> After giving them a fair shot, I think I can now honestly say that Brave and DuckDuckGo are better than Google for >90% of searches
I've had DuckDuckGo as my primary search engine for years and I couldn't disagree with this more. DuckDuckGo is fine for quickly getting to well known sites where I can't remember the URL, but it's objectively worse for trying to find everything from Reddit threads to Recipes. Their depth of indexing sites like Reddit feels dramatically worse lately and recipe search will predictably give me the same list of SEO spam blogs regardless of what I type in.
DuckDuckGo also seems to be doing the YouTube search thing that everyone hates where after the first several results it just starts throwing semi-related things at you instead.
I still add "!g" to my DuckDuckGo queries when I don't have time to mess around or if the first page of results is obvious SEO spam.
The other main point in this blog post isn't really about Google at all, it's just what happened when the author set up a a new e-mail address and didn't sign up for a lot of sites with it:
> Leaving Gmail also gave me the opportunity to start implementing better digital hygiene. I no longer give my primary email to fly-by-night sites, and I'm deliberate with what things I'm signing up for.
I thought there was going to be some substance to this post but it reads like someone congratulating themselves for a choice they made and then trying to backwards justify it.
I had a similar experience with DDG. I felt like I had to add “!g” to everything, which doesn’t actually move one away from Google, it just creates friction.
Kagi, however, has been a different experience for me. I haven’t felt the need to go to Google at all. If I can’t find it with Kagi, I’m confident I won’t find it with Google either. There have also been several times where I was on an outage call with a double dozen people all looking for answers to some issue. Everyone was coming up empty with Google, and I was able to find something that solved the issue pretty quickly with Kagi.
Kagi _does_ use Google results, but they also have their own index, as well as search filters to curate _your_ search result. Makes it easier to cut out the garbage.
I’ve also been using Kagi for the past ~2 years. At first I would always also search Google to see if I was missing out on better results, but after a couple of months I no longer bothered because Kagi did better 99% of the time. It’s worth the cost, I’d keep it over Netflix if I had to choose.
TLDR Kagi is what Google would have been if they had kept improving instead of transitioning to enshitifying ~10yrs ago.
Same experience with DuckDuckGo. I've probably been using it as my primary search engine for, well, I'm not absolutely sure, but I want to say it was sometime during the pandemic so that must be, what, 5 years?
Honestly, it's got to the point where 8 or 9 times out of 10 I switch to Google search because I'm unhappy with the results I'm getting... and really it's at the point where, why am I even still using it?
It's just not very good.
It reminds of something like AltaVista back in the day, or one of those other old skool search engines, with how poor its results are relative to evil old Google.
Do you find the results are better when you use the same query on Google? Because I’ve also exclusively used DuckDuckGo for the past 5 or so years, and every now and then I get frustrated by the results try Google.
But only once did Google actually give me what I was looking for. Every other time the Google results were the same SEO garbage I was getting with DDG.
Maybe I should try switching to Google for a full month to see if my search quality generally improves.
What I found was that when I first started using DDG, using !g to take me to Google would get good results. But over time, it stopped working. I'm not totally sure if it's because Google's profile on me timed out and it's not getting enough searches or because Google search quality has gone down. Now, several years into using DDG as primary, when I can't find it at DDG, I expect I won't find it at Google either... but they do give me different bad results.
Lol this is the same thing that's been repeated about DDG for over a decade. I had the same exact complaints and eventually switched back to Google since I was using !g bangs so often, and that was when I was in high school. Which is why, when I learned about Kagi I switched and never looked back. Even as a "casual" user I still find value because of the lack of obnoxious ads and control I have over boosting or blocking sites from my results completely.
Yeah, was going to ask - I had the same experience with DDG, but with Kagi, I’ve never once been tempted to switch back, even though I have to pay for Kagi.
Kagi has tons of results from Reddit and they're always high and relevant. I don't know if this means they're doing it even though they're "not allowed to" or what but they definitely get it somehow.
Kagi's search results (at least used to) include many Google search results mixed in with results from other sources. That used to be explained on Kagi's main webpage, but I don't see it there now. (And I don't know who pays whom for what in that type of arrangement.)
Kagi uses a third party API that scrapes Google results for their searches. Possibly SerpAPI? Either way, Google doesn't get paid because you can't pay for the kind of search access they want.
Kagi had a post discussing this which made the front page of HN about a month ago [1]:
> Google does not offer a public search API. The only available path is an ad-syndication bundle with no changes to result presentation - the model Startpage uses. Ad syndication is a non-starter for Kagi’s ad-free subscription model.
For the purposes of the discussion at hand, yes some results do ultimately come from Google, just via third-party SERP providers rather than Kagi paying Google for access since Google doesn't offer their own public API (and neither does Bing anymore).
> Because direct licensing isn’t available to us on compatible terms, we - like many others - use third-party API providers for SERP-style results (SERP meaning search engine results page). These providers serve major enterprises (according to their websites) including Nvidia, Adobe, Samsung, Stanford, DeepMind, Uber, and the United Nations.
> This is not our preferred solution. We plan to exit it as soon as direct, contractual access becomes available. There is no legitimate, paid path to comprehensive Google or Bing results for a company like Kagi. Our position is clear: open the search index, make it available on FRAND terms, and enable rapid innovation in the marketplace.
I see the same phenomenon on other smaller forums, too, though. DuckDuckGo always feels like it has a smaller database than Google, which isn't really a surprise.
I mostly use a web engine (DDG) to find web sites these days, not content. Then I use the site's search instead or just browse the navigation tree. Make everything simpler.
I much prefer to use scholar.google.com or npmjs.com for research. The URL is already in my history/bookmarks and the scoped query is more useful than the generic websearch.
Well, yes, DuckDuckGo is not Google. You have to accept that. Not just surface-level, but for real.
What made this easy for me is that Google is also no longer Google. Ever since it started basically ignoring my actual search query, I stopped using it. I used to be very good at using Google, too.
DuckDuckGo is quite bad at times, yes. But then, so is Google. If I need to find something I cannot put into search terms, LLMs are helpful. From my trial experience I would say Kagi is also a capable search machine, for some niches.
DuckDuckGo is fine for quickly getting to well known sites where I can't remember the URL, but it's objectively worse for trying to find everything from Reddit threads to Recipes.
Agree with this. DDG just seems to have less ‘in’ it.
I’ve been playing with old 8052 microcontrollers recently, and it’s not unusual for DDG to return zero results on slightly esoteric technical searches, when Google will have plenty of relevant results (and it’s not just that Google is less strict about search terms - often I’m searching specifically for keywords).
As pointed out in the sibling thread, this isn’t DDG’s fault. Reddit has an exclusive agreement with Google [1] to index Reddit content, and other web search sites are blocked.
Same experience here. DDG works fine for getting to that Wikipedia article with a non-obvious title, but any search where I'm less sure of what I'm looking for tends to fall flat on it's face, with zero sites of interest shown with any given search. Local (non-American, and even more so non-English) searches fail consistently.
I'd imagine you could fix some of this problem if you could (massively) prioritise results from certain sites. If Wikipedia, Reddit and Stack Exchange, not to mention the various forums I find during my travels, were consistently pushed to the top, my experience would be a lot better, since then I could at least know with some confidence that the sites I'd expect to get something from don't have what I need.
This would probably necessitate having an account to save those settings, although they do already have a 'block site' feature, which does come in handy. It also necessitate them actually having indexed Reddit and all the various forums for me to be confident that an empty search result really is the result whatever I'm looking for not actually being out there.
I really should try Kagi, to see if its as great as sliced bread. Since if Kagi does search as well as the Google of old, and I can adjust its searches to prioritise results from known good (to me) sites, then that probably is worth paying for; it's just a shame that it's necessary to begin with, since Google already did that for free back in the day.
> Since if Kagi does search as well as the Google of old, and I can adjust its searches to prioritise results from known good (to me) sites, then that probably is worth paying for
As I was saying in another thread Kagi is what Google would have been if they had kept improving instead of transitioning to enshitifying ~10yrs ago. If I had to pick I’d keep it over Netflix.
Google's indexing is insanely quick too, I'll post a question on Reddit and I search Google and the reddit thread is there same day/minutes which is funny. False hope thinking someone else had my problem but it's me.
Doesn't Google have some agreement with Reddit? They are probably hooked into some kind of firehose stream and index everything in basically real time.
Weird, I switched to DDG years ago, I used !g for a couple of years, but I don't really ever use Google anymore. I don't seem to struggle to find things, so I wonder what's up. Maybe I'm just training myself to be OK with something that isn't optimal. That said, Google seems pretty spammy these days (i.e. actual search results below the fold in many cases).
That is also my experience with DuckDuckGo but all search engines. They ALL suck including Google Search. I don't know why, but the results are simply crap.
> I thought there was going to be some substance to this post but it reads like someone congratulating themselves for a choice they made and then trying to backwards justify it.
I don't read that. Where do you see a backwards justification? Do you know the decision-making steps? I simply don't see how you can conclude this, unless you assume it. In which case the assumption may easily be totally incorrect.
> I don't read that. Where do you see a backwards justification?
Most of the improvements he cited in his life were either unrelated to Google or things that he could have turned off in Gmail.
He complains about Gmail sorting his e-mail, but that's a feature he turned on. He could have just turned it off.
He complains about his inbox being polluted from putting his e-mail address into everything, but his new account doesn't have anything signed up yet. That's not a Google problem, that's an e-mail address problem.
He says that he's getting in the habit of skipping search engines and going straight to IMDB or Wikipedia or Reddit, but again that has nothing to do with Google specifically.
Kagi is the ONLY search engine I know that currently doesn’t suck and I highly recommend it to anyone who will listen. I would cancel almost any other subscription before Kagi.
> That is also my experience with DuckDuckGo but all search engines. They ALL suck including Google Search. I don't know why, but the results are simply crap.
(obligatory disclaimer: I work for Google but not in Search, all opinions strictly my own, yadda yadda)
It's a scale problem. An (in my opinion) unsolveable one.
Google - let's say all search engine companies combined - employ N engineers working on search engines. They allocate those teams X dollars, and let's pretend that's all these companies do and their total income is Y dollars.
Around the world there are orders of magnitude more people - let's say 1000*N, I don't know if anyone has even tried to gather this data - trying to game the search results and get their thing to the top. Those people have a combined budget dramatically larger than X and (I suspect) significantly larger than Y. Oh, and the best of them are almost certainly sharing notes and tactics with each other.
Even if everyone working on a search engine is a 10X genius engineer, they're still at a multiple-orders-of-magnitude disadvantage.
There’s queries and there’s queries. Many queries are effectively undefined bookmarks. You know this exists but haven’t saved it but your know a few key words to get to it. “Rustdoc moka api”.
And then there’s the “I’m researching a subject queries”.
Google used to be useful for both. But for the later case it send to have gotten worse. Which is irrelevant because LLMs are so much better. So people will use LLMs for these usecases.
So Google search basically becomes a phonebook. And that’s easy to emulate. Their calculator is still my go to though
I also ditched Google years ago for DuckDuckGo, but its not without problems for sure. Often times still full of obviously fake sites in results, that I try to report them. Many times it just returns nothing where Google still manages to give results. And I still have to scroll through their ads when I am on a machine without an adblocker (like Firefox Focus/Klar on Android). But I still rather use them than Google, if I don't find something it is usually not the end of the world and I just move on. Recently, I switched all my browsers to their noai site, on some I still have the lite version, I think.
I have basically the same experience of trying DuckDuckGo, getting useless results if the search is outside the domain of the handful of sites I already know, and then trying Google. But I find Google usually also returns useless sites.
ChatGPT is the only general-purpose search engine that seems to have any chance of producing a link that is both new to me and useful. Of course, I try not to use it too much, people say it’s bad for the planet or whatever.
Exactly my experience too, to the point that I kinda ended up only using DDG for its bang features and never really do real searches with it... It's especially bad if I want local results for my country in my language.
I’ve been using DDG for close to ten years and only use !g about once a year or less. What are your typical queries? I mostly search CS-related (though less nowadays with LLM) or simple stuff.
I guess this where I have to remind everyone that DuckDuckGo is really just Bing under the hood. Feel free to run your own experiments with those engines sandboxed.
