Google search sucks ass anyway. Better to wean children off of Google sooner rather than later.
Should have started sooner, a lot of people seem to still think it is the only choice.
My phone reset the default search to Google and it was ridiculous. First page was all AI garbage sites and aggregators. I switched back to Bing, slightly less bad, and found my results on the first page. Gotta get DDG on the default list.
Startpage is a bit slower, but higher quality results.
What are the better options, I use DDG for reference. Curious if there is a go too. Haven’t touched Google in years for a search. Do occasionally use their reverse image search no that I think about it.
DDG is going down in quality. Still acceptable. Startpage yields more assertive results, but it’s a bit slower.
He looks so badass in that thumbnail
Because he is
I think he looks like an extra from the matrix who looked too nice to make the final cut. But I know he is badass, and that’s the point :)
He’s the one in this 2026 version of the matrix
I thought based on the thumbnail that this was about Daredevil.
Is it possible for a photo to be taken of him that doesn’t look cool as fuck?
yes, sometimes he just looks silly and nonthreatening. still not a bad look.
Lol, my thought exactly was “damn, that’s a badass photo, for a badass motherfucker”
The day a corporation can enforce a scholastic learning agenda, or curriculum, is the day we should burn that corporation to the ground. Families, kids, teachers and money for supplies, no propaganda in the schoolhouse, except to teach the kids to recognize it and avoid it.
no propaganda in the schoolhouse
Good luck with that one. Even if you could get schools to stop requiring the Pledge of Allegiance every day, every history textbook and literary novel has a perspective in it and was published by a megacorp.
I don’t know a single school where the pledge is required?
Edit: and every literary novel? Sure, EVERYTHING has a perspective. Novels are written by people, of course it has perspective. Trying to argue that makes it propaganda is a little much
I don’t know a single school where the pledge is required?
It hasn’t been explicitly required in decades, but it’s still implicitly required: everyone else is doing it, and if you don’t, your teachers may treat you differently.
and every literary novel?
Okay, maybe not, like, Hatchet, but there’s plenty that make a more direct and incendiary point. It’s why schools consistently try to ban books like To Kill a Mockingbird or the Handmaid’s Tale. School boards think those books are propaganda in defiance of their cultural values.
It is explicitly required that schools give a time for reverance and respect to the flag each day. The pledge fulfills this requirement but is not the only way.
So it basically is specifically required.
Ok, so maybe generalizations like your original ones aren’t great then?
If people are trying to ban books, that sucks, but it does highlight that the problem you’re trying to highlight isn’t as big as you’re suggesting.
It could be bad, but it isn’t, because people push back.
Now Internet propaganda? Tv propaganda? Media propaganda? Oh hell yeah, that shit is bad. I wish I didn’t have to try to find three different sources before I could trust a news article.
It could be bad, but it isn’t, because people push back.
In some districts. Some of the time. Plenty of other districts uphold their book bans. But that’s only talking about novels in English classes anyway. The more insidious one is the first part of what I mentioned: history textbooks.
School boards basically buy the version of a textbook that supports their values. They’re not trying to buy the most accurate or unbiased; they are buying propaganda that colors history in whatever way they favor. And that is true in every school district in the country. Very few teachers have the knowledge, resources, and support to counter what is in the textbooks their district provides, so kids just get taught a narrow scope that is often extremely suspect or a politician’s preferred description of events.
When McGraw-Hill makes a textbook, they’re tailoring the content within because ultimately they’re a company trying to make money. Schools will always be rife with propaganda as long as that is the model. If textbooks were provided by not-for-profit educational institutes and didn’t need local Karens to approve of every paragraph, maybe things would be different. But right now, propaganda in schools is bad.
I don’t disagree with that at all.
Literature though, not sure how you could paint the entire category as propaganda.
Even the schools I’ve seen that still say the Pledge don’t require it. I’m not in the US anymore, but the last school my kids were in before we left didn’t even do the former.
Why did they have to use this sick ass photo of him for the story?
Why is that guy always so fucking BASED?
Dang, that’s impressive!
He’s a normal human being I think, weird for a politician idk
He correctly understands that he will personally benefit from living in a more functional society more than he could stand to gain from corrupt behavior
A true egoist.
