Happened to my father who got routed through ads on his phone while booking flight tickets to some seedy website. He regretted it but thankfully got refunds initiated successfully because of issues with the flights themselves and a lot of back-and-forth. He resolved to only do critical monetary operations on his laptop where I've installed any and every possible adblocker.

The web is so hostile to the inform and the old. It takes one moment of weakness and there's someone ready and waiting with a scam.

It's already happened to an elderly family member who was trying to troubleshoot a printer problem. The top results were 1-800 hotlines run by scammers looking to get remote access to their machine to "fix" the issue. Google has hordes of these companies padding their pockets and won't lift a finger to remove them.

Most web-usage is happening on mobile, and ad-blockers are less common there. So, younger generation is pretty much living through the ads constantly.

It already happened to my friend, and they’re not so old. Some people typed WhatsApp to their search bar and was brought to a phishing site instead.

Oh wait it happened to me as well. Fortunately it was phishing a recruitment site and all they got is my CV.

Not just the older generation. I can’t get my adult children to care about ad blockers.

I agree about DDG, but I find Kagi worth paying for.

people say that but they often come back to Google ;)

I've just learnt to use ad blockers. the only time I disable it is when I look up the definition of something or the location of a place and the entire page goes blank because of some rules I've added to uBlock.

It's solid, I use it 95% of the time, that 5% Google usually still disappoints.

https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=midjourney&ia=web -> Hmm, midjourney the AI thingy is not even there for me! Just https://www.midjourney.com which is not really clear on what it is. Midjourney is at Midjourney.online, which is not even on the first page. So Argualbly Google is still better. What a world.

Btw, I search DDG from the Firefox bar, and that does not let me copy the URL anymore!!! Wtf. There is just the search term, like there is in the field below it!! Omg, now I have the same thing twice, and a useful thing has been lost.

Duck Duck Go is consistently worse than Google Search in, see https://www.tumblr.com/ddgvsggl

> You also should just stop using Google Search. DuckDuckGo is solid

The only people who would say that are people who would be better off just asking ChatGPT.

Any nuanced search that isnt some encyclopedic fact is terrible on DDG.

That's down to US Government policies. If you tried middle-manning any for-profit like that, you'd get a cease and desist letter really quickly. But USG doesn't seem to care. We can't reasonably expect Google to be a gatekeeper here.

> unless it gets built-into the browser

DuckDuckGo is built in to the browser! Google is still unfortunately the default, but it's just Settings -> Search -> Default Search Engine, and DuckDuckGo is already in the list.

> unless you're running Android Firefox

Yeah, obviously run Android Firefox.

Because the average person looking for an adblocker searches for "adblock". And they're supposed to know the difference between uBlock and UBO?

No, the previous admin's FBI did [0]. But then that alert page (on ic3.gov, Internet Crime Complaint Center) was taken down almost immediately after the 11/2024 election, before even the director was replaced. I genuinely expected this sort of basic alert should remain non-partisan.

[0]: https://web.archive.org/web/20241008235322/https://www.ic3.g...

They always were. Remember IE toolbars? Java and Acrobat bundled software?

You can check the source code.

That seems risky because of hallucinations. Wouldn't Google+Adblock be a better call?