Ditto. Basically the only thing I !g for now are maps and other geo-specific queries like the names of local restaurants or stores. Google still outperforms Kagi on those, but for nearly everything else I prefer the Kagi ad-free, ai-summary-onlt-if-requested results.
Same! I tried to switch to DDG at first (5-6 years ago now), but all too often the results were poor and I had to use !g to search Google to get somewhere. Since I started using Kagi, I've never once had that issue.
100% agree. My default is also DuckDuckGo, but I know for a fact that if the search is anything other than finding the homepage of a company, I'm gonna struggle with duck. I still use it because I want to not use Google, but Google is 10000000% a superior product.
> I thought there was going to be some substance to this post but it reads like someone congratulating themselves for a choice they made and then trying to backwards justify it.
Welcome to 90% of HN blog post submissions :))
I switched to Proton mail 2 years ago. Now I'm in this weird limbo where I want to go back but I can't because Proton's email search is so bad that I often default to Gmail where I still keep forwarding a copy of all my emails just for searching them later on. And this is even with the setting to search through the contents of the mail being turned on.
You might think "well, that's no biggie, I can manage that" but no. I didn't realise how important searching your email was until I was at a bank and they kept asking me some documents from years ago that were only inside my email.
The proton client on the phones are particularly bad and unusably slow in such emergency situations. Now I can't switch back to Google workspace because I started using a lot of the email aliases provided by Proton and it's going to be a clusterfuck once I unsubscribe.
Agreed...mostly. I've been using DDG for many years on and off (shoot, since they first became a thing), and for about 3 years full time. About 15% of my searches end with me adding !g to the end to perform a Google search. Google gets things right another 5-10% of the time. For the oddest of searches, I have to tweak my search terms several times to even attempt to figure out the answer.
Search is hard.
Breaking up with Google is even harder, but definitely worth it. I still have a Gmail account that is used for spam/low effort email nonsense (I currently use hey.com for most email...a decision I am considering revisiting in the future since I've found a good way to host my own email with a provider that won't get auto rejected/blacklisted). That and the searches I mentioned above are my only use of Google Products at this point in time. Maps is gone. Photos is just a memory. I kicked Android out the door years ago. All my home integrations are via open source and/or Apple, and I'm finding ways to NOT have to rely on even Apple for that.
I never really used docs or other services. For storage I am currently using OneDrive and iCloud, however I am about to push all of the cloud storage stuff to Backblaze and Cloudflare.
While I almost never see ads, when I do see them, I notice that they are never targeted ads. Even some of the odd "coincidences" have gone away...say, verbally chatting with my spouse about how I am thinking about buying such and such a product...only to see an ad for it later on (and assuming it was a coincidence)...things like that have stopped.
I've also been avoiding Amazon as well, for the same reason.
Clearly YMMV but I have been very happy with DDG since switching over a couple of years ago. Maybe we are searching in different domains. From my experience, no ads and less ai slop, and fine search quality.
What if we had more specialized search engines? There should be a recipe aggregator that searches for recipes and nothing else, and prioritizes high value recipe sites.
Then we would need a search engine for search engines…
Also, how would a search engine for recipes work? How does THAT search engine find when a new recipe site is created? It would be to scrape the whole internet just to find all the recipe sites….
- it could work like the Kagi smallweb. people submit sites and you can’t submit your own until you submit (and have accepted) enough of others
- I’m also envisioning a parallel world where the big tech monopolies next existed. Maybe there could be crawler/indexer companies whose product was the stream of new content. Then you as a specialist search engine could consume the stream to build your own custom index and weights
I wouldn't say DDG is worse, I'd say it's equally as bad. Both Google and DDG are full of AI slop now. Often the entire first page is full of wrong generated content.
At least DDG lets you block results which Google does not.
It seems like every search devolves long enough to returning anything for fear of existential dread that the user will think you did something wrong wrong. Outlook ignores almost all context to just return partial matches
The image search is terrible on DDG. If I search for multiple keywords, the search only cares if an image matches just one word. Google ranks the results so that images that match all the keywords are presented at the top.
> it's objectively worse for trying to find everything from Reddit threads to Recipes
This is the whole point of using DDG for me. For at least the past 5 years now I don't want anything from reddit in my results because it's full of liars and bots. The content from there or quora is often worse than even the blogspam.
Yeah, the article is slop. Not even AI slop. More like guilty conscience slop.
I ran an experiment where I set DDG as my default on all surfaces. About 3 - 4 months in, I actually started hating searching, and a few weeks later most of my queries had the prefix !g
Gmail is hands down the best. I pay for Gemini, and Gemini outside gmail is much much better than Gemini inside gmail. I pay for ChatGPT, but for some reason, I trust Gemini with my email rather than ChatGPT.
The problem is that people want a "free internet" without ads, and without any form of data harvesting. But they also don't want to pay any money, because the internet, as we all know, "is free".
In 30 years, no one has figured this out. So I feel pretty confident in stating that it's either gonna be ads or payments. And if we switch to a payment model, then the internet becomes another system where the poor are naturally disadvantaged and the rich get unlimited benefit, so I don't think any of the complaining will go away anyway. Just a new set of problems.
Actually-free gets suppressed by free-with-ads. We don’t know how much the truly free hobbyist-volunteer ecosystem would pick up without competition from ad-supported options (often with deep pockets for advertising and promotion, plus monopolist positioning to cross-promote with other products in some cases). Ad-supported options suppress usership of truly free options, which suppresses interest in volunteering time and resources.
It also suppresses open protocols. Protocols stagnated as the Internet centralized and commercialized for a reason. Some of these things could just be protocols.
Not saying that would cover everything, but I am sure those two factors would “step in” to replace some aspects of the ad-supported Internet, if the ads went away. How much, I don’t know.
> So I feel pretty confident in stating that it's either gonna be ads or payments.
I'm assuming you mean exclusive disjunction here, but in reality it's something closer to a conjunction, if not occasionally an inclusive disjunction. So many subscription services also have ads and if they don't, they eventually do.
The problem isn't that people want things for free; hell, we all pay for access to the internet already. The problem is a shit-ton of monied interests want to squeeze every possible dollar from people always. So we're slammed with ads and our behavior is manipulated and tracked and monetized and sold.
This was not how things were on the internet or the web in mid 90s. It was not the ethos then, but it became the ethos when monied interests took over.
Someone who is willing to pay for a service is also an extremely desirable person to show advertisements to. You've just demonstrated you have disposable income.
I think this is why so many YouTubers do sponsored segments: it’s the only way that I, a YouTube premium subscriber, will see an ad. (YT Premium still lets you skip to the end of the segment.)
That will cover the physical infrastructure of your Internet provider. But there are a lot of websites and software on the internet that require either ads or payment to survive. Free usually means "surviving with somebody else's money aka investors"
Ads weren’t that much of a problem when they were contextual. I remember video game websites younger me used to visit having their background plastered with latest release by a AAA studio. This is contextual advertisement. It has no privacy concern.
The issue is that ads now are behavioural, privacy invasive and centralized. No matter what site you visit you’ll get unrelated, possibly scam, advertising that depends on a profile built by a large American corporation. It’s just not reasonable in this context to avoid using an ad blocker.
So yes, the problem is indeed Google (and Meta etc) who monopolized the advertising market. I would say the root cause is lack of antitrust enforcement.
> The problem is that people want a "free internet" without ads
Just run an ad blocker and be done with it. The business model of the website is not my problem; if websites cannot cover their costs without printing ads that I do not want to see, then they will disappear. We will be left with websites that are actually useful, for example businesses operating a website to sell things, or that are funded through donations (e.g. free software).
Critical services like email and search should be treated as a public utility. Those cost money as well, but are affordable to almost anyone, and social safety nets should be taking care of those who don’t.
But some of Apple or Spotify Premium's recent moves Re: advertising show that even those who _are paying_ end up getting the ad experience eventually.
The old "If you aren't paying for a product, you're the product." adage doesn't apply anymore when even if you're paying, you're _still_ being productized.
The real problem is increasing concentration of _everything_ into ever-fewer (viable) players.
Doctorow's book "Enshittification" goes into way more examples of this phenomenon (though I'm far less optimistic than he is about the ability to reverse this trend).
Amazon Prime is the same way. Thanks for paying, please watch ads for first two season of The Boys. Also look at this catalog of movies you can rent for an additional fee.
20-something years ago, when I paid for my internet connection, I also got an email address (or 5…) and some personal web space (5MB maybe?) and access to their NTP servers as part of that. No ads.
Of course if I left the ISP I would lose access to it, as I stopped paying for it. I’ve long since left the ISP, and they’ve dropped all these value adds.
Presumably because people wanted cheaper plans and jumped to other providers which did internet access and nothing else.
There are people willing to pay a reasonable amount for fair services. I pay for various Google and Apple services, including for email. Those that don’t, have ads based plans.
Wrong. Google is very much the problem. If Google had not been allowed to buy YouTube, for example, YouTube and Google would have had to compete with one another.
> The problem is that people want a "free internet" without ads, and without any form of data harvesting. But they also don't want to pay any money, because the internet, as we all know, "is free".
We have evidence against. Several video sites were taking payments back before YouTube became dominant (especially the Japanese ones, for example). YouTube squashed them all by being "free" not by being "better".
The options are ads, pay, or public funding. Public funding is obviously the best option in many cases. For example, non-profit basic internet services
I think the pay solution could potentially work. The biggest issue is the decentralized nature of the internet. If I could setup an account which gives me access to everything ad free, but deducts what the page would earn in advertisement (say something like $0.001 for a visit) and most of the internet which does a pay wall participated in this scheme, then I'd do it. I'd happily put in $10 to such an account and recharge it when I start finding the internet being locked away.
You'd want such a platform to be relatively open to allow anyone to participate, but you'd also have to be pretty aggressive at policing as bad actors would be all over the place trying to artificially drain an account. Maybe it's something that could be built into the browser? You could get a "X would like to charge you for a visit" which you could approve or deny and you could configure to always approve.
I think I get more than $10/month of value out of search engines, and I would rather give money to a company instead of them selling all my data and/or spamming me with a bunch of advertisements. If I am paying for something, then almost by definition the company has a means of making revenue that doesn't require ads.
I hate self-promotion but I wrote about this a bit ago [1], but the TL;DR is that I think people are actually more willing to pay for things if they actually like those things. Something Awful has fallen out of favor now, but for awhile people were happy enough to buy an account because Something Awful was fun to be on [2], and a one-time $10 fee wasn't enough to "exclude" anyone, but it did become a way to support the site in the process. I don't think this model was or is broken, I think SA fell out of fashion because Lowtax stopped caring after a certain point.
Kagi has been growing; I don't know if it's profitable yet, but it has been steadily growing an audience and regardless of your opinion on this specific service, I think this indicates that people will pay for things. At least some of us will.
The internet is not free. Somebody is paying for those ads. And this somebody is us, collectively. And you know what? We are paying more than if we would pay for these services directly, because advertising companies are taking a cut. And on top of that we are paying with our data.
This is about as useful of an argument as when people say taxpayer funded services aren't free.
Those who are wealthier pay more into the tax system, allow those who are less well off to gain access to things they normally wouldn't. This is a good thing.
Likewise, those who are wealthier are buying more products that are advertised, allowing those who are less well off to gain access to the internet for closer-to-free. This is also a good thing.
We can put limits on how advertising is done, give control over your data, etc etc. But the fundamentals stay the same.
So no: paying your way towards internet products won't save the average person money.
> Those who are wealthier pay more into the tax system, allow those who are less well off to gain access to things they normally wouldn't. This is a good thing.
And what if there was a company (let's call it Google) that was extracting huge sums of money out of this social security/welfare system? Would this make you think that perhaps something was wrong about it? And that the system could be more efficient without this company?
I worked on open source because I enjoyed the work and because it had control over the final result. Other people did it because of status it gave them in the community. There's plenty of people willing to work on something for "free" (no money) as long as they are compensated in other dimensions such as ownership, status, control or simply enjoyment.
UBI could help here too, since those people still need to eat. Or, society could admit how dependent it is on open source work and pay maintainers and contributors from taxes.
The issue is obviously that most people don't even know what open source is so it's not an interesting political debate topic.
