It's weird that they don't really address the biggest reason Googles algorithm is worse now. The rampant exploitation of SEO.
Bad actors abuse the system in an attempt to be the first result, regardless of relevancy. It's harder for Google to sift the chaff out than it used to be, because they're flooded with content claiming to be related to the search keys.
You either die a hero or live and watch yourself turn into a villian.
Tom's hardware, woot, and most recently donut media just to name a few. All were once the place to go, they all were bought out by bigger interest and eventually became the villian.
They've been bought by an entertainment parent company, which is why the glut of sponsorships along with their content leaning towards pure entertainment instead of including educational and DIY content. Zach and Jeremiah started their own thing recently and explain in their first video.
It's not even that their results suck, per se, but they straight up ignore most of my search query and focus on one or two words only. Obviously that makes your search results suck.
Remember Google is paid by advertising dollars. So the incentives are to feed you the maximum amount of ads with the minimum amount of content so that you don't leave for something else.
I'm pretty sure their ad revenue from their own pages is a tiny fraction of their overall advertising revenue... They basically own the advertising market online, almost anywhere you see ads googie is getting a cut
2023 Total Google Search & Other Revenue: $175.04 billion
This is revenue generated primarily from ads shown on Google’s search results pages and other search-related services.
YouTube Ads (10.26%)
2023 Total Youtube Ads Revenue: $31.51 billion
This is revenue from ads shown on YouTube videos, including display ads, overlay ads, skippable video ads, and non-skippable video ads.
Google Network (10.20%)
2023 Total Google Network Revenue: $31.316 billion
This is revenue from ads displayed on websites and apps that are part of Google’s ad network, beyond Google-owned properties.
Google Other (11.26%)
2023 Total Google Other Revenue: $34.68 billion
This is revenue from Google’s other ventures and products, such as hardware (like Pixel phones and Nest devices), Play Store purchases, and other non-advertising sources.
Google Cloud (10.75%)
2023 Total Google Cloud Revenue: $33.08 billion
This is revenue from Google’s cloud computing services, such as computing power, storage, and data analytics offered to businesses and developers.
So, 57% from search, and only 10% from ads on non-Google pages.
ICQ shut down yesterday and it was relatively small to begin with so I‘m afraid Google will be around for decades to come and possibly outlive most or even all of us.
Will we do have Youtube alternatives (Odysee & Rumble). But people can't filter out the stuff, they don't like on Odysee & Rumble. They can do that on Youtube but not on Youtube alternatives. So yeah.
Just took a look at them, and Rumble is for sure a hard pass. The 2 rows under "news" is all far-right extremist videos, which is great if you are aiming for the Parlor/Truth Social/Nazi and Nazi sympathizers of the internet, but I think you'll miss most of the world going that toxic on the frontage.
To your point, the amount of money/effort to even try and rival YouTube (and/or Google) would be a hell of a task for sure. Since you would want it to be open, well moderated (but not so much that the majority of people scream "censorship!"), and be able to store/encode/serve a wild amount of video daily. And the later 2 things get exponentially more difficult as you scale.
It would need to be like the Fediverse on steroids, doing a distributed filesystem allowing every federated member to host/encode/serve part of the burden (like Kazaa/Limewire/DC++) but in some manner that people could be assured node hosts couldn't tamper with videos. And then you would also need some sort of reward for creators that wouldn't somehow lead to greedy power struggles causing an implosion of your open platform.
In their current state, I would argue none of them are actually alternatives in the sense of being a real replacement. None of them is setup to scale, making the moderation/filtering point kinda moot.
There's also PeerTube, the Fediverse counterpart to YouTube. Unfortunately, while there's some good stuff you can find (and some re-uploads of YouTube), there's just not as much content. I'd imagine the userbase is pretty small, too.
I hope the fediverse attracts enough adoption to make it long term viable. I am making an effort to be here more than there for lemmy/Reddit but YouTube is still harder to quit
When I first got to Reddit a front page post was like 1000 upvotes so Lemmy is approximately sorta the same level of users as when I first got to Reddit
It's not bad if you subscribe to a handful of channels and only watch those. I use Grayjay, so I just turn off Rumble search and only see like 1-2 channels I've subbed to.
The issue seems to be that people who are not welcome on Youtube go to Rumble, and that's largely right wing commentators, crypto bros who crossed a line, etc.
The same is true for Odyssee, but a little less extreme since Rumble is the bigger and more obvious platform.
I personally don't care what alternative a creator uses, I just want to avoid Youtube.
My company's goal seems to be to get themselves more dependent on AWS. They're always talking about which things we can replace with AWS offerings.
I'm the exact opposite. I'm always looking for how to make the things I use more replaceable. That way if a company goes bad, I only need to replace a small part of my stuff.
If AWS goes bad, I'd feel really bad for out devOPs team...
I'm slowly moving away to open source, self-hosted applications where possible. Changed search to a combination of Gibiru and Yep. Email to a mailcow server I host on a vps, and I'm moving photos to an Immich server I'm setting up. Home Automation is next, I have a Raspberry Pi 5 to act as the Home Assistant server. And a few other projects in the works to split from Google as much as I can and mostly it is all better.
It's like Gmail except it has a proper dark mode, an actually functional search feature, a functional and user-friendly mail filtering system, you can actually block senders, "All Mail" actually shows you all mail, and also Google isn't reading all your emails...
