local warzone

Not my wallpapers!
- When I quit at McDonalds to start a career in welding, the owner of the store happened to be visiting. He took me aside and told me "You know, those guys at... (Sorry, what was that place called again? Right...) You know, I've heard the people there aren't as nice as we are here. Are you sure you want to leave?"
  I've never wanted to punch an old man so much in my life. In that moment, he was the personification of class warfare to me, trying to "trick" me into throwing away my future just so he could have more cheap labour. And the fact it was so blatantly obvious added insult to, well... insult.
  Anyway, it's not the same, but the "wallpapers" thing definitely gives me the same vibes, lol.
  
  It really is the same thing though. It’s out of touch, insulting, and downright disrespectful to use something that is not unique to the provider, or valuable at all, as a reason to stay with said provider.
- They have me by the wallpapers!
- Well, you have to admit they are by far the best feature of bing
- NOOOOOO
  
  🙀
- The xiaomi wallpaper carousel is the worst piece of soft on my phone, I don't care and no you can't have all those accesses.
  Had to install some freeware to just set the backgrounds wtf is this, the way they are getting people now??
  
  Literally used adb to forcefully remove it... It reinstalled itself. Bruh

This isn't funny, this is just the sad state of software these days.
- It’s funny how chrome users are struggling with all those bullshit. Firefox for the win
- At least FOSS doesn't try this. At least not as part of the program (I think there's some childish behaviour from devs but generally it doesn't make it to the code).

I thought we were past the age of toolbar spam
- It never went away, just the degree of desperation has changed

Why would anyone in 2024 honestly switch to google products.
They are worse than microsoft, and that takes effort.
- Well when the alternative is Bing quality search results, Google still has a slight edge.
  That gap is closing by the day tho.
  
  That gap has flipped. Bing never told me to put glue on pizza or to jump off a bridge if depressed.
  
  The gap has been favouring bing (DuckDuckGo) for a while now in my experience. Every time I use Google or just doesn’t find what I’m looking for. Just a few days ago, when Bing was down and I had to use Google, I tried searching for the new beta nvidia Linux drivers. Google didn’t even include the official nvidia site in the first page of results. When I later searched for the same thing again, using DuckDuckGo, it was the first result… and stuff like that happens every time I need to use Google. The only category Google still seems to have a slight edge in is current (as in happening right now) events.
  
  What are you guys actually using?
  
  The index is technically a bit better, but not only just as swamped with the same SE optimized shit, but also packed with irrelevant bullshit.
  
  I find myself switching to Yandex when both Bing nor Google give good results.
- Nah, the way Microsoft and Edge work still enrages me. I just use both Chrome and Firefox atm, with Chrome behind my VPN and Firefox split tunneled. I'm still on 10, but when I have the freedom to do so I'm going to switch to Linux. I can't just up and do it at the moment because I work through my computer and also game through it, so I need to have a ton of things ensured workable before I switch. That requires time and testing, and in an ideal environment a second system to run in parallel, which I cannot do atm.
  I've heard our work may be purchasing work laptops for us, so I might be able to do my switch then.
  
  Im not saying use Edge or Bing.
  I use firefox and admittedly Bing and DDG.
  Im in the same boat as you, when 10 goes, Im going to go back to(see Vista Era) linux as much as possible.
- Microsoft is magnitudes worse than google.
  
  @anarchist @kbinspaceprogram in the same sense that pissing yourself is better than shitting yourself maybe
- Bing (and therefore duckduckgo) was down a couple days ago. I could imagine people temporarily switching to google during the outage.
  
  Yea, had to use google for a few searches and man was it frustrating. Like, I was looking for the new beta nvidia drivers on Linux, and google, for some reason, didn’t see it necessary to show me the official nvidia site in the first page of results. In DuckDuckGo, later that day, when it was available again, it was result N°1
- Because most people are not anywhere near as computer literate as much of Lemmy would have you believe.
- Makes me wonder how bad is chrome nowadays, but not enough to check it out.

Gross
\ But considering the current state of Google search, not as gross as it was.

