It’s started giving all kinds of reccomendation bs, including firefox extensions and shit. Wth? Is this new?

  • hello_hello [comrade/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
    8·
    4 months ago

    Google and Mozilla have a partnership deal worth billions to have Google be the default search engine. Users who use default Firefox shipped by Mozilla have to deal with this.

    You can use meta search engines to get around this like Searxng, Whoogle, 4get, LibreY etc.

    • Frank [he/him, he/him]@hexbear.netOPEnglish
      4·
      4 months ago

      Could you reccomend one? My attempts to use anything but google have been a disaster, all the other google front ends and engines are even worse than google is.

      • hello_hello [comrade/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
        4·
        4 months ago

        If you don’t use Google directly you will suffer a speed penalty to all your searches.

        You can try using an alternative index like Brave Search (but it is also proprietary with AI junk). I’ve been using 4get myself for a couple weeks now and have found no problems with it. Be advised that these meta engines can always get rate-limited or blocked at any time.

        If you just want an always works solution then you can use DuckDuckGo’s HTML interface (html.DuckDuckGo.com) which, while using Bing’s search index and has vowed to censor Russian sources, is the most painless route. This is NOT the default DuckDuckGo site this is the HTML only version with no JS.