Ultimately, arguing that you don't care about the right to privacy because you have nothing to hide is no different than saying you don't care about free speech because you have nothing to say.
Been using their paid email, drive and vpn for the last couple of years and their service has been flawless in my experience. Great apps and never had an outage or issues once.
Free versions are available but the paid version is well worth it.
I've been with them for a couple of years too and I use all their services (mail, calendar, drive, VPN, pass and simplelogin) but calling it flawless is a bit of an overstatement.
Their outside communication is nonexistent at best, development speed is unbearably slow and Linux support, the most privacy countious user-base?, is lacking a lot.
Hopefully in the next couple years they sinally manage to release contact sync and a Linux client for Drive.
Their outside communication is nonexistent at best
Eh, they're decently active on Reddit, I guess. They send the occasional newsletter regarding new features if you don't unsubscribe (and they're pretty good at not spamming with those, imo).
development speed is unbearably slow
I see people say this all the time, and while feature updates are kind of slow, I'm also not lacking anything, personally. I would appreciate it if they smoothed-out SimpleLogin's extension, though. That thing is weirdly clunky to use.
Agree on the Linux bit, though. I'm surprised they haven't put more work into that.
Overall, I've been a happy customer for a few years, personally.
can vouch for mega, been using it for 8 years now with no real issues. only sticking point is file download limits with Firefox, and thats just because im too lazy to download the desktop app
I hate services that force you to download an app when the functionality could be provided in browser. Apps have a lot more permissions to access things that wouldn't be accessible in browser.
its cause of the stupid way mega downloads file to your ram, and only when its fully downloaded does it get moved to the drive or something along those lines, its been a while since i've looked into it.
Its megas limitation by intentionally doing shit a stupid way then blaming the browser for it.
Like I said, its intentional. Nothing to fix because its doing exactly what they want. Cause they want you to install the app, which they have much greater control over and ability to harvest from.
chrome doesnt have this restriction is why i think its not as slimy as that, and why i don't have the app since i just paste the link into chrome lol
sounds more like they designed it around chrome and didnt take firefoxes differences into account, and have yet to fix it because in the grand scheme of things it's a small issue
I use a cheap VPS to host my email server. It's a bit easier than running it solely at home, but there's a lot of annoying work to "verify" yourself. Once you get your DNS records good, you shouldn't be blocked after that (unlike a home server). It only costs me $5/month plus the domain, which I think is money well spent. Doing the admin work to make sure I'm secure still needs to happen, but I don't mind that work and find it fun.
Gmail and other big providers tend to consider new domains to be spam until they've proven otherwise. Can't prove otherwise until you've been up and running for a while. Catch-22. The way out of that is to host with an existing provider for a few years.
Does it cut down on spam? Perhaps. Does it favor existing providers like Gmail? Yes, definitely.
Honestly, hosting email has long been difficult to setup, and all the more so if you don't want your box to be a spam host within three seconds of plugging it in.
I've been hosting a personal domain with an established-but-not-large hosting provider for around 6 years, without any troubles sending or receiving mail from that domain (via the provider's servers, of course).
Does that mean my domain is now well established enough to take email hosting to my own server?
Apparently, doing a sync with it just on my documents and photos, it ended up filling up the Proton Drive and giving hundreds of errors on one of my Windows 10 computers.
I recently started using Tresorit, E2E encrypted cloud storage, owned by the swiss post, only downside I can find is price. I haven't used it long enough to really be able to recommend, but there aren't a ton of options out there.
There's an incredible story behind it. But, the short form is that Proton is more expensive because they're not harvesting your private information. In a few months the law will prevent them from doing for as long as the core fiscal law and Proton exist (at least decades).
If price is main concern, you still have options, but you'll need to be a lot more specific about what you need. For example:
direct Drive replacements - OneDrive and Amazon Drive
just file storage - DropBox, and MEGA
backups - NordLocker, Backblaze
hosted and self-hosted cloud platforms - OwnCloud and NextCloud, use Backblaze B2 for storage
I'm doing the last one. I have NextCloud installed on my custom NAS (just openSUSE Leap with some drives) and am working on configuring B2 as a backup service. It's more expensive than Drive, but it's also more versatile (streams movies to TV, use as Linux package cache for faster upgrades, etc).
Each of these are similar in price to Google Drive, but with a different feature set. Some are cheaper.
Sorry for not being more specific about what I need, I will explain it here.
With Google Drive, it gets assigned to a drive letter on my computer which is H: here and I'm not sure if any other Drive alternatives do that or not.
Right now, I currently pay $3 USD a month for 300 GBs of Google Drive space and they appear to go up with 5TBs for $25 USD a month and $10TBs for $50 USD a month.
I'm not interested in One Drive as that is Microsoft's Shit.
Here are options for to mount Backblaze B2 as a drive. It's $6/TB/month, and I think they allow <1TB, so for 300GB you'd pay ~$2/month. So I think they're pretty competitive, but I'm not familiar with Google Drive's terms. They're certainly in the same ballpark, if not cheaper, but it depends on your egress and Google Drive's policies around that (how much you download from their service).
Well, for one thing, I would want to find out if there is a way to mount a remote drive service to a drive letter on a Windows machine like Google Drive so that I can have it as a backup option that would keep my stuff privacy, and not scraped by some AI LLM.
