Duck duck go lets you turn all that bullshit off. And as far as google has fallen in search quality ddg isn’t any worse.
this post was submitted on 10 Sep 2025
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I ditched Google Chrome years ago. I've been using Firefox and now Zen. And despite all the bitching, duck duck go is 99% as effective for most searches.
At most, you have to go through one or two more pages. Which nowadays is about the same you would have to do on Google. Only the entire time you were bombarded with advertising lies in AI slop. While also feeding their ad machine.
I cannot, in my lifetime, think of another company that had such overwhelming, positive public opinion and momentum and squandered at all so effectively and thoroughly to the extent that they are seen as almost a villain by huge chunks of the world globally.
I think the craziest thing is that someone in their company actually allowed them to get rid of their don't be evil motto. Even if they were going to do all the evil shit they already are doing, just keeping the motto around was such an easy PR win in slam dunk to deflect concerns to and say, oh no, we're always keeping in mind not to be evil.
I don't know if that was the day that Google's fortunes turned. But it definitely feels like it was a tipping point for the history of the company. And now, even though I'm posting this from an Android phone, they just announced plans to make Android shittier in one year by locking down the ability to install apps from online downloads even further. And here I am trying to think of how I can get a custom ROM installed on my phone again for the first time in over a decade. Not because I want new features or cutting edge technology. But because I just want that fucking company as far away from me as possible, and the "year of the Linux phone" is not here yet. So figuring out some kind of way to put Google Apps into a jail and lock them out of my life except when I need them is the new goal. (Probably GrapheneOS)
The fact that they lost their antitrust case and were declared a monopoly and then were hit with basically no punishment whatsoever other than sharing a tiny bit of the data with other super corporations, just makes me livid beyond belief.
Companies like this and the CEOs and executives that run them should not exist.
Their stocks at an all time high. I don’t know if the chunks of people that see them as villains is as big as you think it is.
It sucks that they’ve become this way but they’re being rewarded for it so expect it to continue.
Oh, don't get me wrong. I don't think that we're going to suddenly have a people's revolution that topples Google. Google is so entrenched that it is near inescapable. The fact that there is no antitrust action means that they dominate entire segments of the market with no competition and no ability for anyone to rise to that level.
Even though I loathe Google, I am not fully capable of cutting them out of my life. They are at my job. They're running tons of my friends and families, email, which by proxy they control the email delivery for an insane number of people. They own the most popular browser in the world, which they heavily, heavily promote. And on and on and on.
I think the contingent of people that are pretty sick of Google shit is actually pretty large, but being sick of their shit doesn't mean that you can even remotely remove them from your life. I had family members who were separately given the nagging harassment that they must sign up for Google One or lose all their photos because they were approaching the maximum storage Because Google had silently activated backups on their phones in the background. And both of them separately signed up for Google One accounts when they could have shared a household account between the two of them. Google extort my less tech-savvy relatives. They double dipped on the extortion.
And that's just the tip of the iceberg and I'm hardly alone. But so many people are like my relatives that you just wind up trapped. If you don't know how to do a full Google takeout and then process the Google takeout and filter that down into something you can use to migrate off of their platform, then you are really stuck.
So yeah, I'll be loud and bitter and fucking mad at Google until something happens. Not that I expect anything will. Losing an anti-trust did nothing. At this point, I feel like they could create a search engine that does nothing but ai generate child pornography and somehow get away with it. "We're only committing this crime to train our models." Worked for Facebook.
If I search something these days it's because I spesifically DON'T want an AI answer
user: opens chrome
google: STONKS, THROW ANOTHER REDWOOD TO THE PYRE
Guess I'll be changing my browser soon
You may want to change your search engine instead…
s/instead/also/
Inclusive or
If you're using Chrome, hell, go ahead and change that too.
It will certainly transform how I access information. i.e. by using a different service.
stop using google
I think the sad thing about all of this is the lead that was mentioned yesterday. People will trust AI to spit out whatever the most probable answer is, which makes every answer homogeneous. Few people will actually dive into the open web sites that provide the answer they are searching for, making groupthink worse than it already is. The grey middleground will be sacrificed for perpetual profit.