Remember when Google was a good search engine? And then they started to enshittify their product so that if you look something up, it will purposely give you bad results so you try again and get exposed to more ads. And now they've started putting AI results at the top of the page despite the fact that almost every time I've seen it AI spun a web of lies and more often than not quotes directly from the Onion.
Frustrated, I sent them a feedback form telling them to stop doing this shit. The next thing I know I'm seeing ads on Chrome. Weird. I have an ad blocker for that. Why is it not working?
I checked my extensions, and sure enough the ad blocker was turned off. Let me repeat that: AFTER I SENT GOOGLE NEGATIVE FEEDBACK, CHROME TURNED OFF MY AD BLOCKER. Not only that, but Chrome has a message saying that the ad blocker is dangerous and needs to be removed.
Not fucking likely. Nice try, dickhead. I turned it back on.
The next day, lo! and behold! I saw ads again. Chrome turned the ad blocker off AGAIN. Like Captain America, I can do this all day. I turned the ad blocker back on, and Chrome has yet to turn it off again. All the same, on two websites I routinely visit, I somehow see ads. Bleeding Cool and Flashbak, for some reason, won't let me block their ads. It used to work but not anymore. So I'm starting to think maybe visiting those sites is a bad idea. Can I live without them? Yes. But they are pretty entertaining.
I go to Bing when Google fails to give me my result the first time, but Bing is just as bad. A lot of search engines are bullshit, but there is a good one. Kagi doesn't spy on you, and it doesn't use advertising. You have to pay for it, but it might be money well spent. Come to think of it, if social media did the same thing, ie. ditching ads and surveillance in favor of being paid for the service, perhaps that would be healthy for society as a whole. Granted, most people are on social media because it's "free" and probably wouldn't want to pay for anything. But not being surveilled? Not being advertised to? Like I said, it could be money well spent. Something to think about.
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