Kind of fucked up but tbf Google does similarly shady stuff.
Please just use duckduckgo (or SearX).
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.
Accurate indeed. Pee is stored in the balls, cum is stored in the prostate
What I don’t like about SearXNG (aside of no favicons/icons I think) is that it doesn’t show the content of what I am looking for in the browser desktop tabs, if I search for “Linux” in the tab it is only shown “SearXNG” instead of what I am searching for… That definitely kills my browsing habits… I hope I am being clear (can’t post a screenshot right now), also unsure if it was the same with mobile browsers.
You can control that with a setting. In Settings - Privacy, turn on “Query in the page’s title.”
My instance has a magnifying glass as the favicon.
This is nothing like GregTech! Where’s the tedious microcrafting to enjoy before every search?
How did you change the logo? I tried to do that on my instance and failed miserably. Running it through docker.
I guess I could technically do that, but I really don’t give a f what people search for on my searxng instance. Plus, Google and the likes have an incentive to use your searches for advertising and building a profile on you.
And Searx is the same. And startpage is just google.
But the point is they don’t track.
DDG was letting Bing track users. They may have stopped now that they got in trouble for it.
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.
I would use anything else before DDG, the primary function of it which is searching, generally feels sucky
Microsoft does so many scammy things when it comes to trying to prevent people from using Chrome/Google. Even though Edge/Bing hasn’t caught on, I really think them abusing windows dominate OS position this way should be enough for an antitrust lawsuit.
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.
I was installing chrome on a work computer, and windows defender was automatically flagging the chrome installer (official, directly from google) as malware and deleting it automatically as soon as it was downloaded. It wasn’t blacklisted for very long, I was able to download it without issues the next day, but I always have wondered if that was something they were testing out on purpose or not.
Hope for EU sanctions because it’s going to be a rubber stamp for at least the next four years in the US.
lol the gall
Usual Microsoft, using shady tactics instead of creating a better product or just focusing on their own thing and respecting user choice. They should grow up sometime.
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
User: “Can we get Google?”
Microsoft: “But we already have Google at home!”
The Google at home: [reskinned Bing page]
