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Ask HN: What tools are you using to evade the ever enshittified "big" web?

14 points by LipSchilling ↗ HN
I've seen lots of posts on here recommending small web resources (marginalia etc). These are great, but I still have to use search engines. Am I stuck with Google and the meta-engines pretending to not be Bing? Is there any hope of genuine competition in this space or is the internet so incredibly large that only squillionares can occupy this space?

My real question is, is there hope or are we doomed?

15 comments

[ 5.1 ms ] story [ 33.2 ms ] thread
coldtea
>Is there any hope of genuine competition in this space

No.

orangesite
There is a way but no one ever likes it when I bring it up:

Build a search index that excludes anything with ads on it.

Yes, that excludes a lot of content and no, I really don't care if it does. We'll always have Google for that.

JodieBenitez
Love the idea ! But how ? It seems to be a costly indexing.
orangesite
It may be cheaper thank you think.

Ask one of the many people who know today!

altdataseller
What tools? The library and old school books.
spking
Lately I’ve been using https://shepherd.com/ as a “tool” to find actual books to buy or borrow.

Internet tools to find, physical books to consume. At least the consumption part is ad-free.

bwb
btw, I am hoping to take Shepherd.com ad-free in 12 months :)
vouaobrasil
I use search engines less and less. I find that there are some great websites that I go to for technical information and I just use those.

You can also download docs like the Python reference and use that instead of searching for quick answers. Does it take more time? Yes. But, in my opinion, the extra "inconvenience" is worth it to support Google less. I would rather spend more time on a problem than support Google.

Library Genesis is another place to find stuff that doesn't use Google search or other types of search engines.

Finally, the use less mentality: if you're just searching for random trivia, maybe don't do it at all. The less information bombardment we have in our life, the better. Do an experiment: pretend that search engines don't exist for a week (or block them with /etc/hosts). You'd be surprised at how ingenious you can become when necessity is pushing you.

f0e4c2f7
GPT-4. I use this for learning things but also if there is a clickbait article with information I want to know, I paste in the entire article and ask my question. I used to just abandon clickbait and accept not finding out, now that never happens.

Ublock Origin. Assuming most already know about this one.

YouTube Premium. YouTube has some of the most amazing content on the internet currently. Pretty cheap to go adfree and you get unlimited music with it.

Sponsorblock Browser Extension. This skips sponsorship ads in YouTube videos. Like an adblocker for in video sponsorships.

Wikipedia Current Events. This page is one of my favorite less biased news sources.

I'd still like to do a lot more with this kind of stuff. Now with LLMs, I think in an ideal world I would like a browser on my phone and PC that runs all content through an LLM to automatically filter stupid bullshit. I think we're not that far from being able to build this today (maybe already).

[deleted]
(comment deleted)
brodouevencode
By not using du-jour terms like enshittified/enshittification/etc
hi-v-rocknroll
DDG and Google are both getting worse. I often want to search for a specific rare term and end up with a bunch of new, unrelated news articles or no results at all. Bing is also worthless. News sites, SEO spam, and low effort blogs are noise that I don't care about.
prevent6672
android: - on Android I use NewPipe for watching youtube without ads - try to use and buy apps that I use frequently that offer one-time purchase (e.g. Moon+ Reader Pro) - Firefox Focus with javascript disabled, it allows you to read websites like theatlantic.com, economist.com, etc.

chrome extensions: - ublock origin - disable javascript extension - disconnect - fasterweb - dark reader - web boost

for the rest: - self-hosted stack for piracy - curious if I can host meilisearch myself on a second-hand mini pc and have my own search engine - gpt4 for (so far at least) an ad-free experience in getting cooking recipes, technical documentation, general-known facts

onel
You can get to a pretty useable internet with just two extensions: uBlock - for ad blocking Consent-o-matic - for the gdpr popups

And in my case also Firefox