> But they also don't want to pay any money, because the internet, as we all know, "is free".
I pay ~$150/month for internet itself. I pay close to $90/month in internet services and media. I have coworkers spending hundreds each month on multiple AI subscriptions just because they have a better product for their work than Google. If tiktok and reels cost money then people would be ripping copper wire out of street lights to pay for it.
There are so many locked platform that I struggle to understand the not paying part. Imagine a better Github Search (or ACM search for papers), I bet it would find users.
> And if we switch to a payment model, then the internet becomes another system where the poor are naturally disadvantaged and the rich get unlimited benefit
As opposed to the current system where everyone is disadvantaged and the rich get richer?
Every business transaction in history has had a producer and a consumer, where both parties are in direct contact. Advertisers, on the other hand, insert themselves in the middle, promising to help both sides, while actually being a leech without doing any of the work. It is a despicable industry based on psychological manipulation, responsible for countless deaths, the corruption of every form of media ever invented, and of democratic processes throughout the world.
Sane business models are possible on the internet. Some of them exist already. But it's too late now for any of them to gain traction when advertisers are the same corporations that control it, and they have convinced the world that their products are "free".
1: If given the choice between ads or payments, megacorps will always choose both. If the choice is between ads or payments or data harvesting, megacorps will always choose all three.
2: We pay for access to the internet. It's on the provider to decide whether or not that level of access is sufficient. If it is not, restrict access only to those who pay more, ala Netflix/Hulu etc.
If I choose to put a publicly open service up onto the internet, and people choose to use it, that shouldn't automatically entitle me to spy on them, shovel ads down their throats, track their every movement and human connection, and then charge them for the privilege.
If I found out there was a person I knew who was doing that, I would at least chew them out and exhort them to stop being a worthless piece of shit, if I didn't kick their slimy asses for doing it in the first place.
I'm ok with ads existing. I'm ok with paying for services that charge for their services. I am not and will never be okay with data harvesters, and if I ever meet one I'm going to tell them to their face that they are shit people working for a shit company doing shit things to innocent people and that they should be ashamed.
If I meet someone who puts ads into paid services, I will do the same.
In the meantime, I'm doing everything I can to cut those pieces of crap out of my internet life.
This being on the front page of hacker news is embarassing. Low substance post that is misleading if anything - I was hoping for a career reflection. Not a low-quality "pat on the back" post of no value
Your comment is of even less value than the article. The fact that you find this subject matter uninteresting, is also uninteresting. Clearly other people feel differently.
Kagi doesn't make any models in-house - they use closed-source frontier models and OSS ones hosted by third-party providers. The former are on par with their own vendors' chat interface implementations (capabilities like file upload and custom tool use excepted).
> Smart features: Turn on smart features in Gmail, Chat, and Meet - When you turn this setting on, you agree to let Gmail, Chat, and Meet use your content and activity in these products to provide smart features and personalize your experience.
My wife turned this off because she didn't want typing suggestions or even grammar correction. After disabling the feature, she was much happier.
I've been meaning to get off Gmail, and Proton Mail does seem like my favorite of the alternatives from a quick glance, but I'm also concerned about privacy focused services like Proton getting blocked or compromised in the US... This was a pretty good read
Also,
> I do my best to boycott bad things. And I fail pretty often. I still use Amazon on occasion and I can’t get off Spotify. I use Uber and DoorDash a lot more than I’d like. And I have too many Apple products/services.
OK, I can intuit why most of those are bad, but can somebody give me a good-faith interpretation on what's bad about Apple?
I'd assume it's the working conditions and material extraction processes in China, parts of Africa, and elsewhere, but isn't that true of every piece of consumer technology? The only better companies for consumer hardware that come to mind are Framework and Google for recycling parts and raw materials, but the whole point of the article is about de-googling and Framework's products are relatively niche and at a much lower price and performance / market category.
Apple is very anti-consumer, locking devices down, using planned obsolescence, fighting hard against movements for more open and fairer market practices and standards (e.g. switching to the standard USB-C port, allowing third-party app stores, exploiting developers releasing software on their platforms).
Or as I tell my Apple-philic tech friends: your devices are a single year of flat revenue away from user-hostile decisions.
At the end of the day, Apple exists to make money and keep shareholders happy.
If the business stops growing organically, do you really think they're going to benevolently use the massive control they have over their own platform?
"Apple" isn't privacy-focused. Their marketing strategy is currently privacy-focused and their economics currently permit them to be.
I can testify that Qwant, if nothing else, is a superior image search engine (basically does what GIS used to do 10-15 years ago) and it's better for just getting to a quick answer without your first 4 results being ad-driven.
Unfortunately, when needing to do deeper dives on things, Google is still more or less the best for results past the first page in my experience, though it's rare I need to dig that deep these days.
Just use Kagi. I have been for several years now. I have not regretted it one minute. I have not missed Google at all. Kagi is just so much better. And I like the business model.
It is better, I was a paying subscriber. Then I realised they pay money to Yandex and I feel and obligation to support Ukraine right now. When the war is over or Kagi drop Yandex support I will be a paying subscriber again.
I degoogled back when they announced AMP email, and am in broad agreement with the author here. The only things I’ve found it hard to replace are YouTube, Arts & Culture, Google Books, and Books ngrams. Everything else has great alternatives to move to 100%, and Books is just a backup alongside archive.org and Hathi.
Even if you just stop using one piece of Google you’ll find yourself in a better place.
Leaving Google was the best thing I did, some 10 years ago. It reduced my stress level dramatically. I had no idea about how stressed I was at G. The release, when leaving, was immense.
Never ever, will I return to big tech.
However, having said that, never ever, will I regret having joined. It was an amazing journey.
I’ll admit when it first came out I hated the Gemini summary. It hallucinated a lot. Back then it was useless.
But now I don’t mind it: it’s lightning fast (for an LLM capable of mid level reasoning), but more importantly unlimited and free. And it puts search results alongside the summary so I can ignore it if I like. These days I probably use it on around 90% of searches.
Not the OP, but I alternate between self-hosted instances of Outline (https://www.getoutline.com/) and Nextcloud (with Collabora) for this. Outline I actually like better than Google Docs for most things. Nextcloud is a little rough, but it has change tracking, which I need sometimes.
I’ve also seen a lot of people using Cryptpad recently, which I think wraps OnlyOffice.
This is very interesting and timely. I've been working on something to replace a lot of addictive or exploitive services we use today but there's some caveats. Will people pay? They pay for Kagi but will they generally pay for other things like news, maps, video, chat, weather, etc. The second question is what's stopping people from really quitting? I get the feeling it's sort of habits that we get stuck with. Even I still use Google. But the mention of brave and knowing brave has a generous free search tier for their api makes me think it's possible to replace Google search. But habits die hard. New habit formation may require an alternative approach hence so many buying into ChatGPT.
One issue I also find with this sort of thing. It's hard to have a longer discussion that leads to building good alternatives. A thread appears, we comment and then it disappears. There needs to be more public discourse that leads to tangible results... To real issues that get solved.
I stopped using google for search too, but saying that ducksuckgo or brave is better at search is not true in my ipinion. Sure, the ai summary sucks and you will gwt spobsored results at top, but google is pretty damn good at searching. No other search engine (besides paid kagi) gave me as good results
AI is an area where having decades of private data hosted and indexed by a third party is actually paying off with a direct return (vs just using it to surface ads). All moral qualms about FOSS and whatever else aside, asking a question in plain english and having an "AI assistant" digging through years' worth of photos, emails, events, chats, restaurant reservations and more and returning an incredibly detailed answer that no person ever could feels like the magic of tech being realized in front of our eyes.
Would I prefer this was all open technology instead? Yeah, of course. But it is abundantly clear that economic incentives don't allow open source to compete with the big players, and that's just how it is.
I spent the effort to de-google a several years back and switched to Proton. After years of being on Proton, I recently switched back to GMail.
It didn't really make my life any better. And at this point, I think I see more value in having AI be able to piece together information to serve me up useful information than trying to protect my privacy within email (I couldn't get off Google Photos, it's just too useful).
I highly recommend self-hosting a meta-search engine to get away from any single provider without losing the benefits of either. I have been using searx[0] happily for years.
I used to have a custom domain setup via Google apps. Google decided to update it to something else (they changed their name several times and I lost track of the name now). I switched to iCloud+ Mail when iCloud introduced their custom domain support a few years ago. I do have notification summaries on my iOS turned on, but that's just a guilty pleasure of mine. The summarization is so bad that it's funny. I literally have the summarization feature turned on to laugh at how bad it is every time I see a new summary. Anyway, I used to be a everything-Google guy. Now, I just spread my app usage across multiple services, which I think is a win for me in the long run instead of being locked in to an ecosystem.
I also got myself out of the most of the Apple products from the Apple ecosystem too. I'm a 1Password user because I didn't want to be part of Google or Apple ecosystems.
He lost me at paying for services. Sure, me in my 40s can afford to pay for a good 200$ worth of services, but when I was starting out in high school and college, I could not even fathom paying for anything. And that was the time I was doing real work in my life, not like now.
I don't know what this allergy to features are. You can disable the features. It is not hard. I remember when they used to force conversation feature down everyone's throats. Some oldies hated it, but when they got used to it they appreciated it. Now they have an off feature.
You had me until Proton. I bang this drum every so often when it comes up but I’ve had terrible experiences with Proton locking me out of email permanently without warning or explanation in a way that made not just the email address but the accounts linked to it completely unrecoverable.
Don’t play around with email. It’s not communication, it’s critical digital infrastructure - quite possibly your primary key on the internet. The consequences of getting locked out by a faceless provider for reasons you’ll never hear about are probably a lot bigger than you think.
Couldn't agree more. Kagi for search, Fastmail for e-mail, Apple Maps for navigation (though I rely on Google Maps for reviews). Once a realistic not-Office 365 alternative for docs and spreadsheets appears, I'm going to bail on Drive too.
I've used Fastmail for a year now and haven't missed Gmail for a second. It even natively supports iOS push notifications for Mail, something Google refuses to implement.
Same with Kagi. I love having control over my search results, and custom bangs is life.
To some extend it feels like Google just gave up on search. I don't really share the notion that Google is still better than e.g. DuckDuckGo or Ecosia. In my experience if Ecosia can't find something, neither can Google.
However, I've noticed that search seems to become less and less useful, like huge chucks of the net is just missing. A ton of pages also doesn't really make their content searchable, in the sense that videos and images aren't tagged in any meaningful why.
Mostly I feel the internet shrinking around me, the number of pages I go to becomes fewer and fewer. Brand new topics/content mostly comes from blogs recommended by friends and colleague.
I can highly recommend Brave Search to anyone who is looking for an alternative. I found it to be much better than DuckDuckGo. Feels like Kagi almost, but free.
> My inbox is so much cleaner now, and I patiently await the newsletters I’ve signed up for like a gleeful child waiting for the postman.
The author didn’t go into detail here - but has anyone got a good system to achieve this? Or Is it a specific feature within Proton? I’ve just got mainly the one email and I’ve wanted to change to a better way for ages.
I use gmail, and I've managed to get about halfway there.
Almost every newsletter I get, I'm happy to see, even if I won't have the time to read 95% of them. I get close to no spam (I'd maybe get 1 spam mail every 2-3 weeks).
Just unsubscribe from everything you don't want, use a separate account for services that generate a lot of receipts/notifications, and block as soon as you stop caring about a particular sender. It's doable, just be diligent and be willing to spend some time curating what's allowed to go in.
I used to use DuckDuckGo, until I realized I was using "!g" far too often.
Then I tried Kagi, and I find that works the majority of the time, including their AI. Someone else in the comments here said Kagi's AI models are bad, but I don't think they are for answering the fairly basic questions that I typically search. I'm not going to have Kagi's AI model refactor code or something though.
It's like a drug - getting off is not so easy for many people. I still use youtube and a chromium-based browser. I want to become google-free eventually.
I don't even use Google's regular search that often... but I'm addicted to Google Books, and nobody is offering to replace that. Google Scholar is also amazing. In those niche spaces, Google is a defacto monopoly.
I haven't kept up with Gmail because I've left it many years ago, but last I heard they give themselves the permission to parse your emails and serve you targeted ads based on contents of emails you receive.
