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Comment by Waterluvian | Hacker News Reader

Google seems like it’s quietly in serious trouble based on how they’ve really really cranked up the ads.

On mobile YouTube every third item is an ad. On google search I now get 5-6 YouTube links before a bunch of AI clickbait fuelled by adsense, and then maybe Wikipedia and other legit site are listed… maybe… on the first page.

I’m currently migrating my habits to avoiding search engines in general, but using DDG (which I might stick with) when I need to.

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Mobile Firefox has uBlock Origin. Using the mobile site instead of the YouTube app removes no functionality and brings adblocking, tabs, bookmarks, and playing music in the background.

I don't know why anyone use the mobile app to be honest.

Chromecast. I can’t imagine watching videos on my phone regularly.

Try SmartTubeNext (if your Chromecast is an android TV).

The app is less buggy. That and chromecast are the two reasons I use the app.

And NewPipe via F-Droid if you already have the link and just want to watch the video (no recs, etc.).

I want to be able to control youtube on my TV with my phone.

If I were to, say, plug in a laptop to an HDMI port on my TV and run Brave on it. Is there any way to easily control playback on it with my phone? I.e. send videos to it, pause, skip etc. Some way of mirroring what I am doing in Brave on my phone?

There used to be youtube.com/tv but they killed it

you could run kodi or similar on the TV, and push videos using a remote app.

I'd suggest using KDE connect, if you really want to use a browser on the TV. I just use a $20 Logitech wireless mouse/keyboard personally.

I've found DDG to be worse than Google and no better than Bing from a search result quality perspective. Google may be showing a lot of clickbait, but Bing/DDG seem to show me links to ads from every possible entity that might want to sell me something associated with that search term, before showing me a lot of clickbait.

I'm probably going to a paid search provider.

DDG being similar to Bing does make some sense, as I seem to remember that it’s one of their major sources? As for ads, DDG kindly lets you disable them entirely under the settings menu.

I personally find Google to be almost unusable now results-wise, and DDG has been better. Not always great, but at least consistently better.

I should have been clearer when I said 'ads'. I mean that Bing/DDG seem to front load anyone selling something related to my search term before giving me actual info about my search term. Google at least seems to try and put something relevant on the first page.

It's paid, and I don't want to sound like a shill, but I've been extremely happy with Kagi for search.

They wanna force you to buy premium

and google adwords is pretty costly, with meager ROI imho

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