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Like if you think about all the time wasted, that people are made to waste, just because google was like "if we made this work shittier people would be on google more," all that shit adds up.

There's only 42,076,800 minutes in 80 years, so if google makes every adult in the country waste even a minute of their time, that's already multiple lifespans worth of "wasted time," and I can promise you the actual number of wasted minutes in the ten plus years they've been shitfucking their own product is orders of magnitude greater than that

so like idk i guess what I'm saying is google owes us a few lives and we should start with its execs

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[-] woodenghost@hexbear.net 21 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago)

You have a point. They waste much more than just the time for finding what you searched for: think about all the time you have to work to afford to buy junk, because you got manipulated by ads. And other people have to work to make the useless products. And to design the ads.

Everyone thinks they're too smart to fall for it, but companies wouldn't pay Google, if advertising didn't work. They conduct A/B tests and can get pretty good estimates on how much more people spend because of the ads. That amount is how much advertising is worth to them and it's how much we waste on them paying more for cheap or useless products. Again, products you would have bought anyway sooner or later don't show up in the A/B test calculation.

Companies spend over a trillion dollars on ads (all ads, not just Google). And from the above, we can estimate, that consumers waste about the same amount because of ads. That's enough to end Poverty, hunger and climate change and have money left.

And most ads don't lead to a purchase, but still waste your time even after watching it. By altering your sense of self worth, they make you waste your time thinking things like "I'm not good enough".

[-] PorkrollPosadist@hexbear.net 27 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago)

My problem isn't even the wasted time. Advertising is psychological warfare. It is manipulative and abusive. Everybody responsible deserves to be strapped into the Clockwork Orange device. Their sentence is the average amount of time an ordinary person spends listening to advertisements in their lifetime.

[-] GrouchyGrouse@hexbear.net 7 points 6 days ago

This is my stance. It's horrifying that we let ads be everywhere and on everything.

[-] DragonBallZinn@hexbear.net 8 points 6 days ago

It’s like, fuck it. If chuds have to have their ideas certain identities should be genocided solely for annoying them, then I want to see ads banned solely because they annoy me.

The only compromise would be if I were to be paid to have to sit through ads. 100 bucks per every 15 second ad. And if they ad tries to be “funny”, that immediately goes up to 1000. Want to annoy me so badly? Pay me.

[-] WizardOfLoneliness@hexbear.net 8 points 6 days ago

it make a me a so angery anti-italian-discrimination

[-] hexthismess@hexbear.net 13 points 6 days ago

I think it should be expanded to any planned obsolescence products. You design your $1k dryers to break after 1 year, outside the warranty, you answer to the people.

[-] WizardOfLoneliness@hexbear.net 5 points 6 days ago

he'll yeahhh

[-] DragonBallZinn@hexbear.net 13 points 6 days ago

The nanosecond google started shoehorning an annoying AI generated message with every search tbh.

[-] tombruzzo@hexbear.net 7 points 6 days ago

I've read Lean In and we should have executed the lot of them the second Sheryl joined

[-] kittin@hexbear.net 5 points 6 days ago

Intentionally make a product worse to screw consumers and immediately void all your patents

[-] Kualdir@feddit.nl 6 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago)

You can just... use another service

Suggestions:

Qwant

Ecosia

Startpage

Good

Swisscow

metaGer

DuckDuckGo

Brave Search

More: https://alternativeto.net/software/google-search/

Oh and also Bing 🤢

[-] porcupine@lemmygrad.ml 19 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago)

You can (and probably should, Bing obviously excepted), but given how many of those are effectively just anonymous proxies for Google or Bing results, it doesn’t really solve the issue of the search monopoly intentionally degrading their search results.

[-] kota@hexbear.net 7 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago)

Exactly, for anyone who's interested:

Qwant = Bing
Ecosia = Google + Bing
Startpage = Google / Bing
Swisscow = Bing
metaGer = Bing
DuckDuckGo = combination of Yahoo, Google, Bing, and a tiny bit of their own indexing
Brave Search = mostly their own index, but a tiny bit of Bing

Yahoo = used to have their own indexer, but mostly Bing since 2009ish

There are only a few independent indexers, most notably Yandex, but also some tiny projects like vyntr, marginalia, wiby, and other small ones which only index a small fraction of the web.

[-] Kualdir@feddit.nl 1 points 6 days ago

Qwant and Ecosia are working on their own search index :)

[-] WizardOfLoneliness@hexbear.net 5 points 6 days ago

whatever nerd

[-] Le_Wokisme@hexbear.net 3 points 6 days ago

you forgot the best google alternative, PPB

this post was submitted on 12 May 2025
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