Just started getting this now. Hopefully it’s some A/B testing that they’ll stop doing, but I’m not holding my breath
No offense intended, but why are you still using Google? Startpage has anonyomized results from Google. DuckDuckGo is good enough for most people as well. Brave search also exists if you don’t mind supporting that shitty company.
I like the SearX search engine. It gives old-school, relevant search results, not google ranked ones.
It’s also spread out over many separate instances, so you can pick the one that best suits your search needs:
It’s open source and can be self-hosted. I use something similar called Whoogle that I run in a local Docker container. Strips ads, javascript, tracking, and amp links
I love that society is basically stratifying into groups based on tech knowledge - it all seems very Cyberpunk.
The more technology pervades society the more pronounced this will get. The sheer helplessness of people when faced with problems that seem trivial to some is scary. Especially when you see people losing final theses or critical work related data because they never learned about backups.
Add to that tech companies trying to hide the concept of a file system, and it seems like this is by design to sell more shit.
As someone with technical knowledge sometimes I get locked out of things because I block ads or refuse Javascript. For instance, I had to turn off my pihole so I could sign into my Microsoft account to play Minecraft. Or the times I encounter a website that breaks on Firefox.
If you’re getting locked out of those things, those things are not worth using
I’m pretty sure my divorce lawyer’s document management system is something that’s worth using even if I have to use chrome and disable ad blocking.
As a former web dev, good. I didn’t get paid enough to care about the people that block JavaScript
I’ve been happy with Qwant lately, they have their own index so using them doesn’t support the Google + Bing hegemony. They’re also EU based and regulated by the gdpr.