You Chrome folks need extensions to use non-Google search engines?
Firefox uses just bog standard OpenSearch definitions. No shenanigans. Ships with both Google and Bing if you're into that sort of things. And you can add arbitrary search URLs, no probalo.
- No, it looks like something Windows automatically added to their chrome to enforce Bing, unless something changed recently and I didn't know about it
- You don't, but you can.
- You don't have to use an extension to do it, but some find it easier to do than finding it in settings.
  The same is true for Firefox.
  
  What a world we live in.
- Yeah, and the one on Amazon is broken for years and no one cares.
  There is: https://mycroftproject.com/
  There you can just about anything to Firefox's search providers.
- i need to know more about opensearch

Microsoft is offering wallpapers, ask Google what it's offering before you make the decision.
- Violations of privacy. Microsoft has that too though, so unless Google has wallpapers they need to step up their game.
  
  So stay with Microsoft. Since they're already spying on you through their OS-integrated malware, having them spy on you through their search engine isn't a big deal at this point.

wait is this real
- I was asking myself the same thing. This is a pathetic state of affairs... The only thing missing is that the google banner would now also acknowledge the Bing box and tell you specifically "don't listen to the other popup!".
  
  Where’s that Spiderman meme.

"Programmer" humor 🤔
- Midlevel management does this, not developers
  
  Yeah you can tell there are KPIs tied to bonuses causing this. Corporate culture is trash
  
  I initially read that as medieval management and now I cannot read it any other way.
  
  Medieval management, aka serfdom

Apart from the search engines being both shitty, here there's nothing wrong
If you installed an extension to use bing search, what you want is to use bing search, not Google. So of course the extension has to say "don't switch"
There's also a good point on chrome's side. There's extensions that will switch your default search engine without your consent, so having the possibility to undo directly is nice.
Another way to see it, would be to switch chrome for firefox, Google search for duck duck go, and bing to qwant. Same story, but no shitty companies clouding judgements
- But microsoft install that for you without consent, according to other comment on lemmy.
  
  Oh yeah, there it's a completely different story. But that's mostly on OP to not provide context.
  But if it was installed that way, it's just MS being shitty again
  
  Sadly there's no such thing as "user consent" in big tech

You know that scene in Who Framed Roger Rabbit where Donald and Daffy Duck are both playing the same song on individual pianos while trying to kill each other? Yeah.

And this is the real game of monopoly, of course.

So when running a Linux desktop, what does one do to avoid these search engines? I use DuckDuckGo for the moment, but if love some alternatve that isnopen source too, self hosted if need be, and federated would be awesome
- Federated?
  You're just throwing together FOSS buzzwords at this point.
  
  Well, yacy exists
  
  Why?
- Searx is pretty great, although I wouldn't recommend self-hosting it. Just use one of the public instances like Searx Belgium because it is harder to fingerprint you off of your searches since a lot of people also do their searches on the same instance.
- Realistically SearXNG or Whoogle.
  Ideally you would want to use yacy, but in my experience the results are just too bad to be able to use it
- Searxng throws together results from different engines as far as I know.
  Not sure how a federated search engine would work though.
  Edit: hash0772 (is there a correct way address someone's username on Lemmy?) already mentioned this but it's generally best to use an existing instance, there's also some on tor. (they obviously still only search the clearnet)

The screenshot doesn't show it, but there's also an X in the top right of the screen.
- This comment doesn't show it but this is a good time to uninstall your hard drive, throw in a new one, and install Linux
  
  This comment doesn't say it but it's a few months late.

It's honestly incredible that Bing even still exists, much less is still being actively being pushed by M$
- Bing is the default engine in Edge which is the default browser on Windows. There’s a huuuge demographic who doesn’t care enough to change either of those.
  Also, Bing profits from other search engines using their results as a base. DuckDuckGo, for example, uses Bing as their primary source for search results. And in my experience is better at it than google, these days.
  
  I've personally moved to Bing from Google. Partly because it's annoyingly the only way to do web searches from the start menu, But also because it's much more flexible with AI compared to Google's new AI Overviews (The engines vice president actually tweeted about being able to disable Copilot in response to Google's new AI).
  I personally like how Bing presents information better, but it still has quite a few problems. Especially around relevancy, and it's image search isn't the best if you're looking for anything that isn't a photograph.

Eff M

How does this chrome add-on get installed in the first place?