For me so far, convenience on mobile when looking up information on physical places and business. I get the phone number, address, and hours of operation without clicking a link.

As I'm transitioning to using Ecosia, that's what I find myself going back to Google search for most frequently. I tried switching to clicking links on Ecosia to find a phone number to call, and quickly came to the conclusion the websites are enshittified also, or at least ridiculous to navigate and find useful information. On at least one occasion already Google has had the phone number listed at the top of Search for an organization that just didn't have a phone number provided from themselves anywhere online. (Okay, maybe they had it on their Facebook page, but I'm trying to improve my user experience not soil it).

i still use Google for speed testing bc it works better than ookla

is there a good alternative that I'll feel good about using?

Well that won't help me find scat porn at all then!

Useful except when the solution to some problem is to be found in the responses of an old forum post which reads something like, "how do I fix this fucking shit?"

For your private browsing tabs: https://noai.duckduckgo.com/

I use it now. On Firefox.

This is how it’s done.

I haven’t googled anything in years.

I wanted to use Ecosia but they won’t let you 100% disable AI, which is fucked for a supposedly green venture for so many reasons.

DuckDuckGo now has their own browser that blows FF out of the water.

Edit: Chromium, don’t bother.

I've switched to kagi.

It's not free, but it's absolutely the best IMO.

When I search something I don't see an AI summary. Not sure if I disabled that or not.

And then change the url to duckduckgo.com.

udm=web now. Also, ~~your~~ all(?) examples get the %s mangled by URL format correction, so should be:

https://www.google.com/search?q=%25s&udm=web

but change the %25s to %s.

Also, I miss Pinterest.

Wait, what? Why? Are you talking about the same Pinterest as that search-result-clogging, not ever leading to originals, spamming and content-obscuring piece of shit website?

Here you go:

https://lite.duckduckgo.com/lite

Was with you til the end there. I use the personal blocklist extension, and I got it specifically for pinterest. It's grown to include others, but Pinterest was the beginning.

Doesn't matter. The thread is just locked and ignored forever by Google. There are thousands of such issues and complaints across all Google products, and that's how they deal with it.

I don't use Google for a while now because of the ads and garbage they present ahead of real results, but I remember when you used to just get what you searched for and this is close to that. pretty cool.