most.
> I've never seen a VPN service installed with Brave. Is this a Windows thing? If you're talking about the VPN functionality in Brave itself, isn't this what Firefox also did?
> For me, these were never reasons to avoid Firefox, but seeing that this is how the world works now, maybe they should be.
Yes, you are absolutely entitled to "vote with your money" (or free usage / market share, as the case may be.) Boycotts are an integral component of free speech and self-expression.
(Smalls does at one point talk about "class struggle". He makes it explicit what he means: he thinks there is an opposition between "99.9% of us" and "the billionaires". This is not Marxism even though it uses one phrase that Marxists also use.)
> Or when they promote cancel culture?
The link you provide in support of this (https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/we-need-more-than-deplat...) is to a blog post titled "We need more than deplatforming". It mentions deplatforming but doesn't advocate it (though it doesn't condemn it either), and the actual things it calls for are all Not Cancel Culture: "reveal who is paying for advertisements", "commit to meaningful transparency of platform algorithms", "turn on by default the tools to amplify factual voices over disinformation", "work ... to facilitate in-depth studies of the platforms' impact on people and our societies".
You might reasonably disagree with those proposals; for instance, the next-to-last one could be anywhere from "excellent" to "dystopian" depending on what exactly "amplify X over Y" means and how "factual" versus "disinformation" is decided. But none of it is advocating cancel culture.
As for the "deplatforming" in the title: the specific case it's talking about is the idea that a social media platform should ban a particular user who had for some time plainly been breaking the platform's rules, and who (according to some) had used the platform to attempt to organize an antidemocratic coup. "Social media platforms should be encouraged to ban users who blatantly break their rules, even when those users bring them a lot of traffic" and "Social media platforms should not let themselves be tools for antidemocratic insurrection" are positions one can take without being a fan of "cancel culture".
(Not necessarily correct positions. E.g., if you hold that the insurrection in question was not antidemocratic, that it was a response to blatant election-rigging, then you will likely take a quite different view of how a social media platform should respond to it. I don't myself think that's a credible position, and I doubt the good faith of most of the high-profile people who endorse it, but I know it is something many people believe. Anyway, my point isn't that those positions are right, it's that they're positions many reasonable people take, and that getting from those to "Twitter was right to kick Donald Trump off" doesn't require any sort of endorsement of "cancel culture", and that therefore the fact that an article mentions the possibility of doing that in a not-obviously-disapproving way does not amount to "promoting cancel culture".)
I wouldn't count the Privacy Sandbox doublespeak as "telling you". Brave is not my browser, but it seems completely unjustified to just put them on the same (or even lower) level as Chrome.
That doesn't make a bit of sense. There's plenty of browsers, there's chrome, brave, firefox, opera, edge and safari, those are the big ones. There's also a ton of spinoffs like ice weasel or that browser Kagi is developing that I can't remember the name of.
Way more than just two chromium browsers in existence.
i mean theres really only 2 relevant ones and the other one is because its owned by the most popular phone manufacture and is the only option. ofc we can use anything we want but in terms of real world relevance. and i guess the other one is forced by the most popular OS.
Percent of adults age 20 and older with overweight, including obesity: 73.6%
this is a crisis.
at this point this is like going to a 3rd world country and telling them if you dont want all the problems that come with not having money to just get rich.
like its possible, my brother did it, most my family did it, we all have the capability to do it. it maybe harder for some due to physical limitations or mental ones. so why dont you? dont hate being poor and not getting all the women and luxuries?
74% is sick and its infectious. it curates mental problems that make it even harder to overcome. 74% means there are too many factors that are contributing to this epidemic. if modern technology is able to help get society on the right track i dont know why anyone should be.. for lack of a better word fat shamed haha.
of course we need to be careful and thoughtful. im not even sure though if it will be available for most people anytime soon. i hope so though, iv never been fat per say. maybe a bit more lbs then id like but i do understand how much it helps every part of your life being at a satisfying weight. this could be the greatest cure for depression through medicine ever imo.
i live in one of the fattest cities in america. when i go outside i swear to you sometimes i can go a day without seeing a single person of normal weight. besides the few homeless in my area.
brave is the most shady. at least google microsoft tells you while they spy on you. brave has:
installed a vpn with a running service without telling its window users in an update. also made it reinstall every update until they got called out and users kept complainiong. i mean they did eventually..
if you use brave search without the brave browser they would turn on on the send analytics option back on no matter what you do. ofc this was in secret like after you reopened the browser etc. every other setting would save.
the most popular privacy browser comparing site is owned by a brave employee. it was almost impossible to find this disclosure but they since have made it a bit more easier to spot. still the way they do tests is pretty sus. like testing out the box when they know they have a blocker and certain important settings on
etc etc. i mean i guess its not so surprising their job is hiding thing.
i used to use brave. even when i switched off i used brave search default. but the fact i couldnt turn off analytics, or more so they fact they made it look like i could turn it off made me never lose the last amount of respect i had for those guys. i mean i dont even care about privacy anymore really, i use edge. its just the shadiness that turns me off
i mean in the near future if all ads are preventable. we probably will just be paying to use internet products. i mean its the only reason its free right? or maybe the isp will become the new apple google fb and they will provide browsers and websites. and most likely these isp will lock exclusives. eek
we DO pay for internet and internet products, in so far as actual internet and actual internet products. I pay ISP, I pay VPN, I pay some security services.
further in my humble poor opinion; If the only way to secure funding/guarantee your product/job/life is by having completely irrelevant, predatory ads hosted in your space, maybe you should go int oa different field, or not expect to make money off of a niche hobby application.
Hosting a website, app, service, (if not a paid service), should be "cost of doing business". Or "cost of maintaining a hobby which I'm broadcasting."
It is a great disservice to our children that the "default" in life is "you will pay for this ,and you will watch brain rot ads"
Yeah, all commercial outfits need revenue, and if they don't have ad-based revenue they need their users to be customers paying for the service. Right.
This said, I see three more ways for free (like gratis) services (at least free for users):
1. Government-funded services. If some online services are deemed to be very important for public wellbeing, the government might decide to pay for a service or to run it themselves. One example is public databases like a list of medication covered by health insurance.
2. Non-profits. They can live off voluntary donations from users, governments, and companies.
3. Hobbyist-supported services. People work pro bono to support a service and some hobbyists even pay for third-party services (like hosting).
These are not sharply discerned categories. A service might nominally be run by a non-profit, but the non-profit is staffed by hobbyists and the government might pay for hosting and other costs. Such a service would be a government-funded hobbyist service run by a non-profit.
If you're not trying to be global scale and/or the only site in your market segment, you can go pretty far off of voluntary donations. As far as I know, even the largest Mastodon sites are Patreon/Liberapay/etc funded.
unlike other platforms that are basically free throw ins by the mega corps. Spotify is its own thing and there is no money in music streaming. at least so far and its due to the monopolistic practices of music licensing.
spotify has to try and distinguish or expand as seen with the heavy podcast investments and they desperately need hit features if they want to compete with the companies and stay profitable. for reference i believe this year will be the first profitable one
ya i dont know about desktop app but mobile and website wise it blows away apple, prime, pandora and youtube music like by a long shot..
not to mention the recommendations is also on another level so their curated maxtapes. although i assume that last one has a lot to do with your genre preference but rap/hip hop wise i think its true.
the new song discoverability is the only reason i prefer Spotify even though i get prime and apple free from other bundles already.
i do like the library and playlist separation tho. youtube and i think apple are like this where if you delete off playlist it deletes off your library as well. its really annoying haha
