Technology

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coming_to_America

I host my own SearXNG instance, which miiiight be a bit of a bad idea because the anonymity of the crowd disappears but hosting your own services is way too cool to ignore. It's at search.gregtech.eu in case anyone wants to use it.

SearX is dead; you should use SearXNG now.

DDG is just Bing under the hood

I feel like Microsoft is way more shameless about their shady stuff. They've been messing around with impersonating google/chrome for awhile now, they recently had that thing where they would copy all your open chrome tabs, and then when you started your computer it would open edge with all your chrome tabs to trick people into using edge instead.

They seem to pathologically not be able to help themselves, even with products that don't need to be promoted that way. I used Outlook for Android for years because it was actually quite good. Had a multi account inbox view, true dark mode, Galaxy Watch compatibility when those were all rather unusual features. But then they started trying to put Bing search in my long press menu system wide, using Outlook as the Trojan horse to do so, and I just found that too obnoxious

I don't think they can. They would need to rethink their company culture, but because the current one makes big numbers go up, they don't really have to change anything.

Not just Google. There was a performance "bug" in Windows Defender a while back that specifically harmed Firefox. It had been reported but Microsoft took 5+ years to fix, and Mozilla did the bulk of the sleuthing and proposing fixes themselves.

Now, whether MS were intentionally crippling a competitor's browser in the beginning when the bug surfaced (which coincidentally was around the time Edge was relaunched as a chromium browser), there's no way to know.

But after a certain point, a software company with a market cap in the trillions loses any benefit of doubt I'd give them in scenarios like this where it benefits them not to find a solution. And 5 years is far beyond that point.

Unfortunately for Firefox, they didn't really have the money for a lawsuit against a juggernaut like Microsoft.

Corps don't give a fuck about an antitrust law suit. In the US, the party that pays the most to jerk off CEOs just got put in charge. Even if it was the other party, who only pays slightly less, the most extreme fines are a slap on the wrist. Hell, come Jam 20th it'll probably a tax write off.

Until the EU levies fines that would kneecap these companies out of business, there is no incentive to change the behavior.

~~lately~~

Yeah tbh, it's just two shady companies trying to out-cheat each other.

I prefer DDG to either as well, but in terms of search quality ... Don't they use Bing search results?

I disagree with the quality part.

DDG may be better for privacy, but I've found their search results to be garbage.

I don't think there's a difference in search quality, but I do really like the bangs and the client-side settings (can completely disable the AI noise, enable dark mode, etc all w/o needing an account).