Well, if them spying on you and selling your data was not enough to make you switch to an alternative, then maybe/hopefully lack of search operators will be!
You can use the - (minus) sign,
which excludes pages that contain the word which has the - in front of them.
For example, currently I'm replaying GTA V single player, but when I search for content related to it, I'm often given articles about the online version.
To solve that I search:
GTA V <insert-topic-of-interest> -online
Which excludes all articles containing the word online.
I use SearXNG though,
but afaik this is implemented by most search engines.
Edit: I'm well aware that FireFox/Chrome support this natively, but with this I can share my exclusion rules between browsers and devices, albeit with manual import/exports.
My coping mechanism:
Block/filter out the news!
(Except for positive/uplifting news)
It does wonders for your mental health!
Most news sources are for-profit,
and they did some research,
apparently depressing news draws more attention / clicks, which results into more profit for them, but it isn't good for your mental health.
Other news sources just drive an hidden agenda, and aim to manipulate you to believe whatever the rich guy that owns the news site wants.
Also, try to have fun while humanity is sliding down in the background!
Whether you're depressed or acknowledge and then ignore the facts, will have zero impact on the final outcome which will apply to the whole world.
So might as well aim to be happy in the meantime :)
This is actually quite good news!
Hear me out though.
Encryption has been under attack by government instances for a while now.
They always aim to weaken / backdoor it,
so that they can spy on all their citizens.
China abused the backdoor implemented by the US government,
which sends a message across the world,
being: "Do not backdoor encryption to spy on your citizens, or other countries might abuse it"
Hopefully this will put a stop to governments attacking encryption, at least for a while,
since now they're reminded of the risks which it brings! :)
Windows is not getting better,
CoPilot, Recall, all more unwanted spyware..
UniGetUI is a good way to maintain software on Windows in a Linux fashion through package managers,
however that does not change that the underlying OS is pure spyware.
Yes, the script uses git svn under the hood,
however it simplifies the process of a fair amount of steps,
to just x1 easy CLI command with an in/output parameter.
It enhances and respects privacy,
is open source and self hostable,
and queries multiple configurable search engines (google, bing, brave, duckduckgo, ...)
However I prefer to slap an instance randomizer on top, so each of my queries goes through another public SearXNG instance, for more privacy, and mostly, to bypass rate-limiting after frequent queries.
uBlock Origin Filters to get rid of Copilot + AI feed bloat on Github
uBlock Origin => Open the Dashboard => My Filters => Add:
github.com##.copilotPreview__container github.com##.AppHeader-CopilotChat github.com##li.ActionListItem:has-text(Copilot) github.com##li.ActionList-sectionDivider:has-text(Copilot) github.com##li.TimelineItem:has-text(Copilot) github.com##div.pb-4:has-text(Copilot) github.com###copilot_free_global github.com###copilot-button-container github.com###blob-view-header-copilot-icon github.com##a[href*="/resources/articles/ai"] github.com##a[href*="/settings/copilot"] github.com##a[href*="/features/copilot"] github.blog##a[href*="/features/copilot"] github.blog##a[href*="/ai-and-ml"] github.blog##article.changelog-label-copilot github.blog##article.changelog-label-models github.com##article.js-feed-item-component:has-text(LLM) github.com##article.js-feed-item-component:has-text(OpenAI) github.com##article.js-feed-item-component:has-text(ChatGPT) github.com##article.js-feed-item-component:has-text(GPT) github.com##article.js-feed-item-component:has-text(Llama) github.com##article.js-feed-item-component:has-text(Gemini) github.com##article.js-feed-item-component:has-text(Grok) github.com##article.js-feed-item-component:has-text(DeepSeek)Also disable + block everything under: https://github.com/settings/copilot