If the thought of privacy doesn't turn you off, you must love the thought of unsolicited marketing emails getting amplified through ads that Google serves you.
I've been piholing everything. Duckduckgo can feel clunky at times and having more than one search engine is a blessing. Duckduckgo is for obscure direct searches where as Google for me is the popular enriched searches.
I tried DDG for a while but got frustrated because it wasn't giving me what I was actually looking for. Now I’m using Google with the Searchonymous add-on, which has helped me get much wider results, uninfluenced by my previous search history.
It is very easy to get rid of Google, at least for the kind of person on HN.
Search -> DuckDuckGo
Drive -> Own networked file server
Phone -> Flash Graphene on your Pixel
Browser -> Firefox
Email -> Host your own (this is the hardest)
Youtube -> uBlock Origin (for Firefox), logged out
The last one isn't really a replacement, but Google certainly isn't making any money. Now do the same with Apple and Microsoft by running Linux on your machines and you are close to 100% free of big tech.
Some of Google's products have really dropped in quality. In the past 5 or so years all the changes I've seen in Search, Youtube, and Gmail have been for the worse.
> I always thought I loved Gmail. Turns out I just had the habit of typing in “gmail.com” in my search bar. I honestly can’t tell you a single feature of Gmail that I miss.
> Leaving Gmail also gave me the opportunity to start implementing better digital hygiene. I no longer give my primary email to fly-by-night sites, and I'm deliberate with what things I'm signing up for.
I also do this, but with my own custom domain - still in gmail.
Gmail is fine, imo. I also don't let them algorithmically sort my email - I use filters & such.
> I do my best to boycott bad things. And I fail pretty often. I still use Amazon on occasion and I can’t get off Spotify. I use Uber and DoorDash a lot more than I’d like. And I have too many Apple products/services.
> Individual actions probably will not save the world, but big tech is bad
It's weird to see this without any context or justification or comparison to other industries. As if it's so self evidently true that the author never considered the reader might dismiss his wider point when coming across it with no explanation
It's a poorly written article, and the writer comes across as unpleasant to talk to. Saying "big tech is bad" with no extra context has to be one of the dumbest things I've seen on a post with this many upvotes.
Outside of a small handful that do go in-depth, these "switching off of Google" people just repeat the same thing over and over again, and expect everyone to instinctively agree with their views.
This has the classics like:
- "Google’s services are actively worse than the alternatives" (not actually listing which services they're talking about. Not showing specific features or design decisions which are worse than the alternative. Youtube is certainly not worse than the alternatives.)
- "I do my best to boycott bad things"
- "but big tech is bad"
- "The old adage of “if you’re not paying, you’re the product” is certainly true here." (do we need to hear this banality for the thousandth time?, also there's plenty of actually free services, like this site we're discussing this on.)
I'm in the process of de-googling. It will take time (changing third party contact emails - banks, etc is annoying) - I honestly wish there was the equivalent of "moving" where emails could be updated the same way.
DDG - I love the premise, but their search relies too heavily on Bing which - worked for msft, etc... - no idea why it sucks so much.
Claude/etc for search - artificial guardrails. "Hey give me an example of Charlie Kirk being a homophobe" - "I can't do that". Contrived example, but realistic result.
Google started out as a non-opinionated (outside of link weight) search engine that is now gemini and bs. But even search is not useful. DDG tries, but responses are sub-par.
Not a fan of Google but I always find Gmail criticisms so weird.
Like, what does this guy even mean about the algorithm sorting his inbox? Legit what the fuck is he talking about? Non junk mail goes to my inbox. Spam goes to spam. What am I missing?
And speaking of spam, I have a bunch of proton mail accounts and outlook accounts and iCloud mail accounts and Gmail’s spam filter is easily the best. Like, it’s not even close. Protonmail is nearly as bad as outlook at dealing with spam. It’s impossible to overstate how bad both of them are at filtering spam vs Gmail.
I legit feel like I’m either being actively gaslit or I’m genuinely missing something big here.
As for search alternatives, I’d love to use Kagi full time but the cost is just unreasonably high for now IMO.
Google had a feature in gmail for a long time that automatically sorts your email into categories like Promotions, Social, Updates, Forums, etc. It was automated and fairly effective imo. If you try to disable the 'smart' features they will then disable this categorization retroactively and dump thousands of emails in your inbox and then nag you about turning it back on.
> Like, what does this guy even mean about the algorithm sorting his inbox? Legit what the fuck is he talking about?
Gmail has a feature that can break your inbox into a priority section and an everything else section. You have to put in some work to flag and unflag messages based on what you think is important. It's not perfect but with some training it's helpful.
Some people turn it on and expect it to read their minds about everything or think they can ignore the everything else section.
You can just turn it back off. You don't have to leave Gmail.
> And speaking of spam, I have a bunch of proton mail accounts and outlook accounts and iCloud mail accounts and Gmail’s spam filter is easily the best.
Agree. This person's reduced spam experience was due to the new e-mail address and being disciplined about not signing up for a million things on it, not because Proton is better.
I used to hate the google AI summaries, but recently its like a switch flipped and im finding them actually useful.
Especially when my search query is looking up something basic from the docs (like say library function name or argument order), it really just answers what i want.
Of course a big part of the problem is that google is inundated with seo spam when it comes to programming topics .
Wait till you move over to something like Kagi. It's really like an elevated experience when it comes to search. At first it's just less ads and none of that Google BS, but then eventually you start to use their other features. You realize, search could have moved in this direction a long time ago if Google wasn't motivated by ads.
I have had proton as a paid customer for 8 years and it's been nothing but good. They keep adding features, it works, it's secure and I can have 15 emails that go to the sam inbox!
Proton VPN and drive was a nice addition, then they added a production suite and password manager honestly its 100% a great deal and they keep working hard to make more secured services.
I run a searXNG server so it searches multiple engines for me anonymously!
Pro tip: Gemini Flash is the new Google. Bypasses all the SEO and ad garbage.
Also I still haven't found anything that replaces Google for finding local, physical businesses.
And Gmail? I have it mainly to give to random businesses. I like Hey.com more but I don't want the utility company or some online service I barely care about cluttering it up.
Also there is no YouTube equivalent. They pay creators the most so creators are all on YouTube.
These types of articles always remind of conspiracy theorists. Being so excited to view something in a new way, to degradate something popular, to view themselves as unique individuals and in control again. That they are outside the mainstream and that is superior because they have the secret knowledge.
Also the "if something is free you are the product" is so obviously false if you think about it for a minute. A lot of people pay for Amazon Prime, yet they are still the product. Just because you had a company money does not mean they will won't maximize profit by monetizing your information. Not to mention Blender is free. Are they the product as well? It's just a saying with good mouth feel and nothing else. Definitely not something anyone should change their life around for.
> After giving them a fair shot, I think I can now honestly say that Brave and DuckDuckGo are better than Google for >90% of searches
I've had DuckDuckGo as my primary search engine for years and I couldn't disagree with this more. DuckDuckGo is fine for quickly getting to well known sites where I can't remember the URL, but it's objectively worse for trying to find everything from Reddit threads to Recipes. Their depth of indexing sites like Reddit feels dramatically worse lately and recipe search will predictably give me the same list of SEO spam blogs regardless of what I type in.
DuckDuckGo also seems to be doing the YouTube search thing that everyone hates where after the first several results it just starts throwing semi-related things at you instead.
I still add "!g" to my DuckDuckGo queries when I don't have time to mess around or if the first page of results is obvious SEO spam.
The other main point in this blog post isn't really about Google at all, it's just what happened when the author set up a a new e-mail address and didn't sign up for a lot of sites with it:
> Leaving Gmail also gave me the opportunity to start implementing better digital hygiene. I no longer give my primary email to fly-by-night sites, and I'm deliberate with what things I'm signing up for.
I thought there was going to be some substance to this post but it reads like someone congratulating themselves for a choice they made and then trying to backwards justify it.
I had a similar experience with DDG. I felt like I had to add “!g” to everything, which doesn’t actually move one away from Google, it just creates friction.
Kagi, however, has been a different experience for me. I haven’t felt the need to go to Google at all. If I can’t find it with Kagi, I’m confident I won’t find it with Google either. There have also been several times where I was on an outage call with a double dozen people all looking for answers to some issue. Everyone was coming up empty with Google, and I was able to find something that solved the issue pretty quickly with Kagi.
+1 for Kagi. It's been my daily driver for 2.5 years and I have no complaints.
Kagi + Perplexity have all but eliminated the need for Google search for me
I had a mostly bad experience with Kagi, but I have to say I miss the account-level domain blocking.
Isn't that because Kagi is just filtered Google results?
That’s what startpage does. Kagi has a lot of sources.
https://help.kagi.com/kagi/search-details/search-sources.htm...
Kagi _does_ use Google results, but they also have their own index, as well as search filters to curate _your_ search result. Makes it easier to cut out the garbage.
I’ve also been using Kagi for the past ~2 years. At first I would always also search Google to see if I was missing out on better results, but after a couple of months I no longer bothered because Kagi did better 99% of the time. It’s worth the cost, I’d keep it over Netflix if I had to choose.
TLDR Kagi is what Google would have been if they had kept improving instead of transitioning to enshitifying ~10yrs ago.
Same experience with DuckDuckGo. I've probably been using it as my primary search engine for, well, I'm not absolutely sure, but I want to say it was sometime during the pandemic so that must be, what, 5 years?
Honestly, it's got to the point where 8 or 9 times out of 10 I switch to Google search because I'm unhappy with the results I'm getting... and really it's at the point where, why am I even still using it?
It's just not very good.
It reminds of something like AltaVista back in the day, or one of those other old skool search engines, with how poor its results are relative to evil old Google.
Do you find the results are better when you use the same query on Google? Because I’ve also exclusively used DuckDuckGo for the past 5 or so years, and every now and then I get frustrated by the results try Google.
But only once did Google actually give me what I was looking for. Every other time the Google results were the same SEO garbage I was getting with DDG.
Maybe I should try switching to Google for a full month to see if my search quality generally improves.
What I found was that when I first started using DDG, using !g to take me to Google would get good results. But over time, it stopped working. I'm not totally sure if it's because Google's profile on me timed out and it's not getting enough searches or because Google search quality has gone down. Now, several years into using DDG as primary, when I can't find it at DDG, I expect I won't find it at Google either... but they do give me different bad results.
I’ve been using DDG since they started. But still often use !g.
But I think the AI overviews in DDG and even Google have helped a lot.
AI has helped search tremendously. I only search for things that should have exact answers.
Lol this is the same thing that's been repeated about DDG for over a decade. I had the same exact complaints and eventually switched back to Google since I was using !g bangs so often, and that was when I was in high school. Which is why, when I learned about Kagi I switched and never looked back. Even as a "casual" user I still find value because of the lack of obnoxious ads and control I have over boosting or blocking sites from my results completely.
Yeah, was going to ask - I had the same experience with DDG, but with Kagi, I’ve never once been tempted to switch back, even though I have to pay for Kagi.
> from Reddit threads
Google is the only search engine allowed to index Reddit [1].
[1] https://www.lifewire.com/google-reddit-deal-8685766
Kagi has tons of results from Reddit and they're always high and relevant. I don't know if this means they're doing it even though they're "not allowed to" or what but they definitely get it somehow.
Kagi's search results (at least used to) include many Google search results mixed in with results from other sources. That used to be explained on Kagi's main webpage, but I don't see it there now. (And I don't know who pays whom for what in that type of arrangement.)
Kagi uses a third party API that scrapes Google results for their searches. Possibly SerpAPI? Either way, Google doesn't get paid because you can't pay for the kind of search access they want.
Kagi sources their search results from Google.
This is false.
Kagi had a post discussing this which made the front page of HN about a month ago [1]:
> Google does not offer a public search API. The only available path is an ad-syndication bundle with no changes to result presentation - the model Startpage uses. Ad syndication is a non-starter for Kagi’s ad-free subscription model.
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46708678
For the purposes of the discussion at hand, yes some results do ultimately come from Google, just via third-party SERP providers rather than Kagi paying Google for access since Google doesn't offer their own public API (and neither does Bing anymore).
Some very dodgy wording here.
