Yeah, that sounds like she clicked an ad. Personally, I'd recommend switching to Startpage, Whoogle, or SearXNG; but I understand that might be easier said than done.
this post was submitted on 03 Feb 2025
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duckduckgo is good too. and qwant and ecosia
Yes, personally I use DDG more than Google, but we are in our 70ies, so it would be hard to convince the wife (who has been a dev 40 years ago) to change her habits. I am already looking into SearXNG, though.
Unrelated, but if she's ever interested in sharing, I'd be interested in hearing what it was like to be a female dev in the 80s! It's tough enough today.
I got my Grandma to switch to DDG after she saw an advert for it on TV.
My Gran, meanwhile, didn't need convincing. She uses Ecosia, because she likes the whole reforestation thing they're doing.
Actually it's not that hard and it's even probably possible to even host SearXNG on the same hardware, or kind of hardware, that you've hosted your Pi-Hole or DNS server on.
I actually self-host my own SearXNG and Invidious instances and customize the settings on both, and it's super useful. (Example: My SearXNG instance is aware of my Invidious instance on my network and will use it to load videos when Invidious is queried via the !iv bang. By doing this I'm not relying on public invidious instances so much; which oftentimes experience downtimes...because youtube hates those more, and frequently bans the public instances.)
This is all doable with a little bit of Docker or Podman action and a bit of editing the appropriate YAML files prior to composing the containers.
So you might be able to spin up a SearXNG instance locally on your network for her to use and configure it to use Google and any other search engines she might prefer. Then use something like LibRedirect (Firefox and Chrome plugin) to redirect her to the local SearXNG instance. (instead of using Google)
A video about setting up SearXNG: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UBLypfM9U-g
I wish I could use invidious without problems. I host my own locally and set it to restart the docker every hour like they mentioned in their guide, what makes me say "fuck it" is the fact that some videos play normally, then they stop for whatever reason (docker restarts OR NOT) and from then it loads the video, refreshes a few times and then the video is unplayable because of some "error decoding the video" or whatever it says (image below) and restarting docker or reloading the page does nothing and that video becomes unplayable
I host my own locally and set it to restart the docker every hour like they mentioned in their guide.
That's the part why I stay away from Invidious. Why would you need to restart every hour? How inconvenient :/.
Piped has other issues right now but fixes are underway :)
Invidious is a great project and the restart is not a biggie unless you're watching something. Can you host your own piped instance?
Yeah :) piped self-hosting !
However, we have to wait until they merge the poToken and visitor data issue. Something invidious has already implemented.
Still it's very strange you have to restart your container every hour :/ I'm sure I'm to stupid to understand the backend/code to make any sense out of it, but piped instances never had to restart anything.
Cool!
Ooh yeah, I know about that and NewPipe has this issue but I don't understand if is app only or web browser too but I'll see when I try it
Still it's very strange you have to restart your container every hour :/ I'm sure I'm to stupid to understand the backend/code to make any sense out of it, but piped instances never had to restart anything.
Because of various issues, Invidious must be restarted often, at least once a day, ideally every hour.
It is, no idea why
Yeah, I have my own SearXNG too, albeit hosted on a VPS. However, the difficulty I was talking about was in convincing other people to switch.
All google advertising does that. It's blocked in my network too.
Most advertising links are routed through click tracing sites so that they can add some tracking information about what advertising campaign brought the user there and what that user does while on the site among other tracking data. In the rare cases i want to see something from an email, I never click on links, I always copy the URL being displayed and paste it. You can get email clients that have settings to warn you about this or that will automatically use the displayed link and ignore the anchor link.
Yes, I tried to "wget -S" some of that stuff in the Linux console. Yikes!