Not sure, how long Google is at it, it may just be new to me, but today the wife googled for something, and she couldn’t get there as the response was “can not connect”. “Fix the internet NOW!”, was my order.
Analysing the link on Google’s page, it displayed the link as https://www.example.com/, but it actually goes to https://googleadservices.com/?blabla, which is blocked by our DNS, therefore the error.
Displaying one link, but going to another is misleading, lying, tactics of phishers and scammers, IMO.
Is this new, or is it just me, who never clicks on the first result of a Google search?
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.
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.
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
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!
