In my experience, Google actually is the best search engine, despite all the ads. Everything else, aside from Bing, is just regurgitating content sourced from Google and Bing, but making it slower, clunkier or turning it into a crypto scam.
I switch to DuckDuckGo by accident and was quite impressed. No idea where that stuff comes from. The new 'AI' based search engines are also useful for some things.
I've been a happy DDG user for a few years now. It was initially terrible for local searches (I'm at the ass end of NZ) but the last few years I very rarely find myself switching back to google for anything.
I will never understand how people on HN laud Apple's privacy efforts while keeping a constant blind-eye towards the blatant sale of user data, limitation of freedom, advertisement and gambling/gacha revenue.
At this point we should just accept that Apple is really not ideologically different from a normal, money-hungry business.
No, it’s about Apple setting Google Search, by far the most popular search engine anyway, as the default in Safari. Nothing about Apple selling user data, which is the claim I’m interested in a source on. As far as I’m aware Apple does not sell user data to third parties, but I’m happy to be proven wrong with a solid source.
Perhaps I should have rephrased myself, then; Apple is a user-data sellout. They're a known collaborator with multiple state and municipal surveillance actors, and will gladly sacrifice user security in regions they consider valuable to their supply chain: https://support.apple.com/en-us/111754
Again, every time anyone brings attention to this there's always the same tired relativist apologism. It's bad when Microsoft does it, bad when Google does it, but when Apple has blood on their hands nobody acts like anything is wrong.
Is Microsoft going to pay 20B to put Bing there? Would Apple users accept that? (probably, they accept every other abuse). Is Apple going to set the default to something else for free?
To motivate Apple not to purchase or develop their own search engine. I'm sure they'd like to, but it would have to be so valuable to Apple to justify losing out on $20 billion per year.