> Because direct licensing isn’t available to us on compatible terms, we - like many others - use third-party API providers for SERP-style results (SERP meaning search engine results page). These providers serve major enterprises (according to their websites) including Nvidia, Adobe, Samsung, Stanford, DeepMind, Uber, and the United Nations.
> This is not our preferred solution. We plan to exit it as soon as direct, contractual access becomes available. There is no legitimate, paid path to comprehensive Google or Bing results for a company like Kagi. Our position is clear: open the search index, make it available on FRAND terms, and enable rapid innovation in the marketplace.
https://help.kagi.com/kagi/why-kagi/kagi-vs-google.html
Kagi is probably paying Google for those results?
I responded to another comment in this thread with the details, but in summary, no.
See this previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46708678
When that news first went out, the article[0] I read at the time said that Kagi does purchase some of its indexing from Google.
[0] https://www.404media.co/email/4650b997-7cc3-4578-834c-7e663e...
That sounds like some excellent fodder for an anti-trust suit if you ask me.
It does. Reddit has defined what truth is. Banning r/nonewnormal is merely one part of that
Thanks, that explains Reddit.
I see the same phenomenon on other smaller forums, too, though. DuckDuckGo always feels like it has a smaller database than Google, which isn't really a surprise.
I mostly use a web engine (DDG) to find web sites these days, not content. Then I use the site's search instead or just browse the navigation tree. Make everything simpler.
I much prefer to use scholar.google.com or npmjs.com for research. The URL is already in my history/bookmarks and the scoped query is more useful than the generic websearch.
I'm sure Baidu could safely index Reddit if they wanted to.
Holy shit have we come far.
Well, yes, DuckDuckGo is not Google. You have to accept that. Not just surface-level, but for real.
What made this easy for me is that Google is also no longer Google. Ever since it started basically ignoring my actual search query, I stopped using it. I used to be very good at using Google, too.
DuckDuckGo is quite bad at times, yes. But then, so is Google. If I need to find something I cannot put into search terms, LLMs are helpful. From my trial experience I would say Kagi is also a capable search machine, for some niches.
DuckDuckGo is fine for quickly getting to well known sites where I can't remember the URL, but it's objectively worse for trying to find everything from Reddit threads to Recipes.
Agree with this. DDG just seems to have less ‘in’ it.
I’ve been playing with old 8052 microcontrollers recently, and it’s not unusual for DDG to return zero results on slightly esoteric technical searches, when Google will have plenty of relevant results (and it’s not just that Google is less strict about search terms - often I’m searching specifically for keywords).
As pointed out in the sibling thread, this isn’t DDG’s fault. Reddit has an exclusive agreement with Google [1] to index Reddit content, and other web search sites are blocked.
[1] https://redditinc.com/news/reddit-and-google-expand-partners...
I felt this way until about a year or 2 ago, google has gotten so bad DDG is not worse for my uses
I don't dig in reddit frequently so that specific issue is not one for me
Same experience here. DDG works fine for getting to that Wikipedia article with a non-obvious title, but any search where I'm less sure of what I'm looking for tends to fall flat on it's face, with zero sites of interest shown with any given search. Local (non-American, and even more so non-English) searches fail consistently.
I'd imagine you could fix some of this problem if you could (massively) prioritise results from certain sites. If Wikipedia, Reddit and Stack Exchange, not to mention the various forums I find during my travels, were consistently pushed to the top, my experience would be a lot better, since then I could at least know with some confidence that the sites I'd expect to get something from don't have what I need.
This would probably necessitate having an account to save those settings, although they do already have a 'block site' feature, which does come in handy. It also necessitate them actually having indexed Reddit and all the various forums for me to be confident that an empty search result really is the result whatever I'm looking for not actually being out there.
I really should try Kagi, to see if its as great as sliced bread. Since if Kagi does search as well as the Google of old, and I can adjust its searches to prioritise results from known good (to me) sites, then that probably is worth paying for; it's just a shame that it's necessary to begin with, since Google already did that for free back in the day.
> Since if Kagi does search as well as the Google of old, and I can adjust its searches to prioritise results from known good (to me) sites, then that probably is worth paying for
As I was saying in another thread Kagi is what Google would have been if they had kept improving instead of transitioning to enshitifying ~10yrs ago. If I had to pick I’d keep it over Netflix.
Google's indexing is insanely quick too, I'll post a question on Reddit and I search Google and the reddit thread is there same day/minutes which is funny. False hope thinking someone else had my problem but it's me.
Doesn't Google have some agreement with Reddit? They are probably hooked into some kind of firehose stream and index everything in basically real time.
DDG (Bing I guess?) is pretty quick at that as well. 35 minutes later, your comment is already indexed.
Though I can't speak to their speed with Reddit, who is actively hostile to non-Google indexers.
Yes, DDG is just Bing wearing a duck hat.
Weird, I switched to DDG years ago, I used !g for a couple of years, but I don't really ever use Google anymore. I don't seem to struggle to find things, so I wonder what's up. Maybe I'm just training myself to be OK with something that isn't optimal. That said, Google seems pretty spammy these days (i.e. actual search results below the fold in many cases).
That is also my experience with DuckDuckGo but all search engines. They ALL suck including Google Search. I don't know why, but the results are simply crap.
> I thought there was going to be some substance to this post but it reads like someone congratulating themselves for a choice they made and then trying to backwards justify it.
I don't read that. Where do you see a backwards justification? Do you know the decision-making steps? I simply don't see how you can conclude this, unless you assume it. In which case the assumption may easily be totally incorrect.
> I don't read that. Where do you see a backwards justification?
Most of the improvements he cited in his life were either unrelated to Google or things that he could have turned off in Gmail.
He complains about Gmail sorting his e-mail, but that's a feature he turned on. He could have just turned it off.
He complains about his inbox being polluted from putting his e-mail address into everything, but his new account doesn't have anything signed up yet. That's not a Google problem, that's an e-mail address problem.
He says that he's getting in the habit of skipping search engines and going straight to IMDB or Wikipedia or Reddit, but again that has nothing to do with Google specifically.
> They ALL suck including Google Search.
Kagi is the ONLY search engine I know that currently doesn’t suck and I highly recommend it to anyone who will listen. I would cancel almost any other subscription before Kagi.
> That is also my experience with DuckDuckGo but all search engines. They ALL suck including Google Search. I don't know why, but the results are simply crap.
(obligatory disclaimer: I work for Google but not in Search, all opinions strictly my own, yadda yadda)
It's a scale problem. An (in my opinion) unsolveable one.
Google - let's say all search engine companies combined - employ N engineers working on search engines. They allocate those teams X dollars, and let's pretend that's all these companies do and their total income is Y dollars.
Around the world there are orders of magnitude more people - let's say 1000*N, I don't know if anyone has even tried to gather this data - trying to game the search results and get their thing to the top. Those people have a combined budget dramatically larger than X and (I suspect) significantly larger than Y. Oh, and the best of them are almost certainly sharing notes and tactics with each other.
Even if everyone working on a search engine is a 10X genius engineer, they're still at a multiple-orders-of-magnitude disadvantage.
There’s queries and there’s queries. Many queries are effectively undefined bookmarks. You know this exists but haven’t saved it but your know a few key words to get to it. “Rustdoc moka api”. And then there’s the “I’m researching a subject queries”. Google used to be useful for both. But for the later case it send to have gotten worse. Which is irrelevant because LLMs are so much better. So people will use LLMs for these usecases. So Google search basically becomes a phonebook. And that’s easy to emulate. Their calculator is still my go to though
I also ditched Google years ago for DuckDuckGo, but its not without problems for sure. Often times still full of obviously fake sites in results, that I try to report them. Many times it just returns nothing where Google still manages to give results. And I still have to scroll through their ads when I am on a machine without an adblocker (like Firefox Focus/Klar on Android). But I still rather use them than Google, if I don't find something it is usually not the end of the world and I just move on. Recently, I switched all my browsers to their noai site, on some I still have the lite version, I think.
I have basically the same experience of trying DuckDuckGo, getting useless results if the search is outside the domain of the handful of sites I already know, and then trying Google. But I find Google usually also returns useless sites.
ChatGPT is the only general-purpose search engine that seems to have any chance of producing a link that is both new to me and useful. Of course, I try not to use it too much, people say it’s bad for the planet or whatever.
Exactly my experience too, to the point that I kinda ended up only using DDG for its bang features and never really do real searches with it... It's especially bad if I want local results for my country in my language.
I’ve been using DDG for close to ten years and only use !g about once a year or less. What are your typical queries? I mostly search CS-related (though less nowadays with LLM) or simple stuff.
I guess this where I have to remind everyone that DuckDuckGo is really just Bing under the hood. Feel free to run your own experiments with those engines sandboxed.
Kagi has been an upgrade compared to DuckDuckGo for me.
It’s hard to describe but the results are just better, and it loads incredibly fast.
With DDG I always had this 20% wish to have Google back and frequently queries with !g bangs, not so much with Kagi.
Ditto. Basically the only thing I !g for now are maps and other geo-specific queries like the names of local restaurants or stores. Google still outperforms Kagi on those, but for nearly everything else I prefer the Kagi ad-free, ai-summary-onlt-if-requested results.
Same! I tried to switch to DDG at first (5-6 years ago now), but all too often the results were poor and I had to use !g to search Google to get somewhere. Since I started using Kagi, I've never once had that issue.
100% agree. My default is also DuckDuckGo, but I know for a fact that if the search is anything other than finding the homepage of a company, I'm gonna struggle with duck. I still use it because I want to not use Google, but Google is 10000000% a superior product.
Not indexing Reddit is a feature not a flaw.
This is exactly my experience. I've had it as my primary search engine for 6-7 years now but add !g to about 80% of queries.
Happy user of the DDG mobile browser though.
> I thought there was going to be some substance to this post but it reads like someone congratulating themselves for a choice they made and then trying to backwards justify it.
Welcome to 90% of HN blog post submissions :))
I switched to Proton mail 2 years ago. Now I'm in this weird limbo where I want to go back but I can't because Proton's email search is so bad that I often default to Gmail where I still keep forwarding a copy of all my emails just for searching them later on. And this is even with the setting to search through the contents of the mail being turned on.
You might think "well, that's no biggie, I can manage that" but no. I didn't realise how important searching your email was until I was at a bank and they kept asking me some documents from years ago that were only inside my email.
The proton client on the phones are particularly bad and unusably slow in such emergency situations. Now I can't switch back to Google workspace because I started using a lot of the email aliases provided by Proton and it's going to be a clusterfuck once I unsubscribe.
Live and learn.
Agreed...mostly. I've been using DDG for many years on and off (shoot, since they first became a thing), and for about 3 years full time. About 15% of my searches end with me adding !g to the end to perform a Google search. Google gets things right another 5-10% of the time. For the oddest of searches, I have to tweak my search terms several times to even attempt to figure out the answer.
Search is hard.
Breaking up with Google is even harder, but definitely worth it. I still have a Gmail account that is used for spam/low effort email nonsense (I currently use hey.com for most email...a decision I am considering revisiting in the future since I've found a good way to host my own email with a provider that won't get auto rejected/blacklisted). That and the searches I mentioned above are my only use of Google Products at this point in time. Maps is gone. Photos is just a memory. I kicked Android out the door years ago. All my home integrations are via open source and/or Apple, and I'm finding ways to NOT have to rely on even Apple for that.
I never really used docs or other services. For storage I am currently using OneDrive and iCloud, however I am about to push all of the cloud storage stuff to Backblaze and Cloudflare.
While I almost never see ads, when I do see them, I notice that they are never targeted ads. Even some of the odd "coincidences" have gone away...say, verbally chatting with my spouse about how I am thinking about buying such and such a product...only to see an ad for it later on (and assuming it was a coincidence)...things like that have stopped.
I've also been avoiding Amazon as well, for the same reason.
Just my 2 cents.
> Maps is gone
what do you use? Gmaps doubles as a shop opening times checker and a multi transport journey planner for me
Clearly YMMV but I have been very happy with DDG since switching over a couple of years ago. Maybe we are searching in different domains. From my experience, no ads and less ai slop, and fine search quality.
Give Google two more years and Google will be as bad as ddg/bing.
What if we had more specialized search engines? There should be a recipe aggregator that searches for recipes and nothing else, and prioritizes high value recipe sites.
