Yes we need them to survive,
yes they’re better than Google.
But no we’re not being too negative/hard on them!
Lately Mozilla has been pulling a lot of anti-consumer yet pro shareholder shit.
AI is a perfect example of that,
unwanted by the majority of their community, yet still forced upon us by shareholders, for now through an optional addon, which appears to be a foot in the door, which can quickly grow into a baked in addon which ships with FireFox by default.
DuckDuckGo’s search engine introduced AI assist and an AI chat as opt-out features, which it repeatedly re-enables at random, with no ability to disable it permanently, even though we’ve been able for years to set a bookmarklet to make all our other DDG settings persist.
Users are very unhappy, with requests for a way to permanently disable AI features ignored, receiving only patronising responses from DDG.
No matter, DDG’s utility for searching has deteriorated these past years so severely, even relative to the deterioration we’ve seen with many other options, that I wonder will it survive.
It is always unfortunate when a recommended privacy tool shifts away from privacy, but several doing so all at once is alarming.
Have tried out SearxNG without self-hosting, via different instances, but had to abandon it as it is way, way beyond my mental capabilities to get it to work.
I doubt I could manage to self-host, having looked into Docker for some other matter.
Using Mojeek currently, which isn’t great but not too terrible.
Yes we need them to survive,
yes they’re better than Google.
But no we’re not being too negative/hard on them!
Lately Mozilla has been pulling a lot of anti-consumer yet pro shareholder shit.
AI is a perfect example of that,
unwanted by the majority of their community, yet still forced upon us by shareholders, for now through an optional addon, which appears to be a foot in the door, which can quickly grow into a baked in addon which ships with FireFox by default.
Sources:
https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/discussions/share-your-feedback-on-the-ai-services-experiment-in-nightly/td-p/60519
https://mozillafoundation.tfaforms.net/100
Yet in the Lemmy comments about the poll,
again you can see that the general consensus is no:
https://lemmy.one/post/21332325
They blatantly ignore their community,
and for that we’re allowed to be angry with them.
Yup.
DuckDuckGo’s search engine introduced AI assist and an AI chat as opt-out features, which it repeatedly re-enables at random, with no ability to disable it permanently, even though we’ve been able for years to set a bookmarklet to make all our other DDG settings persist.
Users are very unhappy, with requests for a way to permanently disable AI features ignored, receiving only patronising responses from DDG.
No matter, DDG’s utility for searching has deteriorated these past years so severely, even relative to the deterioration we’ve seen with many other options, that I wonder will it survive.
It is always unfortunate when a recommended privacy tool shifts away from privacy, but several doing so all at once is alarming.
You may self-host SearxNG (via Docker) and avoid direct interaction with search engines - be it google, bing, Brave or DDG.
SearxNG will act as a privacy front-end for you.
https://github.com/searxng/searxng
Have tried out SearxNG without self-hosting, via different instances, but had to abandon it as it is way, way beyond my mental capabilities to get it to work.
I doubt I could manage to self-host, having looked into Docker for some other matter.
Using Mojeek currently, which isn’t great but not too terrible.
You can send us in results via the submit feedback button or contact page when they’re not-so good, if you’d like to help