> 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.
bartread 1 hours 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.
expensive_news 32 minutes ago [-]
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.
toast0 4 minutes ago [-]
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.
2muchcoffeeman 26 minutes ago [-]
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.
nomel 1 hours ago [-]
> from Reddit threads
Google is the only search engine allowed to index Reddit [1].
That sounds like some excellent fodder for an anti-trust suit if you ask me.
alex1138 2 minutes ago [-]
It does. Reddit has defined what truth is. Banning r/nonewnormal is merely one part of that
elliotec 31 minutes ago [-]
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.
hoppyhoppy2 3 minutes ago [-]
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.)
kyleee 24 minutes ago [-]
Kagi is probably paying Google for those results?
LeonenTheDK 4 minutes ago [-]
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.
I'm sure Baidu could safely index Reddit if they wanted to.
Aurornis 1 hours ago [-]
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.
skydhash 47 minutes ago [-]
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.
fuzzy2 17 minutes ago [-]
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.
jrmg 1 hours ago [-]
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).
shevy-java 1 hours ago [-]
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.
Aurornis 46 minutes ago [-]
> 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.
Arainach 53 minutes ago [-]
> 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.
phito 54 minutes ago [-]
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.
yakkomajuri 27 minutes ago [-]
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.
css_apologist 57 minutes ago [-]
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
AvAn12 48 minutes ago [-]
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.
dangus 44 minutes ago [-]
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.
dgacmu 6 minutes ago [-]
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.
fhdkweig 46 minutes ago [-]
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.
BoredPositron 47 minutes ago [-]
Give Google two more years and Google will be as bad as ddg/bing.
websap 55 minutes ago [-]
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.
direwolf20 1 hours ago [-]
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.
cortesoft 1 hours ago [-]
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….
bikelang 1 hours ago [-]
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
Aldipower 1 hours ago [-]
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/
hn_acc1 57 minutes ago [-]
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.
WarmWash 57 minutes ago [-]
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.
bubblewand 38 minutes ago [-]
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.
amelius 10 minutes ago [-]
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.
yacthing 3 minutes ago [-]
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 well 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.
layer8 36 minutes ago [-]
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.
bengale 18 minutes ago [-]
Government email, sounds great. Sign me up.
danny_codes 37 minutes ago [-]
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
sharifhsn 27 minutes ago [-]
Government can subsidize the poor. Remember Obamaphones? Just expand that idea.
dec0dedab0de 12 minutes ago [-]
...or the post office
aaaronic 35 minutes ago [-]
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).
yaky 21 minutes ago [-]
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.
skydhash 43 minutes ago [-]
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.
imiric 19 minutes ago [-]
> 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".
BizarroLand 30 minutes ago [-]
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.
realprimoh 51 minutes ago [-]
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
paxys 46 minutes ago [-]
This is the daily "Google is bad" post. Best to ignore it and move on.
bitpush 1 hours ago [-]
> 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.
jeffbee 1 hours ago [-]
Kagi's models are also incredibly bad. I can't imagine how this person believes they are getting fair value from them.
alexjplant 51 minutes ago [-]
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).
abtinf 32 minutes ago [-]
> Kagi's models are also incredibly bad.
Congrats on totally discrediting yourself.
dpe82 52 minutes ago [-]
Kagi assistant includes all Anthropic, Google, OpenAI and Grok models as well as all the common open weights models.
asim 32 minutes ago [-]
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.
> 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)
swiftcoder 10 minutes ago [-]
Does this work outside of workspaces? I didn't think public gmail accounts had the option
mrweasel 55 minutes ago [-]
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.
alabhyajindal 5 minutes ago [-]
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.
xnx 55 minutes ago [-]
> 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.
39 minutes ago [-]
paxys 43 minutes ago [-]
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.
nvr219 53 minutes ago [-]
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
spacebear 32 minutes ago [-]
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.
latexr 44 minutes ago [-]
> 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.
charonn0 29 minutes ago [-]
> 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.
karmelapple 16 minutes ago [-]
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.
TeeWEE 11 minutes ago [-]
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.
seaucre 1 hours ago [-]
Gmail can be made vanilla. It sounds like switching emails and improving their email hygiene was the real improvement.
direwolf20 1 hours ago [-]
It will still always analyse your emails for advertising purposes.
jeffbee 1 hours ago [-]
Gmail is one of the only three categories of user data that Google specifically says they won't scan.
hn_acc1 56 minutes ago [-]
Which probably means they scan it extra hard.
stephantul 31 minutes ago [-]
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.
reddalo 2 minutes ago [-]
I love Qwant and I think it works better than DuckDuckGo.