Then we would need a search engine for search engines…
Also, how would a search engine for recipes work? How does THAT search engine find when a new recipe site is created? It would be to scrape the whole internet just to find all the recipe sites….
Random ideas:
- it could work like the Kagi smallweb. people submit sites and you can’t submit your own until you submit (and have accepted) enough of others
- I’m also envisioning a parallel world where the big tech monopolies next existed. Maybe there could be crawler/indexer companies whose product was the stream of new content. Then you as a specialist search engine could consume the stream to build your own custom index and weights
> a search engine for search engines…
Everything old is new again: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MetaCrawler
This exists and is called a meta search engine. For example like MetaGer, which was extremely famous 20 years ago in Germany. https://metager.org/
Reminds me a bit of how yahoo got started: categories, sub-categories, etc..
Of course, back then they had thousands of websites to categorize not billions.
Try using Yandex and Baidu next.
Non-US search engines are great for LOTS of censored content, including DMCA and pirated.
I dont think most here realizes just how censored our internet really is.
Those would however censor different things that the regimes they are hosted in dislike.
I wouldn't say DDG is worse, I'd say it's equally as bad. Both Google and DDG are full of AI slop now. Often the entire first page is full of wrong generated content.
At least DDG lets you block results which Google does not.
It seems like every search devolves long enough to returning anything for fear of existential dread that the user will think you did something wrong wrong. Outlook ignores almost all context to just return partial matches
The image search is terrible on DDG. If I search for multiple keywords, the search only cares if an image matches just one word. Google ranks the results so that images that match all the keywords are presented at the top.
> it's objectively worse for trying to find everything from Reddit threads to Recipes
This is the whole point of using DDG for me. For at least the past 5 years now I don't want anything from reddit in my results because it's full of liars and bots. The content from there or quora is often worse than even the blogspam.
Yeah, the article is slop. Not even AI slop. More like guilty conscience slop.
I ran an experiment where I set DDG as my default on all surfaces. About 3 - 4 months in, I actually started hating searching, and a few weeks later most of my queries had the prefix !g
Gmail is hands down the best. I pay for Gemini, and Gemini outside gmail is much much better than Gemini inside gmail. I pay for ChatGPT, but for some reason, I trust Gemini with my email rather than ChatGPT.
The problem isn't Google.
The problem is that people want a "free internet" without ads, and without any form of data harvesting. But they also don't want to pay any money, because the internet, as we all know, "is free".
In 30 years, no one has figured this out. So I feel pretty confident in stating that it's either gonna be ads or payments. And if we switch to a payment model, then the internet becomes another system where the poor are naturally disadvantaged and the rich get unlimited benefit, so I don't think any of the complaining will go away anyway. Just a new set of problems.
Actually-free gets suppressed by free-with-ads. We don’t know how much the truly free hobbyist-volunteer ecosystem would pick up without competition from ad-supported options (often with deep pockets for advertising and promotion, plus monopolist positioning to cross-promote with other products in some cases). Ad-supported options suppress usership of truly free options, which suppresses interest in volunteering time and resources.
It also suppresses open protocols. Protocols stagnated as the Internet centralized and commercialized for a reason. Some of these things could just be protocols.
Not saying that would cover everything, but I am sure those two factors would “step in” to replace some aspects of the ad-supported Internet, if the ads went away. How much, I don’t know.
> So I feel pretty confident in stating that it's either gonna be ads or payments.
I'm assuming you mean exclusive disjunction here, but in reality it's something closer to a conjunction, if not occasionally an inclusive disjunction. So many subscription services also have ads and if they don't, they eventually do.
The problem isn't that people want things for free; hell, we all pay for access to the internet already. The problem is a shit-ton of monied interests want to squeeze every possible dollar from people always. So we're slammed with ads and our behavior is manipulated and tracked and monetized and sold.
This was not how things were on the internet or the web in mid 90s. It was not the ethos then, but it became the ethos when monied interests took over.
Someone who is willing to pay for a service is also an extremely desirable person to show advertisements to. You've just demonstrated you have disposable income.
I think this is why so many YouTubers do sponsored segments: it’s the only way that I, a YouTube premium subscriber, will see an ad. (YT Premium still lets you skip to the end of the segment.)
> we all pay for access to the internet already
That will cover the physical infrastructure of your Internet provider. But there are a lot of websites and software on the internet that require either ads or payment to survive. Free usually means "surviving with somebody else's money aka investors"
Ads weren’t that much of a problem when they were contextual. I remember video game websites younger me used to visit having their background plastered with latest release by a AAA studio. This is contextual advertisement. It has no privacy concern.
The issue is that ads now are behavioural, privacy invasive and centralized. No matter what site you visit you’ll get unrelated, possibly scam, advertising that depends on a profile built by a large American corporation. It’s just not reasonable in this context to avoid using an ad blocker.
So yes, the problem is indeed Google (and Meta etc) who monopolized the advertising market. I would say the root cause is lack of antitrust enforcement.
> The problem is that people want a "free internet" without ads
Just run an ad blocker and be done with it. The business model of the website is not my problem; if websites cannot cover their costs without printing ads that I do not want to see, then they will disappear. We will be left with websites that are actually useful, for example businesses operating a website to sell things, or that are funded through donations (e.g. free software).
Critical services like email and search should be treated as a public utility. Those cost money as well, but are affordable to almost anyone, and social safety nets should be taking care of those who don’t.
Government email, sounds great. Sign me up.
I’m assuming a sane country where the right to privacy [0] holds.
[0] e.g.: https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/American_Convention_on_Human_...
Government physical mail is pretty great, you just need the right regulations.
Government physical mail has the benefit that substantial tampering is way harder to do at scale.
It's the same vein as criminals using cash vs Bitcoin; both can hide crime, but one is way easier to scale up.
The infra is what’s expensive, and that doesn’t need to be able to read the contents of your email.
But some of Apple or Spotify Premium's recent moves Re: advertising show that even those who _are paying_ end up getting the ad experience eventually.
The old "If you aren't paying for a product, you're the product." adage doesn't apply anymore when even if you're paying, you're _still_ being productized.
The real problem is increasing concentration of _everything_ into ever-fewer (viable) players.
Doctorow's book "Enshittification" goes into way more examples of this phenomenon (though I'm far less optimistic than he is about the ability to reverse this trend).
Amazon Prime is the same way. Thanks for paying, please watch ads for first two season of The Boys. Also look at this catalog of movies you can rent for an additional fee.
The "low-cost airline" style of business.
Yes, and that is precisely why I have no qualms about piracy, especially considering that buying isn't owing when it comes to these platforms.
I agree.
20-something years ago, when I paid for my internet connection, I also got an email address (or 5…) and some personal web space (5MB maybe?) and access to their NTP servers as part of that. No ads.
Of course if I left the ISP I would lose access to it, as I stopped paying for it. I’ve long since left the ISP, and they’ve dropped all these value adds.
Presumably because people wanted cheaper plans and jumped to other providers which did internet access and nothing else.
There are people willing to pay a reasonable amount for fair services. I pay for various Google and Apple services, including for email. Those that don’t, have ads based plans.
I miss the online storage. My ISP let you use it to host your own site. So I hosted and tinkered - bliss
> The problem isn't Google.
Wrong. Google is very much the problem. If Google had not been allowed to buy YouTube, for example, YouTube and Google would have had to compete with one another.
> The problem is that people want a "free internet" without ads, and without any form of data harvesting. But they also don't want to pay any money, because the internet, as we all know, "is free".
We have evidence against. Several video sites were taking payments back before YouTube became dominant (especially the Japanese ones, for example). YouTube squashed them all by being "free" not by being "better".
The options are ads, pay, or public funding. Public funding is obviously the best option in many cases. For example, non-profit basic internet services
I think the pay solution could potentially work. The biggest issue is the decentralized nature of the internet. If I could setup an account which gives me access to everything ad free, but deducts what the page would earn in advertisement (say something like $0.001 for a visit) and most of the internet which does a pay wall participated in this scheme, then I'd do it. I'd happily put in $10 to such an account and recharge it when I start finding the internet being locked away.
You'd want such a platform to be relatively open to allow anyone to participate, but you'd also have to be pretty aggressive at policing as bad actors would be all over the place trying to artificially drain an account. Maybe it's something that could be built into the browser? You could get a "X would like to charge you for a visit" which you could approve or deny and you could configure to always approve.
Transaction fees would be a beast.
I pay for Kagi primarily for this reason.
I think I get more than $10/month of value out of search engines, and I would rather give money to a company instead of them selling all my data and/or spamming me with a bunch of advertisements. If I am paying for something, then almost by definition the company has a means of making revenue that doesn't require ads.
I hate self-promotion but I wrote about this a bit ago [1], but the TL;DR is that I think people are actually more willing to pay for things if they actually like those things. Something Awful has fallen out of favor now, but for awhile people were happy enough to buy an account because Something Awful was fun to be on [2], and a one-time $10 fee wasn't enough to "exclude" anyone, but it did become a way to support the site in the process. I don't think this model was or is broken, I think SA fell out of fashion because Lowtax stopped caring after a certain point.
Kagi has been growing; I don't know if it's profitable yet, but it has been steadily growing an audience and regardless of your opinion on this specific service, I think this indicates that people will pay for things. At least some of us will.
[1] https://blog.tombert.com/Posts/Personal/2026/02-February/Peo...
[2] It actually still is! I bought a new account about a year ago and I had forgotten how funny a lot of the posters actually are. It's a blast.
The internet is not free. Somebody is paying for those ads. And this somebody is us, collectively. And you know what? We are paying more than if we would pay for these services directly, because advertising companies are taking a cut. And on top of that we are paying with our data.
This is about as useful of an argument as when people say taxpayer funded services aren't free.
Those who are wealthier pay more into the tax system, allow those who are less well off to gain access to things they normally wouldn't. This is a good thing.
Likewise, those who are wealthier are buying more products that are advertised, allowing those who are less well off to gain access to the internet for closer-to-free. This is also a good thing.
We can put limits on how advertising is done, give control over your data, etc etc. But the fundamentals stay the same.
So no: paying your way towards internet products won't save the average person money.
So the hellscape that is the ad-based internet economy is a good thing because it's an indirect form of wealth redistribution? That's a new one!
It's also a pricey form of wealth redistribution :(
> Those who are wealthier pay more into the tax system, allow those who are less well off to gain access to things they normally wouldn't. This is a good thing.
And what if there was a company (let's call it Google) that was extracting huge sums of money out of this social security/welfare system? Would this make you think that perhaps something was wrong about it? And that the system could be more efficient without this company?
Status and control are a currency too.
I worked on open source because I enjoyed the work and because it had control over the final result. Other people did it because of status it gave them in the community. There's plenty of people willing to work on something for "free" (no money) as long as they are compensated in other dimensions such as ownership, status, control or simply enjoyment.
UBI could help here too, since those people still need to eat. Or, society could admit how dependent it is on open source work and pay maintainers and contributors from taxes.
The issue is obviously that most people don't even know what open source is so it's not an interesting political debate topic.
> But they also don't want to pay any money, because the internet, as we all know, "is free".
I pay ~$150/month for internet itself. I pay close to $90/month in internet services and media. I have coworkers spending hundreds each month on multiple AI subscriptions just because they have a better product for their work than Google. If tiktok and reels cost money then people would be ripping copper wire out of street lights to pay for it.
There are so many locked platform that I struggle to understand the not paying part. Imagine a better Github Search (or ACM search for papers), I bet it would find users.
> And if we switch to a payment model, then the internet becomes another system where the poor are naturally disadvantaged and the rich get unlimited benefit
As opposed to the current system where everyone is disadvantaged and the rich get richer?
Every business transaction in history has had a producer and a consumer, where both parties are in direct contact. Advertisers, on the other hand, insert themselves in the middle, promising to help both sides, while actually being a leech without doing any of the work. It is a despicable industry based on psychological manipulation, responsible for countless deaths, the corruption of every form of media ever invented, and of democratic processes throughout the world.
Sane business models are possible on the internet. Some of them exist already. But it's too late now for any of them to gain traction when advertisers are the same corporations that control it, and they have convinced the world that their products are "free".
