Google, I Dump Your Ass | Hacker News Reader

Google, I Dump Your Ass

jaredwhite.com

37 pointsabnercoimbre27 comments

> When it comes to the #OpenWeb, I am ride or die.

Isnt the whole idea of #OpenWeb open access to information? How does blocking using robots.txt in line with that?

Because parasitic entities tend to misbehave. There's always been other search engines, Google is in slow decline (or accelerated, depending on your viewpoint) so blocking them because they slop users into oblivion. Sometimes you have to say: This his how far I was willing to let this go and now it's over.

heres the rub, whos to say in the future or even now that google is really respecting the robot.txt in the first place. I know for a fact that my sites are still getting hit by AI bots but I'm "blocking" them via cloudflare. Way too many IP's originating from data center ISP. Just saying respecting the robot.txt maybe just PR lip service.

Do we really need many of more of these posts? Just leave already. It’s not a special thing, leaving a platform with billions of people. Robots.txt has been around since… forever?

A while ago, a band I really like (King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard) made a choice to remove their music from Spotify. I'm all for it! I'm not a huge fan of Spotify or something, but the legions of fans then making a huge deal out of them cancelling their Spotify subscription "in solidarity" was by far the biggest impact that choice had... Spotify was almost certainly not affected at all.

Bytes on the internet are mostly free, so I can't say we "have enough"... there's always space for more, but saying "I am in the in-group!" has diminishing returns past the first hundred posts haha

This reads like a self centered narcissist.

"How dare this person write something not pleasing me and my needs..."

https://blog.google/products-and-platforms/products/search/s...

> we're now exploring updates to our controls to let sites specifically opt out of Search generative AI features

Breaking up is proving hard to do. Googling "Jared White" still gets his site and googling "Google, I Dump Your Ass!" comes to this page.

This reads like an ant screaming at someone’s foot before they get stomped.

I've been thinking a lot about what it would take to build a simple search engine again. I think the time for a decentralized search engine that is human vetted is now. In a way that's what sites like reddit/HN ect have become, but I think we need a real search engine not just a social network. Looking to alternatives does not leaving me feeling great right now, DuckDuckGo is just bing IE microsoft and that's not really a better trade.

Thoughts on Kagi? It's a paid product which slows down network effects. However, I'd argue search being "free" is part of the problem.

I think the issue of search being free greatly depends on who is providing the content / doing the work. If the links are provided by the public than yeah it should be free, but if the links are provided by a singular entity who had to do the work then the question is did they provide you a service and what is it worth to you? I would argue the core issue is less a monetary issue and more a public domain vs corporate ownership issue. We need a publicly owned web search so that the ethics involved with using said search can be better enforced.

Morgan from DuckDuckGo here! Some of our web links come from Bing; that's never been a secret. But at this point, we're significantly more than that. For the past two years, we've been building our own web index (see https://insideduckduckgo.substack.com/p/duck-tales-why-duckd...). Beyond web links, many of our search results, such as local results, maps, knowledge panels, answers, sports, weather, and AI features, don't come from Bing at all. When you combine all of this with our commitment to privacy and a completely different design and user experience, it's clear that DuckDuckGo is a fundamentally different search engine.

ditch Bing, and make AI go away, or at least make it opt-in.

those things are why i went somewhere other than DDG.

i find myself searching with cUrl a lot more lately.

How do you search with curl?

you bash on perl, with pipes and cURL.

Sure, I understand the interface - I'm primarily asking what URLs you pass to the cli

Wow, first thank you. I mean you no disrespect as I do think DuckDuckGo is the better of the options. Sadly for me Microsoft is a big deal as I'm a Jew by ethnicity who takes great issue with the harm Israel has caused people in the name of my ancestors. For me anything that helps provide Microsoft any financial support is real a conflict of interest for me. That said these are my own personal issues and I don't expect other people to confirm to my own ethical views. Outside of that I'm also a programmer of 25+ years who has spent a great deal of my time watching Microsoft cause a great deal of harm to the industry. IDK about you, but I feel github has been hijacked, and don't get me started on all the tax dollars we have been spent on sharepoint type BS that can't seem do the basic requirements our governments / institutions have paid for. So yeah anything you can do to distance yourself from them would be something that makes me take a real look at duckduckgo again.

Aside my ranting about M$, if I may ask why go beyond web search, or put another way how do you not end up on the same path as google / bing going that path?

Is there a path to submit new content, ie websites, to be indexed and crawled? How does new content get seeded into DDG’s internal index?

No one cares.

Kagi is awesome. And frankly, it's the end game. Just pay for your search full stop. The original 1990's assertion that "information wants to be free" and all that related nonsense never really passed the laugh test.

Being able to search the web is critical to day-to-day life. Why wouldn't you pay for it? I pay for all sorts of dumb stuff I barely use. I use Kagi every day.

Because I am paying for their service, I know that they are trying to provide me the best service they can - we are aligned. I want to pay for good service, they want to get me good service.

I pay for Kagi not because of political value system. I pay for it because it's just better than Google. I encourage you to try it. It's night and day.

Any alternatives you'd recommend outside of the USA?

I use kagi outside the USA.

> The original 1990's assertion that "information wants to be free" and all that related nonsense never really passed the laugh test.

It didn’t even pass the end of the paragraph where the quote originated.

I assume to use the paid search, you need to be authenticated to search? Privacy NIGHTMARE. Just because they're taking your money, doesn't mean they care about you.

They have a solution for that, called privacy pass. It uses tokens to show the system you are a paid user, but supposedly does not reveal who you are.

I haven't tried it myself, so I have no idea if it works as it should. I'm still deciding to subscribe or not.

More info: https://help.kagi.com/kagi/privacy/privacy-pass.html

What’s so great about Kagi? Is it better than having an LLM search for you?

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