It's not about security through obscurity but "if a measurement becomes a goal then it ceases to be a good measurement" - so keeping the measurements hidden in order to make it harder for them to become a goal is a decent way to go on about it.
How would you measure "without ads"? That would just be the same cat and mouse game that adblockers have to deal with for decades.
I'm not sure it's possible to find a good completely open source solution that's not either giving bad results by down rating good results for the wrong reasons or that's open to misuse by SEO.
That might work if it's a small project where noone cares about fixing the results but if something like that becomes mainstream it's going to happen
The problem is that it's just incredibly expensive to keep scanning and indexing the web over and over in a way that makes it possible to search within seconds.
And the problem with search engines is that you can't make the algorithm completely open source since that would make it too easy to manipulate the results with SEO which is exactly what's destroying google
I mean half of them are obvious merges of Pokémon with assets copied one for one in some cases. Really wouldn't be surprised at all of they used an AI for this
Also Merkel basically did everything to not change the status quo and her government even actively sabotaged renewable energies and made it almost impossible to invest money into future technology.
They were even PROUD to not make any debt when Germany was one of the few countries that would get paid by the banks for making debts.
Now the retirement fund is starting to eat up the available money more each year since the main voting group of the CDU are retired people and they didn't want to change anything about how that system works even though it's in dire need of reforms especially with the boomers now getting into retirement.
How are you supposed to self-host a web crawler and indexer without getting a giant server bill?
Having this service at least slightly centralised makes sense ressource-wise - but assuming crawling and indexing is free is just foolish. I'd choose something like kagi but I guess many people will rather cheap out and go for the next free service not realising that that company has to make money another way to make up for the high cost of running a search engine
How is harry potter in the center with all the terf shit Rowling pulled recently and how the world is clearly structured in strictly conservative hierarchies where everyone has their role and there are races only made for serving despite clearly intelligent and races with huge noses that are all working in finances and so on.
Trump is netanyahus best buddy and fueled the conflict by moving the embassy to Jerusalem - why is everyone framing it in a way as if republicans would not make matters 100 times worse for Palestine?
Or they still think they are entitled to a "free" search engine and don't see the amount of resources needed for that and that it's actually a service worth paying for, either through a subscription or through a donation-based service.
Switching one private company for another is definitely not the way to go...
The problem is that saying Israel has no right to exist and that the whole country should be Palestine is antisemitism though. And especially in the pro-gaza-crowd that line is often crossed.
Better yet: Bouncer allows you to remove permissions after a given set of time or immediately after closing the app. WhatsApp only gets my location for 3h after I shared it with someone on there - Google would never remove that permission since the app is in use regularly and it's no problem granting that permission anew next time I want to share something.
Also all my pictures are only accessible on demand by chat apps and not permanently
Excel wrongly assuming the year 1900 was a leap year for their timestamps is my favorite bug that will never be fixed because everyone has built workarounds for this already
For gecko the best alternative to old opera and Vivaldi I found so far is floorp