I can't wait for the European index.
arcade79 39 minutes ago [-]
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.
thallavajhula 47 minutes ago [-]
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.
dlev_pika 24 minutes ago [-]
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
prideout 27 minutes ago [-]
This is not written by a former Google employee, it's written by a former Google user. Confusing title to see on hackernews.
aalukabi 24 minutes ago [-]
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.
elxr 13 minutes ago [-]
> actively improved my life
Doesn't clarify beyond some trite remarks with no actual proof.
robin_reala 1 hours ago [-]
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.
memset 1 hours ago [-]
What have you done for email?
frakt0x90 1 hours ago [-]
For me, Fastmail has been incredible.
calmbonsai 57 minutes ago [-]
I concur on Fastmail. I only keep a "legacy" Gmail account for parental tech support.
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.
shevy-java 1 hours ago [-]
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.
pier25 41 minutes ago [-]
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.
its-kostya 1 hours ago [-]
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.
rhcom2 57 minutes ago [-]
> last I heard they give themselves the permission to parse your emails and serve you targeted ads based on contents of emails you receive.
> 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.
alex1138 19 minutes ago [-]
Is there a legitimate reason why only Google can trawl Reddit or is it just more monopolistic bullshit?
dtj1123 33 minutes ago [-]
Startpage is good
dismalaf 5 minutes ago [-]
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.
dude250711 1 hours ago [-]
I saw someone on Safari having to actually watch YouTube ads.
It was so bizarre! I forgot those even exist.
wao0uuno 1 hours ago [-]
Adblockers for Safari exist. Even on iOS.
dude250711 1 hours ago [-]
They even work sometimes I have heard.
baggachipz 41 minutes ago [-]
Wipr2 is amazing. Never see ads on mobile Safari. On desktop, Orion is great.
JohnMakin 48 minutes ago [-]
"conscience," not "conscious."
avazhi 1 hours ago [-]
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.
jhhh 37 minutes ago [-]
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.
avazhi 15 minutes ago [-]
I’ve clearly had it turned off for years(?) and I’ve never had it nag about it.
chroma_zone 1 hours ago [-]
You may have turned this feature off (like I did) but by default Gmail sorts your emails into categories like Promotions, Social, Updates...
r_lee 1 hours ago [-]
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
Aurornis 1 hours ago [-]
> 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.
1 hours ago [-]
xnx 57 minutes ago [-]
"Leaving Google" = "stopped using Google services" in this case (vs. "quit working at Google")
hn_acc1 57 minutes ago [-]
I assumed it was related to employment as well.
jajuuka 21 minutes ago [-]
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.
righthand 1 hours ago [-]
Kagi, Fastmail, Immich, LibreOffice are all excellent alternatives to Google Garbage.
ajross 42 minutes ago [-]
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.
khana 51 minutes ago [-]
[dead]
OrvalWintermute 1 hours ago [-]
> 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.
Rendered at 21:42:50 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Google is the only search engine allowed to index Reddit [1].
[1] https://www.lifewire.com/google-reddit-deal-8685766
[0] https://www.404media.co/email/4650b997-7cc3-4578-834c-7e663e...
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 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.
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.
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).
> 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.
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.
(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.
Happy user of the DDG mobile browser though.
I don't dig in reddit frequently so that specific issue is not one 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.
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.
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
Of course, back then they had thousands of websites to categorize not billions.
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.
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.
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 well 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.
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).
The "low-cost airline" style of business.
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".
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.
> Sometimes I will use Kagi's "assistant" model whilst coding. Particularly to clean up existing code/stylesheets
The only moral abortion is my abortion.
Congrats on totally discrediting yourself.
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.
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)
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 still scratch my head how DuckDuckGo has made people excited for Bing search results in a way Microsoft never has.
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’ve also seen a lot of people using Cryptpad recently, which I think wraps OnlyOffice.
Probably nothing? It’s not like that’s a need that everyone has.
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.
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.
Claude checks multiples websites, reads them all, and answers my question.
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't wait for the European index.
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 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.
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
Doesn't clarify beyond some trite remarks with no actual proof.
Even if you just stop using one piece of Google you’ll find yourself in a better place.
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.
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.
Stopped doing it in 2017 (according to them). https://fox59.com/news/google-will-no-longer-read-your-email...
> 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.
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.
It was so bizarre! I forgot those even exist.
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.
I'm personally not so attached to this idea of Google being evil so I don't really get this at all
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.
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.
> 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.
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.