Google's new AI search results promotes sites pushing malware, scams

I'm pretty sure Startpage got sold out to an ad company. I think the best option is just to use SearxNG

Thank you

Any alternative to Google Alerts?

Long time looking for such service which monitors web for keywords.

It’s just a bit too expensive imo.

Same here, happy Kagi subscriber 👍

I keep reading that Google’s search results are supposedly much better than DDG’s when my experience is the exact opposite. I don’t even live in an English speaking country and the results I get are a vast improvement over Google’s. It has been this way for me since at least last year, but in my experience DDG had caught up to Google in 2022 already. It could also be that Google has just deteriorated a lot in the last two years (which it definitely has, judging by all the bad publicity they’ve been getting for it), so I’d urge you to give DDG/Brave Search/Bing/Kagi/SearxNG another chance.

I’d also recommend setting an alternative of your choice as the default everywhere and to use it exclusively for like a week before making up your mind about that specific product!

Do you mean grammar-wise, or special operators?

Whoa! You weren't kidding about that list of search engines. What's with the Germans and search engines? They sure do have a lot.

Do Russia have some fuck up law like USA that the government can access the data of Russian's companies?

Yeah, Yandex censors quite a bit, at least since the war with Ukraine:

Yandex, the leading search engine for Russian speakers, has meanwhile tightened its censorship, removing independent media from its search results.

And Yandex altered results to trash Navalny.

But at least they have a banner when they're likely censoring stuff.

So I absolutely wouldn't trust it for anything related to politics or Russian interests. Maybe it's okay from a privacy and non-Russian interest perspective though, idk, but by default I don't trust it because Russia is so repressive against media in its country.

As for DuckDuckGo, here's what I found:

• censorship of Russian "propaganda" annoys far-right activists
• another source citing DDG combating Russian disinformation
• potential censorship or reduction in rank for legally-questionable content

That said, it seems as if it's just reducing the search ranking for Russian "disinformation," not removing results. That's annoying, but not as troublesome as Yandex or Google. BTW, I found all of those links through DDG, so it's not like they're trying to hide anything.

I would not use anything in Russia as Russia isn't a democracy and does not allow freedom of the press

Not sure who's down voting you, its quite a valid option that, unlike google, is actually innovating in interesting ways.

There's an issue at play here that I think we're not confronting enough. America has been on a steady march of deregulating in the name of corporate greed. Some of the most functional countries in the world are also the ones with the strongest regulatory bodies (granted they're also largely petrochemical profiteers, I do have criticisms even of countries that I think are doing better than the US) because there's a presumption built into the system that if left unchecked, the forces of greed will violate the liberties of the populace. Its not a coincidence that the only countries that faced major Y2K bug issues were the UK and the US. Germany, Nordic countries, and Benelux countries all ALSO faced this bug, but in those countries the consequences for fucking up banking data was fines. In the US and UK, the consequences were someone might sue in civil court. Much less scary for banking institutions so they continuously acted like the problem was someone else's problem until the last minute.

My point is this: regulations work. We have case studies in other countries that they work. We don't implement them not because they don't work but because they require long view systems change and the political system we live in doesn't encourage thinking long term. Political funding efforts encourage thinking of policy in 2-6 year terms instead of the actual 30 year time frames it requires to plan them. Its much easier to pull a quick grift with political power weakening the overall system than it is to FIX the system. It incentivizes corruption. THAT is the issue that needs addressing and one we should really be trying to assess what the Benelux countries are doing so well

Regulation would certainly help, considering the USA has basically given up on it. They don't even try.