It used to be that you would do a search on a relevant subject and get blog posts, forums posts, and maybe a couple of relevant companies offering the product or service. (And if you wanted more information on said company you could give them a call and actually talk to a real person about said service) You could even trust amazon and yelp reviews. Now searches have been completely taken over by Forbes top 10 lists, random affiliate link click through aggregators that copy and paste each others work, review factories that will kill your competitors and boost your product stars, ect… It seems like the internet has gotten soooo much harder to use, just because you have to wade through all the bullshit. It’s no wonder people switch to reddit and lemmy style sites, in a way it mirrors a little what kind of information you used to be able to garner from the internet in it’s early days. What do people do these days to find genuine information about products or services?
If you’re not paying for it, you are not the customer, but the product.
While that’s generally a good way of thinking to stay alert, it’s not a dogma. It discredits the whole, vast FOSS ecosystem, most prominently the Linux kernel, or services like Wikipedia that don’t sell your data and rely solely on community contributions and donations.
DDG finances itself via non-personalized ads that aren’t very annoying. They won’t become a trillion dollar company that way but can get by.
Fair. By similar logic, don’t discredit the whole paid ecosystem, when you’re used to getting something for free. Kagi has no ads, no trackers, and listens to their users. Their search results and feature set is better than DDG.
