This a guaranteed to be a gigantic shit show that will become an unmitigated disaster, if they don’t end up abandoning it early on.

I can’t fucking wait.

Imagine these morons going on a tear and firing 20% of the bureaucrats at the Pentagon.

The majority will be fired based on false positives and office politics. Those rounds of firings will then cause so many of their former colleagues to start leaking information, in addition to the leakers that passed the polygraph.

I’m not a licensed math surgeon, but I think your math is wildly optimistic in favor of Microsoft due to how the subscription totals are actually distributed per price tier.

I don’t doubt that they did a lot of math to figure out an acceptable level of churn for this change, I just don’t think it’s nearly as generous and wide as you’re calculating.

There probably is a very real churn limit that they’re trying to avoid, and my hunch is that there exists a breaking point that could be hit with an aggressive and sustained boycott / cancellation spree, but again, I’m not a math surgeon so I could be wrong. That’s just my gut feeling.

Let me know when their business model no longer includes making their customers wait multiple years before shipping their orders.

Or when their model no longer includes the tactic of refusing to cancel orders after customers waited multiple years.

Ouroboros of slop.

Searxng still has to send out queries and receive results, but yes, it’s one of the better options, and I mentioned it in another comment.

Regardless, my beef with Google search isn’t specifically privacy related, it’s that in exchange for giving up some privacy, I get no useful results in return, just slop.

DDG isn’t perfect, but it substantially better than most of the available alternatives.

Externally hosted search engines have to make money, you’ll either exchange some privacy, or some cash, in exchange for results.

I mostly use DDG, but sometimes searx.

Startpage returns similarly dubious results as Google, but with the built-in proxy functionality and no clutter, so it’s also in the rotation.

I’m actually surprised people still heavily use Google search.

Not for some tech snob snark reason, but because it’s unusable.

I only ever go back to Google if I’m really desperate, and I can’t recall the last time it ever delivered me a result I considered useful.

It’s all SEO AI spam, and those are the web results Google returns only after all of its own AI and shopping bloat.

Completely useless.

Yeah, that shit slaps.

I appreciate your cynicism, but I think you’re vastly overestimating Kash Money’s capacity for subterfuge.

I never thought I’d say it, but Ted Cruz is right.

Won’t somebody please think of the pedophiles?