There is no meaningful competition, so reputation doesn't matter.
Those people already left Google to use DDG. Where are they going to go now? Some random individual's hobby search engine with a crappy index? Some shady startup's Bing wrapper that promotes a crypto scam?
There is no real competition in search (and in social media, and in email, and in operating systems, and in browsers, ...). Companies can do whatever the fuck they want, and the only thing users can do is complain in vain.
>There is no meaningful competition, so reputation doesn't matter.
>Those people already left Google to use DDG. Where are they going to go now? Some random individual's hobby search engine with a crappy index?
>Companies can do whatever the fuck they want, and the only thing users can do is complain in vain.
Why so dramatic? It isn't really that big a deal if DDG starts to suck.
I use 3 or 4 different engines myself ATM just to see what's going on, DDG being one of them. To say DDG can do whatever they want is only true on the macro, in the short term. It is true me saying 'please don't' will not stop them from doing this right now, and will not affect their bottom line right now.
But this news is going to stop me recommending DDG to tech peers, and to change the default on my family's computers. That is STILL a drop in the pond, assuming I am the only one who is going to take this course of action. However, I am very confident that I will not be the only one to make such a switch.
Now regarding the idea that DDG is the only good modern search, I refer you to Searx, Librex, Kagi, and Startpage.
Now regarding your comment about "random individuals hobby search engine with a crappy index", that would be true if I wasn't satisfied with the indexes of the ones I recommend. I am satisfied with them, so that's not an issue. Unless you don't like hobby projects, in which case that's weird but you do you.
With regards to the "shady startup that wraps bing" point, Startpage is a Google wrapper but I assume the real issue is the shadiness. Which, sure, start page is not a perfect track record, but its good enough.
To close, I really don't think tech doomerism is productive. There are alternatives available. Making excuses to not try them is just lazy, not "realistic".
>There is no real competition in search (and in social media, and in email, and in operating systems, and in browsers, ...).
This is factually untrue. There's plenty of competition in social media and OSes, and Firefox still exists. For social media, there's Diaspora (yeah, I know, no one uses it), and for OSes you've got to be kidding: there's dozens of Linux distros out there or you can easily roll your own with various tools that are easily found. And despite its poor marketshare, Firefox still works quite well for me on Linux.
You have a valid complaint about search and email though, but for email it's understandable: the underlying protocol is broken beyond repair because its designers never anticipated spam so the current state is really unavoidable. Luckily, people have found alternatives to email and just don't use it much any more.
Firefox is near the lowest market share in its history, and declining further.
Linux accounts for somewhere between 0.5% and 3% of the desktop OS market, depending on who you ask.
Mastodon, Diaspora, Lemmy etc. are niche products used by far fewer than 1% of people.
That's not competition. That's "some geeks built some stuff and a couple of people use it occasionally". If there were just two car manufacturers, and one of them had 98% market share and the other 2%, I doubt you'd call that market "competitive". Competition doesn't simply mean "other stuff exists".
>Firefox is near the lowest market share in its history, and declining further.
Yes, but for now, it works just fine. Much better than Chrome IMO in fact. As long as Mozilla gets enough funding to continue development, this shouldn't change.
>Linux accounts for somewhere between 0.5% and 3% of the desktop OS market, depending on who you ask.
Why does this matter? It works fine for countless people and companies. I'm using it at work right now, and have been using it exclusively at work for many years. Marketshare is meaningless with Linux anyway because almost no one pays for it, so of course it doesn't show up in marketshare surveys.
>Mastodon, Diaspora, Lemmy etc. are niche products used by far fewer than 1% of people.
But they exist and work. If people don't like Facebook et al, they're free to switch, and they have no right to complain.
>Competition doesn't simply mean "other stuff exists".
Yes, it really does. Those things are all viable alternatives. That's the definition of competition.
> Yes, but for now, it works just fine. Much better than Chrome IMO in fact. As long as Mozilla gets enough funding to continue development, this shouldn't change.
It has gotten worse.
And mostly Cloudflare is fo blame.
Many sites are relying to Clouldflare and the human verification seems to work only in Chrome or Safari.
It breaks so many important pages and they don’t seem to care to fix it.
I am not aware of any that stopped using google search completely in favor of DDG,
For me DDG was better results, as Google has tried to read my mind and be "smart" about what i am "really" looking for instead of just giving me the results for the words I put in the box. I most often encounter this when looking for technical solutions to a technical problem. Google tends to be better for search results on non-technical items, current events, political topics etc
DDG has made their search less useful, is it less useful than google's trash when it comes to technical search results time will tell
Been using Brave search since they released it. I used to fallback to Google but I've stopped using it recently, it has turned to absoulte crap always returning random spam or nothing at all unless I'm searching for something basic. Been falling back to Phind on dev stuff now if Brave doesnt have anything. Phind is something I would absolutely pay for when the time comes.
Related, and after reading some of the comments in this thread talking about knowledge and knowledge workers, but maybe this would be the perfect time to bring back ontologies and OWL/RDF?
Those people already left Google to use DDG. Where are they going to go now? Some random individual's hobby search engine with a crappy index? Some shady startup's Bing wrapper that promotes a crypto scam?
There is no real competition in search (and in social media, and in email, and in operating systems, and in browsers, ...). Companies can do whatever the fuck they want, and the only thing users can do is complain in vain.