this post was submitted on 20 Sep 2023
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Showerthoughts

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A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. The best ones are thoughts that many people can relate to and they find something funny or interesting in regular stuff.

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Pseudo-monopolies are great at extinguishing imagination like that, and tbh Google search (as I understand its basic setup) was only as good as it was thanks to timing and few really good competitors.

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Yea but it's not the case today. I get as good or better results out of duck duck go, and bing is good too now. The only reason to continue using Google is if you love ads.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

Yep. Some of the replies here are getting tied up in Google/search engine history, which doesn't matter as much with how the space is now and how Google's being better in the past wasn't necessarily entirely good given that it destroyed competition and/or has deterred much competition.

Ideally there would have been some check to address the rise of their pseudo-monopoly on search to ensure the service it provided remained decent so we wouldn't be having this discussion, but "free" markets go brrr.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

For me it's still hit or miss when you're searching for specific troubleshooting error codes or programming. Sometimes Bing or DDG will miss the point entirely and show me things with no relation for my search query at all.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Interesting. There was a time when I noticed that DDG didn't scan as often and so wouldn't have the very latest news, but now they are functionally identical to me. If I don't find something on one, I'm pretty surprised how I don't find it in more or less the same way on the others