Doing this to combat bots like they aren't also using bots to scrape data from the internet is interesting.
I wonder how this affects modified/custom search engines (like udm14).
this post was submitted on 17 Jan 2025
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Udm14 is just a query parameter to open google with the "web" results tab. Still works.
the widely used programming language to make web pages interactive
I hope we aren't talking forms and input fields, right?
great!
now I can just disable JavaScript to end my dependence on their services.
I remember interviewing at Google years ago (if you're keeping score, it was 2012/2013 just before their stock hiccupped and my onboarding was killed as I was only a 97% fit), and the guy was religious about page load times. "We cut 200 lines of code if it'll give us a millisecond of page load speed", that kind of thing.
How they've fallen.
well they don't need to fight for new users anymore. Everyone uses it already, and children are basically indoctrinated to it: all schools have that as search engine, often they even use google classroom and drive and whatnot on the classes. if they have chromebooks, the chrome browser automatically starts after login even if you don't want to use it, and you can't unpin it from the taskbar either
Google sucks so bad that I switched to Bing. BING!
DuckDuckGo for day-to-day stuff, Bing for naughty content.
Careful saying that round these parts, you'll summon the ducks.
quack
I didn't know they allowed you to search without JS before. If you're at the point of disabling JS, presumably for security or privacy reasons, why not just use DDG which works perfectly well without JS?
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At this point I’ve been using DDG for 7 years as my main search engine. It’s gotten better while Google has become a joke.
Can confirm. I didn't think it'd be like that but it do be like that. DDG gang, where you at.
So, you're saying Bing got better.
DDG does add their own spice on to – or so they claim, and Bing doesn't have bangs so I'd never want to use it.
I don’t know the full story about how Microsoft is developing Bing, but I do know that Google made a conscious decision to make their search results worse, simply so that you’d search more times, which for them translates to additional ad revenue. But, my sense is Bing hasn’t gone this far yet.
It's not only the results, though, but other features too
I switched to DDG recently due to the manifest v3 changes and AI junk and have been really liking it. It feels like what Google used to be when it was good.
Can't wait until they enshittify, the way I see it, everything will eventually, even Lemmy. It's up to us to not settle too hard in one place
The fact Lemmy is open source and federated makes it almost impossible to enshittify. What are you gonna do, show ads? Third party clients are first class citizens here
One scenario is that normies join en masse and influencers/marketers follow them, and the quality of conversation goes to zero like on all big platforms. You can't solve this with software.
So that's "getting shittier" but not "enshittification". The latter is explicitly a profit-motive driven phenomenon, coined by Cory Doctorow in 2023. Here's the original post he made about it: https://doctorow.medium.com/tiktoks-enshittification-bb3f5df91979
it still can enshittify, but we can save it with the help of git and the fork button
No, I don't think that's sustainable, nor is it sustainable to act as if it were true. Given the lack of resources we have compared to Google or Meta et al., the only way to make it work is to stick with something for the long run, and bake in protections in both the technology and the organisational structure. Being opensource and federated goes a long way there, there's no real reason why something not for profit would have to enshittify. But people won't put in the effort to keep building it if they think that's inevitable.
The core of what you're saying has been my approach for many years. Never go "all in" on anything.
Convenience is one thing (to me, but it's everything to so many), but it's just one factor. And if it means I am (or my data is) the product, it costs too much.
Google begins recommending DuckDuckGo.
That or Startpage
Feels good not to care anymore about the unrelenting enshittification of Reddit, Twitter and Google since I switched away from them.
Just makes me realize that I haven't used Google search in like over a year now because I use Kagi. Even before that i was using searx-ng.
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Cool. As if the over-promotion of AI garbage wasn't enough of a reason to stop using it.
why no one quotes searx instances? https://searx.space/
or even paid search engines : kagi.
Kagi is good
Isnt literally the first Q&A that is REQUIRES Js?
If the British civil service, even operating under previous administrations, can put together a multi-functioning government domain that runs reasonably well without JavaScript, there's no reason Google can't continue to do the same with a ducking web search.
The former works better with JavaScript, that's true, but it works OK without and that's the point.
Then again, the civil service were ordered to do it largely out of spite because the government didn't want to give the plebs any excuse for not being able to use the site.
I'm not sure how to get Google to lose the need for scripting in the same way.
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