The policy change is “If schools don’t allow google slop, they can’t use google search.”
Hopefully it just means that schools use duckduckgo and avoid google search, too. Blocking google (the world’s largest advertising corporation) should be the default policy of all schools, especially public schools.
Kids in New York are gonna grow up using DuckDuckGo!
And possibly be better off for it
Google wants to slop your kids!
Google wants kids reliant on Big Tech to do the thinking for them. It’s an insidious and much more damaging goal.
I mean they force us to use it by putting it on top of the actual search results and they don’t realize we just dont fucking want it – im sorry they spent trillions already on it but we’re not paying them for it – that’s on them to eat the money they set in fire.
FUCK Artificial Intelligence
Probably the nicest way to put it, all things considered
Schools should be self-hosting searxng or something similar. Public education’s reliance on corporations is antiquated and barbaric.
SearXNG ftw
Unfortunately school boards are not very tech savvy and typically want to go with name brand vendors for everything.
School boards can blame ignorance but they go where the kickbacks are, which is also barbaric.
And he is right. Break up big tech monopolies
Burn google to the fucking ground. Its a monopolistic and horrible corporation.
Anyone have recommendations for search nowadays? Ddg is pretty meh lately.
SearXNG
There are public instances, or you can self-host it.
Its a “meta search engine”, meaning that it aggregates, and reorganizes results from the indexes of whichever search engines you want (after removing AI, Ads, and sponsored content from those results).
You could set it to index only Google if you wanted, and you’d basically have pre-enshitified google. I have about 20 indexes active in my personal instance, but they have ~100 indexes that you can use, allowing you to see results that wouldn’t turn up on Google or DDG.
It’s free, and it works better than Google ever has.
I had been searching for a specific rare game ROM for literally years, to no avail. I ran one SearXNG querry, and found the ROM from the 2nd link on page 1 (that’s right, pages, none of this infinite scroll rigmarole).
I would be interesting in learning to set this up. I’m not super familiar with self hosting tho. Do you have a guide you’d recommend?
Not off the top of my uead, but i could probably find one.
What OS do you use?
I have mint and Windows.
Ok cool, I set mine up on Mint and it was super easy
Are you familiar with Docker? (If not it’s cool, it’s very easy to learn)
I am familiar with docker
Awesome, then you already have all of the knowledge you’ll need to stand up your own private instance (and troubleshoot if needed)!
https://docs.searxng.org/admin/installation-searxng.html#installation-basic
Let me know how it goes
Self host 4get
It works great!
I’ve been using startpage lately, but I find it meh… although to be honest I don’t know if that is so much their fault as it is how SEO has ruined the web
what I can say is that whenever I search a topic, the first half dozen results I click on are just AI generated bullshit all with the exact same web page layout. and that’s just the ones I click on, not the ones that I scroll past that I can tell are the exact same shit
I don’t know exactly why all the search results nowadays are websites that were clearly AI generated under the same template and have a whole novella about how it’s important to use the correct torque for your oil drain plug, but like dude I just want to know what the torque spec is for my car because it’s not in the manual
noai.duckduckgo works very well for me. I left ddg years ago because I thought it was crap, have used ecosia, and startpage since then, but ended up on noai.duckduckgo this year and I see no reason to change
This is also interesting https://marginalia-search.com/
Ecosia feels like a greenwashed Bing, but I have stuck with it as my default for a few years now and it feels “good enough”
I have an instance of SearX for an alternative that I haven’t quite gotten the hang of, though
It feels really temperamental and apparently it just pulls from DDG anyway? Glad to be part of Lemmy so I can get some new suggestions for alternatives to Google
You can use MetaGer, Ecosia, Startpage, Mojeek, Qwant, specific page searches… or all of these. if you want a deeper research. After more than a quarter of century I’ve anyway half the internet in my bookmarks and only use the websearch in few occasions, or for security checks of unknown URLs.
not to discourage you, but half of those are powered by google indexing.
I know, but the problem of Google isn’t the index, the biggest out there, the problem is the SEO crap and the handling of it by logging your searches and showing the results by it (filter bubble), Google show you what you want to see, not what really is fact. Startpage, Whoogle and others use the Google index, but without all this crap, AI and filters.
