#now its kinda been reduced to like ten major platforms and niche holes in the ground that are only found by like 6 people in passing

[pumpkinstep]

I had to switch search engines three times before I settled on Yahoo. Turns out it functions pretty well And it's clean as hell. It also doesn't have an integrated ai chatbot pretending to be a search engine unlike Bing...and Google...and DuckDuckgo...

Now I had been using Bing for a long time but I Had to switch because of Copilot and also because the web page just looks like total shit.

During my search for an independent search engine that works decently well and isn't cluttered, I discovered there's hardly anything out there that doesn't source Google or Bing as their Main source of information and links. Which as you can imagine is pretty terrible considering where both websites are going.

Anyway, I discovered the best way to do it is to cultivate your own webcrawler eventually and like look, im a tech guy but seriously fuck that. I'm sure it's like Linux where it's awesome when you have it all set up but man that sounds like a huge drag and anything that's a drag And tech? Thats like sending you straight to Fuck that's such a huge drag hell.

So yeah, I settled for Yahoo because even though it sources Bing, it's search pages are so so so clean and tidy. Everything is where it ought to be and I don't have to scroll past 10 blocks of images, videos, and unrelated news reels to reach the first link.

Which kinda sucks since using yahoo is kinda like scraping the bottom of the barrel when it comes to search engines I feel. I'm sure plenty of people been using it but I think it's always been behind. Which is actually a good thing in this case as it turns out.

I've already been using Firefox for years so I didn't need to change that...though I do think it's shit that Google is making a pretty big effort to effectively ban ad blockers on Chrome while also making it the default web browser for most hand held devices and the like.

All this to say, at the end of my internet search engine journey, I ended up adding an anti ai filter to my ad blocker because the trash links were just too much.

I really do think having to do all that just to use the internet at a fraction of the quality it once was is a pretty big ask for the average person. Especially when most folks are only concerned with it working seamlessly and not the why it works the way that does.

Though these days I heard computer literacy is down so...I guess that just makes this situation a lot worse.

Anyway there's no real point, just thought I'd share how truely ridiculous things are getting online.