Comment on Google Search’s cache links are officially being retired

• Octopus1348@lemy.lol ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Ecoisa!

  They just planted 200 million trees.

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  • dojan@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    I’ve heard of Ecosia, but I’ve never heard of how exactly their model works. It sounds to good to be true, so I’ve always written it off as bullshit.

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    • robotica@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Ahh yes, the classic “it’s not 100% good, so it’s 100% bad” thinking

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      • dojan@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

        More like “a company doesn’t do something out of the kindness of their own heart” thinking.

        Maybe they are fantastic, but the idea of a company doing something positive for the world just by me using their product (for free) sounds outlandish.

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    • Octopus1348@lemy.lol ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Here are their financial reports.

      blog.ecosia.org/ecosia-financial-reports-tree-pla…

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• gedaliyah@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Kagi is nice

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  • Amir@lemmy.ml ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Another paid service that has no reason not to enshittify

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    • friend_of_satan@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      What is the alternative if we need a searchable index of the internet? Self host? Participate in a community driven swarm? Is that possible or even feasible for us to do? I’d love to see such a thing. It would be quite interesting to learn about the architecture of it, especially ways that the tech prevents gaming the search results, but I have yet to see something like that.

      Or are you suggesting that internet search should be done by a non-profit or government agency that we fund with tax dollars?

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      • pirat@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

        If you figure out how to search “correctly” on SearXNG instances, some of them are pretty good (though they source part of their results from google). That’s how I search most of the time nowadays. I’ve found a favourite instance and a few backups. My most important advice is: to change the default language from “auto” to “en”, and only change it to some other locale for results specifically in that language/country.

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    • gedaliyah@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Honestly, I hope it’s around long enough. Right now it’s very good and rapidly improving. Enshittification by definition only happens when a service is large enough and successful enough. Until that happens, I’m going to keep using what for me is the best search option.

      Let’s face it. Search is a fundamental necessity of the internet. How many models can functionally work?

      • It could be free for the user, but supported by ads. We’ve seen how that works. Maybe it’s run its course.

      • It could be ad-free and paid for by users. The competitive incentive at least is to give users the best possible experience.

      • It could be entirely free and provided as a utility. Literally no one is asking for a government run Internet.

      • Maybe there’s some futuristic solution like an Open Source distributed network in which users run the search themselves. As far as I know nobody has come up with a search that doesn’t require a massive database with enormous costs.

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