• bquinlan@kbin.social
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    1 year ago

    Everything you do with Google Search is tied back to you as an individual, stored, and analyzed. They know what you searched for, how that fit into your search history, how long you looked at various parts of the results, which ones you clicked on, and what you did after that. That data is then used by Google to target you with very specific advertising. It is also sold to other entities that want to target you for marketing, demographics, and sometimes less wholesome things.

    DuckDuckGo does not retain any information about your searches.

    Google is definitely a better search engine, but 19 times out of 20 I can get what I want from DuckDuckGo just as easily. And on the rare occasions when I can’t, I resort to Google. That gives Google a lot less to work with and causes me very little inconvenience. Everything involves tradeoffs, but that is not a painful one.

    • Daak@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      I get what google does, but I find the trade-off the be really convenient.

      A funny creepy story I have is that I used to use a specific video to go to sleep, and apparently yt’s algorithm got so good at figuring out my sleep schedule that it would start recommending me that video when I started getting ready for bed.

      • bermuda@beehaw.org
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        1 year ago

        recently youtube shorts started recommending me “alpha male” andrew tate videos despite me constantly ticking the “don’t recommend this channel again” posts and i guess in response spotify is now recommending me Karl Marx audiobooks

        • MoonRocketeer@beehaw.org
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          1 year ago

          This is hilarious. I hope their code is literally something like

          if (user.pref == hate("andrew tate") 
          { 
              user.is = "communist";
          }
          

          I wouldn’t even be mad.

        • Daak@kbin.social
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          1 year ago

          If youtube figures out that you’re a single male, nothing will stop then from throwing Andrew Tate and other right wing garbage in your feed. Literally as soon as I got into a relationship I immediately stopped getting them. Now I get weird relationship based stuff. But it was so bad, I blocking channels but new channels kept getting in there.