I don't like these platforms...

I'm going to start using this term.

* Artificial Incompetence

Fuck Google. Idc anymore - fuck them. They rose to the top on the promise of "were different!" And "don't be evil". It's probably our own fault for trusting them but at this point if a competitor came out I'd jump at the chance to move to them and hasten Googles death.

Were helpless. These companies run the world. Regulation needs to happen and I HATE regulation. But at this point Wed only be regulating like a dozen entities while giving citizens more freedom.

I feel like there ought to be a google competitor now that google is so crappy.

I switched to DDG on my phone and it’s good. Recommend it.

I think other than Google that pretty much every site has had engines change over the years. IIRC Microsoft had a search site before Bing, for instance, and IIRC AltaVista changed search engine quite often as it struggled to retain relevance. In general, it's not really the engines that people are upset about, it's the parasitic stuff attached to it at the gate entrance.

Also I'm pretty sure it doesn't use Google. Last I knew Bing is used.

How so? As far as I know, the bubbling is based on your input only, not Google's. So their desires as a company are not involved in what you see.

It's about incorporating Google's opinion of what you want to see, but you seemed to be implying that it is about incorporating Google's opinion of what you ought to see. I think that is somewhat misleading.

> The rest of it, the generic part of Google's algorithm, can and does reflect Google's desires as a company.

True, but what does that have to do with bubbling? Any sufficiently advanced search technology will have that problem whether it uses bubbling or not.

I tried using DDG for a long time, but it's just _terrible_ for technical queries.

DDG helpfully suggests a bunch of unrelated videos - a Coldplay video, a Tyler, The Creator sketch from the Eric Andrew show, and something about a C-line fencing tool. The actual search results are vaguely related, since the first one is a youtube video about birds with someone named Berryman in the description. The next one is a bird rescue, and the third appears to be some sort of etsy shop.

Compare to Google. The first result is the Wikipedia entry for the exact story I was searching for. The second result is the full published story. The third is a related story set in the same universe. Google then shows me some image results, and bam, the second one is actually related to the short story!

Sorry, DDG. You just don't cut it for my needs.

But I use gmail, google docs, Android with many google integrations. I could find alternatives, but really not as good. And mostly it would be just another company, where I'm not sure I can trust either.

Local and self-hosted options are just really not good enough. For example in MS Excel, I can't load actual currency tickers, or share it simply.

I also use Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter. If I don't I'll just have no voice.

I have my own web, but nobody goes there.

Open Internet is gone for me.

Academic websites seem to have nearly vanished from the results.

Perhaps the results get better if you pay Google by allowing them cookies, but I think that wasn't necessary 10 years ago either.

So the difference is that in a non-biased library you find many more and interesting sources.

> "missing {keyword}, require {keyword}?"

Great job big G, I'm definitely the one who made the mistake with my query and didn't want to include that word.

My two word query should not have one of it's words excluded.

OR

If the typical user is asking conversational questions, the search models need a layer of NLP preprocessing, which should likewise be conditional.

I don't understand this "narrowing". I want to see every single damn result, I want to go to the "last page" and see those weird and obscure results. But nope, not any more.

They do a similar thing with image search; you search for something that you know has tens of thousands of images (ie - cats), but you are limited to maybe a total of 1000 or fewer images (show more results...show more results...END).

One last thing that occurs - and I am not sure how this is done; I don't think it is google - but how is it that I can do a lookup for something, and then in google's search results there will be exact matches for that something being searched for, but if you go to those links, invariably they forward you to some kind of spammy or worse "content" (usually doing nothing for me, because they assume everyone is using Windows - so they drop a link for a file that's an executable .EXE - yeah, sure).

It is almost like sites are (somehow) generating search results on the fly for google based on your keywords, but that can't be possible (?) because that isn't how google does indexing (that wouldn't even work or be efficient). So I don't know how it is that sites have my exact keyword matches (unless due to sheer numbers, my searches aren't that unique - but I do often search for very obscure stuff, and even those things pop up).

Meh...

I understand that 90% of people get their apps exclusively from the Play Store but that is not because Google is evil. Its because people prefer one store were they can find everything: the supermarket model.

By choice, I do not have a Play Store account and wherever possible install apps only from F-Droid. However, there are (rare) times where I want to install a free (as in beer) closed source app. However, the publisher only chooses to make the app available via the Play Store. I would really, really like a direct apk download. I appreciate this approach is not for every end user and some people are scared of the "warning" messages Android displays when installing apps directly. Nonetheless, it would be really nice to have the choice and I don't see it as so much extra effort on the publisher's side.

So even though it’s technically possible, it’s not always a going to happen.

There’s also side loading as a malware vector. If you do side load, you need to remember to turn off non-AppStore access immediately after.

If you develop apps to make money as a business this is not realistic. If the user can only side load your apps you probably have shrunken your potential customer base by 95%.

Because the grandparent comment was about the search engine.

- Develop mobile apps for a company rather than sell your own on Play/App store. - Develop non-mobile apps. - Not-app programming (business automation, infra, embedded, etc). - Get out of programming entirely.

This is basically the same message for all the other displaced/disrupted jobs (coal miners, bank clerks, lift operators, cashiers). Nobody owes anybody a livelihood for a fairly narrow/specific field. Especially not in "mobile app development" which 10 years ago was close to non-existent as as job title.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computers_Don%27t_Argue

A theory- the app itself had infringing material, and the person who reported/banned it found that material via the review.