1: If given the choice between ads or payments, megacorps will always choose both. If the choice is between ads or payments or data harvesting, megacorps will always choose all three.
2: We pay for access to the internet. It's on the provider to decide whether or not that level of access is sufficient. If it is not, restrict access only to those who pay more, ala Netflix/Hulu etc.
If I choose to put a publicly open service up onto the internet, and people choose to use it, that shouldn't automatically entitle me to spy on them, shovel ads down their throats, track their every movement and human connection, and then charge them for the privilege.
If I found out there was a person I knew who was doing that, I would at least chew them out and exhort them to stop being a worthless piece of shit, if I didn't kick their slimy asses for doing it in the first place.
I'm ok with ads existing. I'm ok with paying for services that charge for their services. I am not and will never be okay with data harvesters, and if I ever meet one I'm going to tell them to their face that they are shit people working for a shit company doing shit things to innocent people and that they should be ashamed.
If I meet someone who puts ads into paid services, I will do the same.
In the meantime, I'm doing everything I can to cut those pieces of crap out of my internet life.
Government can subsidize the poor. Remember Obamaphones? Just expand that idea.
...or the post office
This being on the front page of hacker news is embarassing. Low substance post that is misleading if anything - I was hoping for a career reflection. Not a low-quality "pat on the back" post of no value
This is the daily "Google is bad" post. Best to ignore it and move on.
HK likes bashing big corps, but Google is the special soft spot for us. By 'soft' I mean easy to punch.
Your comment is of even less value than the article. The fact that you find this subject matter uninteresting, is also uninteresting. Clearly other people feel differently.
not uninteresting, poor quality. you're
> I don't knowingly use AI
> Sometimes I will use Kagi's "assistant" model whilst coding. Particularly to clean up existing code/stylesheets
The only moral abortion is my abortion.
The trick is to say ignorant. If you know nothing about AI of course you're not knowingly using AI.
Kagi's models are also incredibly bad. I can't imagine how this person believes they are getting fair value from them.
Kagi doesn't make any models in-house - they use closed-source frontier models and OSS ones hosted by third-party providers. The former are on par with their own vendors' chat interface implementations (capabilities like file upload and custom tool use excepted).
Kagi assistant includes all Anthropic, Google, OpenAI and Grok models as well as all the common open weights models.
The subscription pays for competent search. Anything else is gravy
If you don't like the AI feature, Google at least lets you turn it off: https://workspace.google.com/blog/product-announcements/upda...
Specifically in Gmail Settings:
> Smart features: Turn on smart features in Gmail, Chat, and Meet - When you turn this setting on, you agree to let Gmail, Chat, and Meet use your content and activity in these products to provide smart features and personalize your experience.
My wife turned this off because she didn't want typing suggestions or even grammar correction. After disabling the feature, she was much happier.
(googler, opinions are my own)
Does this work outside of workspaces? I didn't think public gmail accounts had the option
I've been meaning to get off Gmail, and Proton Mail does seem like my favorite of the alternatives from a quick glance, but I'm also concerned about privacy focused services like Proton getting blocked or compromised in the US... This was a pretty good read
Also,
> I do my best to boycott bad things. And I fail pretty often. I still use Amazon on occasion and I can’t get off Spotify. I use Uber and DoorDash a lot more than I’d like. And I have too many Apple products/services.
OK, I can intuit why most of those are bad, but can somebody give me a good-faith interpretation on what's bad about Apple?
I'd assume it's the working conditions and material extraction processes in China, parts of Africa, and elsewhere, but isn't that true of every piece of consumer technology? The only better companies for consumer hardware that come to mind are Framework and Google for recycling parts and raw materials, but the whole point of the article is about de-googling and Framework's products are relatively niche and at a much lower price and performance / market category.
Apple is very anti-consumer, locking devices down, using planned obsolescence, fighting hard against movements for more open and fairer market practices and standards (e.g. switching to the standard USB-C port, allowing third-party app stores, exploiting developers releasing software on their platforms).
Or as I tell my Apple-philic tech friends: your devices are a single year of flat revenue away from user-hostile decisions.
At the end of the day, Apple exists to make money and keep shareholders happy.
If the business stops growing organically, do you really think they're going to benevolently use the massive control they have over their own platform?
"Apple" isn't privacy-focused. Their marketing strategy is currently privacy-focused and their economics currently permit them to be.
I switched from Fastmail to iCloud Mail and I’m happy.
I switched from iCloud Mail to Fastmail and I’m happy.
"So no one is really choosing to use Google Search. It's being chosen for them."
Google tries to argue that based on so many people using it that it must be the best
But only a small percentage of people actively _choose_ to use it
Very few people know about "settings", "default settings" or how to change them
If they knew how, then would they change them
If the default was something other than Google, then would people chaange the settings to Google
Google pays billions becuse it knows most people will never become aware of settings or try to change them
Ecosia is not just Bing, we offer a bunch of indexes, including bing and Google.
We’re moving to our own index, which we are building in collaboration with Qwant, under the name European Search Perspective.
I do see the point of the article however.
I can testify that Qwant, if nothing else, is a superior image search engine (basically does what GIS used to do 10-15 years ago) and it's better for just getting to a quick answer without your first 4 results being ad-driven.
Unfortunately, when needing to do deeper dives on things, Google is still more or less the best for results past the first page in my experience, though it's rare I need to dig that deep these days.
Will I ever be able to pay for ecosia?
I love Qwant and I think it works better than DuckDuckGo.
I can't wait for the European index.
Just use Kagi. I have been for several years now. I have not regretted it one minute. I have not missed Google at all. Kagi is just so much better. And I like the business model.
It is better, I was a paying subscriber. Then I realised they pay money to Yandex and I feel and obligation to support Ukraine right now. When the war is over or Kagi drop Yandex support I will be a paying subscriber again.
Kagi's response: https://kagifeedback.org/d/5445-reconsider-yandex-integratio...
I degoogled back when they announced AMP email, and am in broad agreement with the author here. The only things I’ve found it hard to replace are YouTube, Arts & Culture, Google Books, and Books ngrams. Everything else has great alternatives to move to 100%, and Books is just a backup alongside archive.org and Hathi.
Even if you just stop using one piece of Google you’ll find yourself in a better place.
What do you look for in Arts & Culture? I find https://www.getdailyart.com/ pretty great if you are mostly just interested in painting.
What have you done for email?
For me, Fastmail has been incredible.
I concur on Fastmail. I only keep a "legacy" Gmail account for parental tech support.
Leaving Google was the best thing I did, some 10 years ago. It reduced my stress level dramatically. I had no idea about how stressed I was at G. The release, when leaving, was immense.
Never ever, will I return to big tech.
However, having said that, never ever, will I regret having joined. It was an amazing journey.
I’ll admit when it first came out I hated the Gemini summary. It hallucinated a lot. Back then it was useless.
But now I don’t mind it: it’s lightning fast (for an LLM capable of mid level reasoning), but more importantly unlimited and free. And it puts search results alongside the summary so I can ignore it if I like. These days I probably use it on around 90% of searches.
Gmail can be made vanilla. It sounds like switching emails and improving their email hygiene was the real improvement.
It will still always analyse your emails for advertising purposes.
Gmail is one of the only three categories of user data that Google specifically says they won't scan.
Which probably means they scan it extra hard.
I use fastmail and kagi and love both. I wonder what OP is using instead of google docs for live co-authoring... Word Online? lol
Not the OP, but I alternate between self-hosted instances of Outline (https://www.getoutline.com/) and Nextcloud (with Collabora) for this. Outline I actually like better than Google Docs for most things. Nextcloud is a little rough, but it has change tracking, which I need sometimes.
I’ve also seen a lot of people using Cryptpad recently, which I think wraps OnlyOffice.
> I wonder what OP is using instead of google docs for live co-authoring
Probably nothing? It’s not like that’s a need that everyone has.
> After giving them a fair shot, I think I can now honestly say that Brave and DuckDuckGo are better than Google for >90% of searches
I still scratch my head how DuckDuckGo has made people excited for Bing search results in a way Microsoft never has.
This is very interesting and timely. I've been working on something to replace a lot of addictive or exploitive services we use today but there's some caveats. Will people pay? They pay for Kagi but will they generally pay for other things like news, maps, video, chat, weather, etc. The second question is what's stopping people from really quitting? I get the feeling it's sort of habits that we get stuck with. Even I still use Google. But the mention of brave and knowing brave has a generous free search tier for their api makes me think it's possible to replace Google search. But habits die hard. New habit formation may require an alternative approach hence so many buying into ChatGPT.
One issue I also find with this sort of thing. It's hard to have a longer discussion that leads to building good alternatives. A thread appears, we comment and then it disappears. There needs to be more public discourse that leads to tangible results... To real issues that get solved.
I stopped using google for search too, but saying that ducksuckgo or brave is better at search is not true in my ipinion. Sure, the ai summary sucks and you will gwt spobsored results at top, but google is pretty damn good at searching. No other search engine (besides paid kagi) gave me as good results
Fastmail and Kagi are not noticeable expenses (to me) but are a noticeable increase in quality of life.
Might not have been true at one point but if you can spare the cost I highly recommend either.
Fastmail user for a decade. Does the job.
AI is an area where having decades of private data hosted and indexed by a third party is actually paying off with a direct return (vs just using it to surface ads). All moral qualms about FOSS and whatever else aside, asking a question in plain english and having an "AI assistant" digging through years' worth of photos, emails, events, chats, restaurant reservations and more and returning an incredibly detailed answer that no person ever could feels like the magic of tech being realized in front of our eyes.
Would I prefer this was all open technology instead? Yeah, of course. But it is abundantly clear that economic incentives don't allow open source to compete with the big players, and that's just how it is.
I spent the effort to de-google a several years back and switched to Proton. After years of being on Proton, I recently switched back to GMail.
It didn't really make my life any better. And at this point, I think I see more value in having AI be able to piece together information to serve me up useful information than trying to protect my privacy within email (I couldn't get off Google Photos, it's just too useful).
I highly recommend self-hosting a meta-search engine to get away from any single provider without losing the benefits of either. I have been using searx[0] happily for years.
[0]: https://github.com/searxng/searxng
This is not written by a former Google employee, it's written by a former Google user. Confusing title to see on hackernews.
It took me until the 3rd paragraph to figure this out
> I can't think of any other differentiating features in Gmail. Ads in my mail? Nostalgia?
Originally, the differentiating features were multi-gigabyte storage limits and the public's goodwill towards Google, Inc.
Gigabyte storage is now the norm, public goodwill for Alphabet, Inc. is minimal, and so there's nothing that really sets Gmail apart anymore.
I used to have a custom domain setup via Google apps. Google decided to update it to something else (they changed their name several times and I lost track of the name now). I switched to iCloud+ Mail when iCloud introduced their custom domain support a few years ago. I do have notification summaries on my iOS turned on, but that's just a guilty pleasure of mine. The summarization is so bad that it's funny. I literally have the summarization feature turned on to laugh at how bad it is every time I see a new summary. Anyway, I used to be a everything-Google guy. Now, I just spread my app usage across multiple services, which I think is a win for me in the long run instead of being locked in to an ecosystem.
I also got myself out of the most of the Apple products from the Apple ecosystem too. I'm a 1Password user because I didn't want to be part of Google or Apple ecosystems.
He lost me at paying for services. Sure, me in my 40s can afford to pay for a good 200$ worth of services, but when I was starting out in high school and college, I could not even fathom paying for anything. And that was the time I was doing real work in my life, not like now.
I don't know what this allergy to features are. You can disable the features. It is not hard. I remember when they used to force conversation feature down everyone's throats. Some oldies hated it, but when they got used to it they appreciated it. Now they have an off feature.
You had me until Proton. I bang this drum every so often when it comes up but I’ve had terrible experiences with Proton locking me out of email permanently without warning or explanation in a way that made not just the email address but the accounts linked to it completely unrecoverable.
Don’t play around with email. It’s not communication, it’s critical digital infrastructure - quite possibly your primary key on the internet. The consequences of getting locked out by a faceless provider for reasons you’ll never hear about are probably a lot bigger than you think.
Couldn't agree more. Kagi for search, Fastmail for e-mail, Apple Maps for navigation (though I rely on Google Maps for reviews). Once a realistic not-Office 365 alternative for docs and spreadsheets appears, I'm going to bail on Drive too.
