Yeah I follow all 3 people I know that use it. Hooray.

Why bother taking the survey then, or is it somehow mandatory?

I tried to use it, but honestly without an algorithm, it’s simply an empty page. And I don’t want to follow hashtags, since there’s usually too much semi-relevant garbage linked to those. So either I have a curated feed of only the people I follow, which gets boring, or I got nothing at all.

Then you buy a factory new identical one?

That looks useless on a catastrophic scale.

Frustrates me as well, but the reason is quite simple that people search for “$device cable”, and sellers need to list all of them so the search engine of choice lands the user there.

They should still list the specs though.

I’ve yet to meet a single person who likes and/or uses widgets. To me they are useless clutter that drain my battery.

I’m not aware of any alternatives, but then again I didn’t experience any problems so never bothered to look either.

I’ve used K9 for over a decade, until at some point work required me to have an exchange account. At that time I switched to Nine, since outlook is hot garbage.

My pleasure :-)

Triggered me to do a quick check:

Their privacy policy looks alright; and while I don’t like ads, they are gone in the minimum donation package of just 1 EUR, I think I did that just shortly after I started using them. https://www.lonelycatgames.com/docs/xplore/privacy - all the other parts seem privacy respecting, and the company is based in Slovakia, so has to respect GDPR by default. Website looks very dated and some of the other software has been abandoned a while ago, but they clearly state that and offer it as-is. Funny enough, I’ve also been using Disk Map for ages and never realized it’s from the same developer.

Because it hasn’t been update in half a year, or is there something else I’m not aware of?

X-Plore file manager, been using it for a solid decade. Can start an ftp server locally as well as connect to outside servers, really versatile.

Alternatively: Google pushes a totally innocent app with full access to all current and future photos amidst a digital arms-race of a fascist technocracy.

You bet I would.

Not tipping is not giving my money away for nothing.

Tipping culture creates unwarranted expectations and removes obligations from employers.

I’ve stopped tipping decades ago and won’t look back.

Private mode has all trackers disabled, so they might be able to trace the IP to my router, but not to a specific device (assuming you have random hardware ID activated). With kagi it’s traced to a specific account regardless.

And while I’m running a VPN by default, kagi will still be able to identify me, so that’s an absolute no-go.

I’m using kagi on and off, but haven’t reached the point where I’m confident that paid search is the answer. Especially since that ties results to accounts even in privat mode, so they can claim no log policies as much as they want, I don’t trust it.

DDG doesn’t deliver the same quality as google, bing is garbage for anything but porn, and Yandex works surprisingly well, but whether I want my data in Russia is another story. In private mode I use it occasionally.

Nope, you can’t disable it at all, this is the only workaround that currently gets rid of their crap.

In your browser settings under search configure a new custom search with the following string:

https://www.google.com/search?q=%25s&udm=14

That attaches the string udm=14 to every search in the browser toolbar, which omits all AI features.

The downside is that if you’re searching for translation or currency conversion it won’t show you those as google features on top of the search results either, but only as separate links.