The $10/month solution to Google search crapification

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Life is too short. It may be worth paying $10/month to get the results you need on the first page of search results, rather than scrolling through 5 pages of ads before you find the good stuff.

Paying $14/month to avoid all the ads on youtube might be worthwhile, too.

Now all we need is a solution to Amazon crapification. {{ LOL }}

intercst

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I think AI is taking their lunch. It might be better to pay for an AI solution today.

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I use duckduckgo - it’s pretty good.

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I’ll say. Today I went to book a hotel room, I didn’t have the phone number but knew the name, so I typed it in. Every single listing on the first page was “sponsored”. Expedia, Hotels.com, Jerry’s Broken Down Craphouse.org, I don’t remember them all - I just remember that the specific hotel I asked for DID NOT APPEAR on the first page.

Encrapification? I guess.

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Try duckduckgo. I’m curious to know if it works for your search

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Amazon has gotten so bad. Yesterday there was a “woot” sale on small home appliances. And my wife and daughter told me that we need a new toaster (pop up kind). So I was about to buy the woot one, but figured I would check [the regular] Amazon first. I searched for “pop up toaster 2 slices”, it showed a hundred toasters including 4 slice ones. I tried sorting by price from low to high, and I got 4 pages of cheap toaster covers (cozy?), so I changed the search to “toaster 2 slice -cover” and then sorted by price again. Sure enough it still had al the covers in there. I gave up and bought the woot one before it disappeared. When did they change their search to not exclude stuff with “-” in front of it???

I wonder if using an AI in front of Amazon could help. Maybe I could tell an AI “search Amazon for 2 slice toasters but make sure you exclude anything that isn’t a toaster like toaster covers and then list them in order of price from low to high”. Would that work?

[NOTE: I just tried it in grok and it worked, it gave me a list of 10 toasters that fit the description. It also said “For the most accurate and up-to-date options, visit Amazon.com and use the search term “2 slice toasters -covers -accessories” with the “Sort by: Price: Low to High” filter.”]

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I’m not sure what you all are doing, but I don’t have a huge problem with google searches. Here’s what I do:

  1. I use an ad blocker. I happen to use AdBlock Plus as it’s free. There are other free ad blockers. Use what works for you.

  2. I do NOT sign in to google when searching. Heck, I do not sign in to google for pretty much anything. The only time I sign in is to make the occasional comment on a YouTube video, then I immediately sign back out.

  3. I use Firefox as my browser. Not Edge. Not Chrome. Not Safari. (No, I don’t trust Apple, either.) DuckDuckGo would be fine, too - I’m just used to Firefox. Any browser that is independent from the big tech companies would be my suggestion.

I just did a google search for 2 slice toaster. I did get one row of sponsored results, but the rest were not sponsored and seemed to be responsive.

But to be honest, for a toaster, I’d probably go straight to wally world and look at their cheap ones. It’s a stinkin’ toaster. They’re all junk, just some pieces of junk are more expensive than others. Spend less than $20 and be done with it.

–Peter

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Charge them $10/month–more if possible. No pay = no shop there. They can make their money on sales.