i would guess that people that deactivate js are fine not using google for search
this post was submitted on 18 Jan 2025
198 points (99.0% liked)
Privacy
32871 readers
1101 users here now
A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.
Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.
In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.
Some Rules
- Posting a link to a website containing tracking isn't great, if contents of the website are behind a paywall maybe copy them into the post
- Don't promote proprietary software
- Try to keep things on topic
- If you have a question, please try searching for previous discussions, maybe it has already been answered
- Reposts are fine, but should have at least a couple of weeks in between so that the post can reach a new audience
- Be nice :)
Related communities
much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
This breaks things like Whoogle that used the JavaScript-less api to pull search results.
Any idea if it will break SearXNG?
True. I am one of those. I just use duckduckgo or swisscows or brave search.
Someone here use still Google for searching? 😳
Thank you dgg
Thank you, DuckGoGo
DuckGuckGo
Deutsche Geophysikalische Gesellschaft
I wish they would fix the bug where I can't click "images" with js disabled
Soon they’re gonna start using Widevine DRM to encrypt the Javascript required to access the search results. 🤦🏻♂️
This coincides with Google search getting worse and now including the AI slop.
What's the best alternative to Google these days?
What’s the best alternative to Google these days?
I use Kagi, it's great (great results, no ads, no tracking, a lot of clever filtering tools) but it's paid. Free, I would use Brave Search but I doesn't give me as good results as Kagi.
Edit: added links.
I use SearxNG, found a good, reliable instance that is close to my location.
SearXNG solves this (and many other problems)
I wish they would fix the bug where I can't click "images" with js disabled
That no bug. There just no html search for image.
You just described a bug
No. Missing feature is not bug.
You not write bugreport, you write feature request.
Image search already exists. Its just missing for some users. That's a bug, not a new feature request
Why it is important to use alternative metadata fetcher like searxng
This used to be a great feature for vintage computers. If the machine had internet, you could search with HTTP site instead of HTTPS.
The alternatives listed here might not require JS, but most if not all of them require SSL. Vintage computers struggle to support that. Anyway, Google is best avoided when possible so hopefully an alternative surfaces .
Motherf***ers
I mean on the list of reasons not to use Google, I feel like this one is pretty low.
Luckily, as of today I can still set my user agent to something like a Playstation or ancient firefox/IE to get a lightweight HTML-based page. The results are in www.google.com/url?q= format but I can use a redirector extension for that.
Better abandon google search for something else at this point. Even if alternative search engine calls bing and google, at least they take this BS out of the way
you're right, but startpage is slower than lightweight google :p
The what page
Startpage, it's an alternative search. But it's not without its own problems.
Wait this is new? I wasn't able to use google without JS for sometime.
Startpage.com does not
What does this mean?