I don’t think they went through with it.

I remember reading a related article reclaimthenet

This same Home Office served Apple with a secret order, a Technical Capability Notice, demanding a backdoor into end-to-end encrypted iCloud backups, first for every human on the planet and later, after Washington threw a tantrum, for British users alone. Secret being the operative word, since the law gagged Apple from so much as admitting the order existed.

Apple’s answer was to rip its strongest encryption out of the UK entirely rather than build the thing, sniffing that it has “never built a backdoor or master key to any of our products or services,” and the fight is still grinding through the courts. That is the track record of this government, one that asks one company, in the dark, to dismantle encryption for an entire nation is not a government you hand a camera-side scanner and trust to use it gently.

Shoutout to https://uruky.com/

It’s a paid private search engine.

https://theprivacydad.com/interview-with-the-engineer-of-uruky-a-private-search-engine/

Trying them out right now, so far so good!

Go to https://ecosia.org/ in a private browser window. It says “AI that answers to the planet”. Search something and the AI Overview on top is enabled by default.

For what it’s worth i’ve been using them for like a year and I clear my cookies often and never got this AI overview thingy you’re talking about. I actually have no clue how it even looks like.

I was thinking the same thing recently. It’s not the place it once was. But in general the internet has changed a lot. And it’s not just AI.

1. All sorts of paywalls especially in news sites.
2. Everything is getting centralized into a few sites and they’re usually eithe poorly indexable or not at all (Discord, facebook, X, Instagram and so on)
3. Fediverse (Lemmy, Mastodon) also struggles with search engines.
4. People trying to sell you shit, create a brand even more than before. Because of this all sorts of SEO optimization crap is done like writing BS articles nobody cares about.
5. AI slop.
6. Search engines have gotten better of getting rid of “illegal stuff”.
7. A lot of sites are just presentational bloat with no substance. Very cool looking landing pages with all sorts of cool animations but when you need to actually find the information that you need… the same UI usually gets in the way.

Oh and now we’re getting into age verification crap also yay

old.reddit.com on mobile is a bit rough but otherwise yeah

Your browser accepts cookies. Websites can write small files to your device that persist after you leave — files that identify you when you return, that follow you across sites, that remember what you looked at, what you almost bought, and how long you hesitated. We have not written one. Your browser would let this page write up to 10 GB to your device — a private room, ours alone, like the one given to every site you visit.

Hol up … 10 GB?

In 10 years you will say the same thing about today :)

It’s mostly novelty. But wears off eventually when you start noticing very obvious patterns emerge in the way it answers and quality degrades significantly as context size grows. It also will always talk to you in the way YOU tell it to which also becomes boring as time goes on.

It’s always funny to me how people on the news talk about AI partners and so on when you know if they have 2 brain-cells, next month they will drop this whole stupid idea. When you’re talking to it about your problems you’re just talking with yourself.