I've used Fastmail for a year now and haven't missed Gmail for a second. It even natively supports iOS push notifications for Mail, something Google refuses to implement.
Same with Kagi. I love having control over my search results, and custom bangs is life.
To some extend it feels like Google just gave up on search. I don't really share the notion that Google is still better than e.g. DuckDuckGo or Ecosia. In my experience if Ecosia can't find something, neither can Google.
However, I've noticed that search seems to become less and less useful, like huge chucks of the net is just missing. A ton of pages also doesn't really make their content searchable, in the sense that videos and images aren't tagged in any meaningful why.
Mostly I feel the internet shrinking around me, the number of pages I go to becomes fewer and fewer. Brand new topics/content mostly comes from blogs recommended by friends and colleague.
I can highly recommend Brave Search to anyone who is looking for an alternative. I found it to be much better than DuckDuckGo. Feels like Kagi almost, but free.
> My inbox is so much cleaner now, and I patiently await the newsletters I’ve signed up for like a gleeful child waiting for the postman.
The author didn’t go into detail here - but has anyone got a good system to achieve this? Or Is it a specific feature within Proton? I’ve just got mainly the one email and I’ve wanted to change to a better way for ages.
I use gmail, and I've managed to get about halfway there.
Almost every newsletter I get, I'm happy to see, even if I won't have the time to read 95% of them. I get close to no spam (I'd maybe get 1 spam mail every 2-3 weeks).
Just unsubscribe from everything you don't want, use a separate account for services that generate a lot of receipts/notifications, and block as soon as you stop caring about a particular sender. It's doable, just be diligent and be willing to spend some time curating what's allowed to go in.
I used to use DuckDuckGo, until I realized I was using "!g" far too often.
Then I tried Kagi, and I find that works the majority of the time, including their AI. Someone else in the comments here said Kagi's AI models are bad, but I don't think they are for answering the fairly basic questions that I typically search. I'm not going to have Kagi's AI model refactor code or something though.
It's like a drug - getting off is not so easy for many people. I still use youtube and a chromium-based browser. I want to become google-free eventually.
I don't even use Google's regular search that often... but I'm addicted to Google Books, and nobody is offering to replace that. Google Scholar is also amazing. In those niche spaces, Google is a defacto monopoly.
Brave and DuckDuck have been my defaults for a long time.
There are two reasons I can think I use Google and Chrome for:
- Search: If I want to be sold something - say I’m in the market for an electric heater, I’ll search for it on Google to be tracked and advertised.
- Chrome: because there are some flows and UX that simply don’t work well in other browsers
I haven't kept up with Gmail because I've left it many years ago, but last I heard they give themselves the permission to parse your emails and serve you targeted ads based on contents of emails you receive.
If the thought of privacy doesn't turn you off, you must love the thought of unsolicited marketing emails getting amplified through ads that Google serves you.
> last I heard they give themselves the permission to parse your emails and serve you targeted ads based on contents of emails you receive.
Stopped doing it in 2017 (according to them). https://fox59.com/news/google-will-no-longer-read-your-email...
I've been piholing everything. Duckduckgo can feel clunky at times and having more than one search engine is a blessing. Duckduckgo is for obscure direct searches where as Google for me is the popular enriched searches.
I tried DDG for a while but got frustrated because it wasn't giving me what I was actually looking for. Now I’m using Google with the Searchonymous add-on, which has helped me get much wider results, uninfluenced by my previous search history.
Leaving googles is for GROWN UPS and independent Individs. The ones that need to see more, to get out of the egg.
I self host (feels damn great) but still check my old, antique, gmail once every 3-4 months. Makes me smile and say, I was one of them.
I hardly use Google anymore. I almost always use Claude. It can do the "higher level task" I often want to accomplish when I go to google.
Claude checks multiples websites, reads them all, and answers my question.
It is very easy to get rid of Google, at least for the kind of person on HN.
Search -> DuckDuckGo
Drive -> Own networked file server
Phone -> Flash Graphene on your Pixel
Browser -> Firefox
Email -> Host your own (this is the hardest)
Youtube -> uBlock Origin (for Firefox), logged out
The last one isn't really a replacement, but Google certainly isn't making any money. Now do the same with Apple and Microsoft by running Linux on your machines and you are close to 100% free of big tech.
Some of Google's products have really dropped in quality. In the past 5 or so years all the changes I've seen in Search, Youtube, and Gmail have been for the worse.
> I always thought I loved Gmail. Turns out I just had the habit of typing in “gmail.com” in my search bar. I honestly can’t tell you a single feature of Gmail that I miss.
> Leaving Gmail also gave me the opportunity to start implementing better digital hygiene. I no longer give my primary email to fly-by-night sites, and I'm deliberate with what things I'm signing up for.
I also do this, but with my own custom domain - still in gmail.
Gmail is fine, imo. I also don't let them algorithmically sort my email - I use filters & such.
I was thrown by
> I do my best to boycott bad things. And I fail pretty often. I still use Amazon on occasion and I can’t get off Spotify. I use Uber and DoorDash a lot more than I’d like. And I have too many Apple products/services.
> Individual actions probably will not save the world, but big tech is bad
It's weird to see this without any context or justification or comparison to other industries. As if it's so self evidently true that the author never considered the reader might dismiss his wider point when coming across it with no explanation
Yup.
It's a poorly written article, and the writer comes across as unpleasant to talk to. Saying "big tech is bad" with no extra context has to be one of the dumbest things I've seen on a post with this many upvotes.
Just because Kagi is always mentioned in these type of posts, I can see already there's a lot of posts.
https://kagifeedback.org/d/5445-reconsider-yandex-integratio...
> actively improved my life
Doesn't clarify beyond some trite remarks with no actual proof.
> actual proof
You don't think their own opinion of their own life isn't self-evident proof?
When it's poorly explained, no.
Outside of a small handful that do go in-depth, these "switching off of Google" people just repeat the same thing over and over again, and expect everyone to instinctively agree with their views.
This has the classics like: - "Google’s services are actively worse than the alternatives" (not actually listing which services they're talking about. Not showing specific features or design decisions which are worse than the alternative. Youtube is certainly not worse than the alternatives.) - "I do my best to boycott bad things" - "but big tech is bad" - "The old adage of “if you’re not paying, you’re the product” is certainly true here." (do we need to hear this banality for the thousandth time?, also there's plenty of actually free services, like this site we're discussing this on.)
I'm in the process of de-googling. It will take time (changing third party contact emails - banks, etc is annoying) - I honestly wish there was the equivalent of "moving" where emails could be updated the same way.
DDG - I love the premise, but their search relies too heavily on Bing which - worked for msft, etc... - no idea why it sucks so much.
Claude/etc for search - artificial guardrails. "Hey give me an example of Charlie Kirk being a homophobe" - "I can't do that". Contrived example, but realistic result.
Google started out as a non-opinionated (outside of link weight) search engine that is now gemini and bs. But even search is not useful. DDG tries, but responses are sub-par.
This is the way. Vote with your wallet!
Not a fan of Google but I always find Gmail criticisms so weird.
Like, what does this guy even mean about the algorithm sorting his inbox? Legit what the fuck is he talking about? Non junk mail goes to my inbox. Spam goes to spam. What am I missing?
And speaking of spam, I have a bunch of proton mail accounts and outlook accounts and iCloud mail accounts and Gmail’s spam filter is easily the best. Like, it’s not even close. Protonmail is nearly as bad as outlook at dealing with spam. It’s impossible to overstate how bad both of them are at filtering spam vs Gmail.
I legit feel like I’m either being actively gaslit or I’m genuinely missing something big here.
As for search alternatives, I’d love to use Kagi full time but the cost is just unreasonably high for now IMO.
Google had a feature in gmail for a long time that automatically sorts your email into categories like Promotions, Social, Updates, Forums, etc. It was automated and fairly effective imo. If you try to disable the 'smart' features they will then disable this categorization retroactively and dump thousands of emails in your inbox and then nag you about turning it back on.
I’ve clearly had it turned off for years(?) and I’ve never had it nag about it.
You may have turned this feature off (like I did) but by default Gmail sorts your emails into categories like Promotions, Social, Updates...
it's just someone who thinks degoogling himself has somehow elevated his entire existence to the sky
I'm personally not so attached to this idea of Google being evil so I don't really get this at all
> Like, what does this guy even mean about the algorithm sorting his inbox? Legit what the fuck is he talking about?
Gmail has a feature that can break your inbox into a priority section and an everything else section. You have to put in some work to flag and unflag messages based on what you think is important. It's not perfect but with some training it's helpful.
Some people turn it on and expect it to read their minds about everything or think they can ignore the everything else section.
You can just turn it back off. You don't have to leave Gmail.
> And speaking of spam, I have a bunch of proton mail accounts and outlook accounts and iCloud mail accounts and Gmail’s spam filter is easily the best.
Agree. This person's reduced spam experience was due to the new e-mail address and being disciplined about not signing up for a million things on it, not because Proton is better.
Google takes money to bypass their spam filters. They call those ads.
I used to hate the google AI summaries, but recently its like a switch flipped and im finding them actually useful.
Especially when my search query is looking up something basic from the docs (like say library function name or argument order), it really just answers what i want.
Of course a big part of the problem is that google is inundated with seo spam when it comes to programming topics .
Wait till you move over to something like Kagi. It's really like an elevated experience when it comes to search. At first it's just less ads and none of that Google BS, but then eventually you start to use their other features. You realize, search could have moved in this direction a long time ago if Google wasn't motivated by ads.
I have had proton as a paid customer for 8 years and it's been nothing but good. They keep adding features, it works, it's secure and I can have 15 emails that go to the sam inbox!
Proton VPN and drive was a nice addition, then they added a production suite and password manager honestly its 100% a great deal and they keep working hard to make more secured services.
I run a searXNG server so it searches multiple engines for me anonymously!
"Leaving Google" = "stopped using Google services" in this case (vs. "quit working at Google")
I assumed it was related to employment as well.
FWIW Google Gemini is currently like the Google of old - the search pretty much always finds what I want with no b.s..
I’m sure someday it will be aggressively monetized and enshitified but enjoying it while it lasts.
Startpage is good
Is there a legitimate reason why only Google can trawl Reddit or is it just more monopolistic bullshit?
"How to replace Amazon, Google, X, Meta, Apple – and more" - https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/feb/26/how-to-re...
"conscience," not "conscious."
Kagi, Fastmail, Immich, LibreOffice are all excellent alternatives to Google Garbage.
I saw someone on Safari having to actually watch YouTube ads.
It was so bizarre! I forgot those even exist.
Adblockers for Safari exist. Even on iOS.
They even work sometimes I have heard.
Wipr2 is amazing. Never see ads on mobile Safari. On desktop, Orion is great.
Pro tip: Gemini Flash is the new Google. Bypasses all the SEO and ad garbage.
Also I still haven't found anything that replaces Google for finding local, physical businesses.
And Gmail? I have it mainly to give to random businesses. I like Hey.com more but I don't want the utility company or some online service I barely care about cluttering it up.
Also there is no YouTube equivalent. They pay creators the most so creators are all on YouTube.
Some of this is... pretty tortured:
> Leaving Gmail also gave me the opportunity to start implementing better digital hygiene.
Which is to say, everyone else's spam filtering is awful, so you need to restrict access to your email so they don't fill your inbox.
This is literally the same logic that says we shouldn't vaccinate women against HPV because then they won't learn to practice abstinence.
These types of articles always remind of conspiracy theorists. Being so excited to view something in a new way, to degradate something popular, to view themselves as unique individuals and in control again. That they are outside the mainstream and that is superior because they have the secret knowledge.
Also the "if something is free you are the product" is so obviously false if you think about it for a minute. A lot of people pay for Amazon Prime, yet they are still the product. Just because you had a company money does not mean they will won't maximize profit by monetizing your information. Not to mention Blender is free. Are they the product as well? It's just a saying with good mouth feel and nothing else. Definitely not something anyone should change their life around for.
> My conscious is a tiny bit cleaner
I think he meant my conscience.
Used to think Google was awesome when they were hyper accurate, fast, and not enshittifying products.
Now I am convinced they are just a little bit better than Meta.