Disney+ changes subscriber agreement to allow ads on every plan
https://feddit.org/post/35666466
If you can’t opt out of ads then they are not only there to sell more products.
Ugh foreal
And decades later they’re multibillionaires who hold all the traits of multibillionaires. They’re into transhumanism, the singularity, effective altruism, microdosing, owning your own private yachts, planes, and islands, donating to conservative candidates, and moving their assets to avoid paying taxes. Complete scum. Utopia isn’t going to happen when all your AI shit is making creative people miserable.
Study math at university, start a search engine company using your sick math skillz, become the evil businessman you presumably hated when you started out, and then use your wealth to fund AI that will make nobody want to study math at university. Pulling up the ladder. What a world.
Their later solution to this problem is interesting: for a long time the search and ad teams were entirely separate. The search team had one mission and that was to make Google search as good as possible. Selling ads and making money was someone else’s task. The old reasoning of “Make a really good product and then the profit will follow”. This is how Google search was able to outcompete all it’s competitors.
Then 2019 rolled around, the Google Ads team failed to meet objectives, and they blamed Google search for their failure. Google’s solution was to make search worse, reduce the visual difference between ads and results, and eventually put the ads guy officially in charge of search. The goal of Google search had changed from making the best search engine possible to optimizing ad views and clicks. This is one of the best documented stories of enshittification imo.
Good reads about this:
https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/
https://codingwithcody.com/2025/10/search-is-dead-google-killed-it/Didn’t know this until you wrote your comment but 2019 is definitely when shit fell off so hard I rethought using Google at all
I think they also discovered they were charging companies for all the blocked ads nobody saw, and were about to get sued into oblivion, so they refunded a token amount, and threw ads into overdrive.
I think ads were never paid by the dished out links, but by the actual opens. sometimes even only by the click on it (impression vs click).
Google ‘charges for YouTube adverts viewed by bots’ Published 23 September 2015
I think this lead the charge to confirm you’re a human, i.e. age confirmation.
Interesting, I didn’t know about this. Youtube isn’t search however, Nibbler is right that advertisers in search only pay per click, not per impression.
TIL and wow
Some say that If you speak Prabhakar Raghavan’s name three times while looking into a mirror Ed will appear
I laughed. It definitely feels like that when reading Ed’s articles, the glee is almost palpable whenever he gets a chance to dish on Prabhakar.
it’s funny that they talk about ads hurting search results because they literally became an advertising company that does shitty search on the side.
Some alternatives:
- Duckduckgo (Bing with privacy)
- Qwant (Bing with privacy, but building their own index)
- Mojeek (pet favorite of the privacy community but small index, search often unsatisfying for me)
- Kagi (apparently really good but paid)
I paid for kagi for a year or two. Problem (for me) is, they are very USA centric and offer less value to other regions. For region-independet search they were on par or better with google.
Not trying to pick on one thing but I guess I am focusing on it in my reply.
Am I the only person that thinks duck duck Go is no longer worth recommending?
No, it’s not just you. DDG hasn’t been very good in my recent experience. I bit the bullet and gave Kagi a try and it’s been excellent. It’s what I recommend now.
It’s not free, but I’ll gladly pay to ensure that I’m the customer being tailored to instead of the product being sold.
Yeah initially it felt silly to pay for a search engine, but I gave kagi a try and really like it. I could immediately turn off all ai shit. I can block websites that are ai trash or that I just plain don’t like or I can just down rank a website so I’ll see other results first. For example, I have the Minecraft fandom website downranked but not blocked so that if I’m searching for something that isn’t documented on the Minecraft wiki then the fandom page will still pop up, it just won’t be the top result ever
Also, I’m on the basic 300 searches a month and I’ve never hit the max despite feeling like I search a lot between my phone and computer
Edit: there’s also a little indicator next to websites that have a lot of trackers and ads so you can avoid or block those sites if you want
Could you please tell me why you dislike it?
There’s also Ecosia that lets you choose between Bing and Google as result provider. (And for a while now they have been working on a European Web Index with Qwant to replace the US sources.)
And they plant trees!
Shouldn’t “paid” be a a huge advantage, if we are complaining about advertising?
Main problem with “paid” is that you have to log in for searching = all your searches can be tied to your payment into / identity. That’s a big no-no.
Not to mention Kagi is based in the U.S. Whatever privacy promises they make are bullshit.
Either bullshit or delusional (which amounts to bullshit for the users) if they don’t realize that they can’t do anything about a FISA court order. Do they have a warrant canary at least?
Not everyone on the Internet has money to burn.
So then we need to choose between advertising or demanding unpaid labor…
we need that altruistic billionaire just doing it for the love of the consumer
yeah you know that’s how most of them become billionaires, by being altruistic and always putting others before their own needs.
exactly!!!
no one’s demanding unpaid labor
It’s a difficult choice indeed
I use DDG but i wish it filtered out sites that are clearly 100% AI generated
Problem with all SEO is AI is really good at grabbing hold of the search crawlers and creating articles on questions whether it answers the question or not. I sometimes search by date published so older non ai articls have a chance. Perhaps they could increase the wighting based on age.
I use https://noai.duckduckgo.com/ together with the uBlacklist browser extension. It lets you ban domains from your search results across all major search engines and also lets you subscribe to blacklists compiled by others, such as https://github.com/laylavish/uBlockOrigin-HUGE-AI-Blocklist (I see now that this hasn’t been updated since last year, but there are most likely others out there.)
I wish it didn’t append completely irrelevant “Apple Maps” results for places thousands of miles way, to everything I search for.
I would imagine ddg can’t licence Google maps. I’m surprised they don’t use bing maps (if that’s still a thing)
Brave has its own index. I’m happy with it. No crypto stuff there.
Fuck brave. One huge anti-feature collection.
is this satire?
To be fair, I think they still believe that.
Imagine if they could be held accountable for something like this they said.
2011, the removed the “don’t be evil” from their mission statement. they’ve only been evil for 15 years. /s
Imagine the internal meetings they had leading to that outcome.
“Guys, we’re evil now, okay?”
I’m old enough to remember them having “don’t be evil” written in big letters on their campus…
Brin now actively interfering with elections to avoid being taxed. You are the face of evil, Sergie.
Spending over a hundred million to avoid chipping in to the public purse
A single greedy man pissing away 5% of the total tax revenue of Wyoming into lobbyist pockets just to not pay for public education, health & infrastructure that would benefit people
Bringing up the tax revenue of Wyoming as a yardstick sounds like you’re trying to diminish the severity. Like we should be more pissed off that they get away with it for so cheap when you put it that way.
They don’t only not pay taxes, they get money from the taxpayers in the form of subsidies.
It looks like he underestimated the power of the dark side
Bros saw those profits and changed their tune.
Throw potentially $100,000,000 at me and I would be a wholly different person. Humans aren’t meant to have that much power and systems that allow it are inherently psychologically poisonous.
Psychologically poisonous? How? I’d imagine that it’d liberate you and then you can just be yourself.
Liberated in the same way a toddler is liberated from social decorum. The world enforces personality traits via social and evolutionary pressure. As that pressure wanes, humanity’s prosocial nature can morph or decay.
You are right, you get to be yourself. Ultimate freedom. Say hello to people at the park? That’s an option. Purchase a restaurant you enjoy? That’s an option. Gain an uninterruptable supply of cocaine? That’s an option. Kidnap kids to be your island sex slaves? That’s an equally easily available option. You are free.
Released from restraints, people can be their best self or the most debaucherous, ladder pulling, vile thing ever to be birthed. Or cycle between either extreme as they slide through philanthropy and torture like a saltwater crocodile between marine and freshwater environments. Eventually, an itch that shouldn’t be scratched might arise and an opportunistic infection could follow. I’m not interested in putting myself in that situation, let alone others.
This isn’t universally true. There are plenty of people with that amount of money that aren’t psychologically poisoned, but they stop trying to double their weathly and many go philanthropist but you rarely hear those stories because they don’t make a big deal about it.
Like MacKenzie Scott (Bezos ex-wive). The amount of money she is funneling to struggling NGOs is insane.
If you have that kind of money and choose to keep it, you’re evil. Full stop.
To play Devil’s Advocate, that kind of money gets you connections you’d never have access to otherwise. If your goal is to improve the world, having a direct line to the people in charge could let you do more good, and nothing is stopping you from donating it all posthumously anyway.
If we don’t let anybody accumulate that kind of wealth, then that wealth can’t be used to buy access.
Where do you draw the line?
A retiree that invests well and owns a home can easily end up with well over 10 million.
I’m fine with a billion but I find it gets tricky below that. Since a billiion is a very large magnitude above the mean.
I’d rather push for philanthropic efforts rather than force people to do weird things like setup trusts for every heir that sits just below some limit but remain funds they still directly control by being the trustee.
If the goal is truely to prevent being able to possible accumulate those amounts then we’re looking for a different economic system which is fine but then just say that.
Yes, that’s why I keep saying America’s problem is the boomer class. By value of assets it’s 8 times bigger than even the billionaire class. And that’s just boomers, it gets worse when you include the older ones (silent or greatest or whatever).
We should in some way couple the amount of money retirees receive (don’t know how it is calculated in the US, here it is dependent of how much you earned in life and how many years you were working, with a minimum and maximum value) to the maximum amount a single person can directly and indirectly own. If your investments get over the limit, you can only spend, but not earn more money - in some cases this might result in you having to sell off something you own and donating what you get for it (and you can’t use your investments as collaterals for a credit line when over) until you are back below the max.
No human being can own more than the average insurance value of a human life. Raise the average value of a human life if you want more money. That’s my solution.
I would probably break mentally if you gave me that much money. After a short shopping spree to buy the things i always wanted but never was able to finance (nothing major - mostly high end PC hardware and around 100 TB redundant storage, a phone without a huge amount of scratches, a nice e-bike and some home renovations) I would give most of it away with minimal involvement from my side and just keep a small nest egg because i never had one.
Just want to suggest Kagi, because their ethos is essentially this, and I would say their search results are considerably better than any other engine I’ve tried. It’s been well worth the money so far.
I am so conflicted about them paying Yandex. Kagi sounds awesome with their small web search, filtering of AI or SEO slop, etc.
Yandex is solid too for searching torrents and piracy websites, that’s something that is really lacking in other search engines.
But I wouldn’t knowingly pay money for anything if it goes to Russia, and isn’t essential for me.
Been a long standing Kagi user and have never had to go past the first page for something I need.
Model access is also useful.
Customization rules and other things, useful.
I realize lemmy loves its searxng, but I am happy with my purchase.
Advertising is the most prolific form of environmental pollution wrought by commerce.
It needs to become as socially acceptable as smoking, and every instance of it must be exhaustively scrutinised and required to be justified.
Then they got money. That changed everthing.
Google is THE success story of the end of the dot com bubble.
I hear it does that
