[HN Gopher] Leaving Google has actively improved my life
___________________________________________________________________
Leaving Google has actively improved my life
Author : speckx
Score : 335 points
Date : 2026-02-27 19:08 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (pseudosingleton.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (pseudosingleton.com)
| robin_reala wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| What have you done for email?
| frakt0x90 wrote:
| For me, Fastmail has been incredible.
| calmbonsai wrote:
| I concur on Fastmail. I only keep a "legacy" Gmail account
| for parental tech support.
| kyrra wrote:
| 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)
| swiftcoder wrote:
| Does this work outside of workspaces? I didn't think public
| gmail accounts had the option
| dude250711 wrote:
| I saw someone on Safari having to actually watch YouTube ads.
|
| It was so bizarre! I forgot those even exist.
| wao0uuno wrote:
| Adblockers for Safari exist. Even on iOS.
| dude250711 wrote:
| They even work sometimes I have heard.
| baggachipz wrote:
| Wipr2 is amazing. Never see ads on mobile Safari. On
| desktop, Orion is great.
| pavel_lishin wrote:
| > _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.
| seaucre wrote:
| Gmail can be made vanilla. It sounds like switching emails and
| improving their email hygiene was the real improvement.
| direwolf20 wrote:
| It will still always analyse your emails for advertising
| purposes.
| jeffbee wrote:
| Gmail is one of the only three categories of user data that
| Google specifically says they won't scan.
| hn_acc1 wrote:
| Which probably means they scan it extra hard.
| Aurornis wrote:
| > 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.
| direwolf20 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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....
| Aldipower wrote:
| 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/
| bikelang wrote:
| 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
| hn_acc1 wrote:
| 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.
| nomel wrote:
| > from Reddit threads
|
| Google is the only search engine allowed to index Reddit [1].
|
| [1] https://www.lifewire.com/google-reddit-deal-8685766
| Aurornis wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| thayne wrote:
| That sounds like some excellent fodder for an anti-trust suit
| if you ask me.
| alex1138 wrote:
| It does. Reddit has defined what truth is. Banning
| r/nonewnormal is merely one part of that
| elliotec wrote:
| 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.
| kyleee wrote:
| Kagi is probably paying Google for those results?
| LeonenTheDK wrote:
| 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...
| monooso wrote:
| 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
| hoppyhoppy2 wrote:
| 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.)
| sethops1 wrote:
| Kagi sources their search results from Google.
| monooso wrote:
| 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
| resfirestar wrote:
| 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).
| rpdillon wrote:
| 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
| dheera wrote:
| I'm sure Baidu could safely index Reddit if they wanted to.
| bartread wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| 2muchcoffeeman wrote:
| 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.
| toast0 wrote:
| 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.
| mitchell209 wrote:
| 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.
| ericd wrote:
| 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.
| jrmg wrote:
| _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 wrote:
| 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.
| Arainach wrote:
| > 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.
| Aurornis wrote:
| > 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.
| css_apologist wrote:
| 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
| websap wrote:
| 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.
| phito wrote:
| 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.
| AvAn12 wrote:
| 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.
| BoredPositron wrote:
| Give Google two more years and Google will be as bad as
| ddg/bing.
| fhdkweig wrote:
| 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.
| dangus wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| 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.
| yakkomajuri wrote:
| 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.
| fuzzy2 wrote:
| 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.
| al_borland wrote:
| 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.
| jerbearito wrote:
| +1 for Kagi. It's been my daily driver for 2.5 years and I
| have no complaints.
| paffdragon wrote:
| 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.
| cyanydeez wrote:
| 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
| bee_rider wrote:
| 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.
| eek2121 wrote:
| 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.
| driverdan wrote:
| 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.
| mabedan wrote:
| 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.
| ivankelly wrote:
| 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
| rpdillon wrote:
| 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).
| ge96 wrote:
| 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.
| pkulak wrote:
| 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.
| avazhi wrote:
| 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.
| r_lee wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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.
| chroma_zone wrote:
| You may have turned this feature off (like I did) but by
| default Gmail sorts your emails into categories like
| Promotions, Social, Updates...
| jhhh wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| I've clearly had it turned off for years(?) and I've never
| had it nag about it.
| liquid_thyme wrote:
| Google takes money to bypass their spam filters. They call
| those ads.
| righthand wrote:
| Kagi, Fastmail, Immich, LibreOffice are all excellent
| alternatives to Google Garbage.
| its-kostya wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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...
| OrvalWintermute wrote:
| > 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.
| bitpush wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| Kagi's models are also _incredibly_ bad. I can 't imagine how
| this person believes they are getting fair value from them.
| dpe82 wrote:
| Kagi assistant includes all Anthropic, Google, OpenAI and
| Grok models as well as all the common open weights models.
| alexjplant wrote:
| 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).
| shevy-java wrote:
| 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.
| xnx wrote:
| "Leaving Google" = "stopped using Google services" in this case
| (vs. "quit working at Google")
| hn_acc1 wrote:
| I assumed it was related to employment as well.
| WarmWash wrote:
| 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.
| skydhash wrote:
| 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.
| bubblewand wrote:
| 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.
| danny_codes wrote:
| 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
| cogman10 wrote:
| 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.
| layer8 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Government email, sounds great. Sign me up.
| sollewitt wrote:
| Government physical mail is pretty great, you just need the
| right regulations.
| gameman144 wrote:
| 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.
| teaearlgraycold wrote:
| The infra is what's expensive, and that doesn't need to be
| able to read the contents of your email.
| aaaronic wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| BizarroLand wrote:
| 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.
| sharifhsn wrote:
| Government can subsidize the poor. Remember Obamaphones? Just
| expand that idea.
| dec0dedab0de wrote:
| ...or the post office
| imiric wrote:
| > 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".
| amelius wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| jonahx wrote:
| 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!
| amelius wrote:
| It's also a pricey form of wealth redistribution :(
| yardstick wrote:
| 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.
| dwayne_dibley wrote:
| I miss the online storage. My ISP let you use it to host your
| own site. So I hosted and tinkered - bliss
| simon666 wrote:
| > 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.
| Gooblebrai wrote:
| > 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"
| saalweachter wrote:
| 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.
| tombert wrote:
| 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.
| duped wrote:
| > 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.
| martin-t wrote:
| 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.
| mrweasel wrote:
| 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.
| xnx wrote:
| > 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.
| nvr219 wrote:
| 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
| latexr wrote:
| > 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.
| spacebear wrote:
| 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.
| realprimoh wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| This is the daily "Google is bad" post. Best to ignore it and
| move on.
| wavemode wrote:
| 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.
| raincole wrote:
| HK likes bashing big corps, but Google is the special soft spot
| for us. By 'soft' I mean easy to punch.
| JohnMakin wrote:
| "conscience," not "conscious."
| thallavajhula wrote:
| 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.
| johnbarron wrote:
| "How to replace Amazon, Google, X, Meta, Apple - and more" -
| https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/feb/26/how-to-re...
| paxys wrote:
| 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.
| ajross wrote:
| 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.
| pier25 wrote:
| 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.
| arcade79 wrote:
| 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.
| trilogic wrote:
| 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.
| dtj1123 wrote:
| Startpage is good
| asim wrote:
| 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.
| stephantul wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| I love Qwant and I think it works better than DuckDuckGo.
|
| I can't wait for the European index.
| NittLion78 wrote:
| 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.
| charonn0 wrote:
| > 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.
| prideout wrote:
| This is not written by a former Google employee, it's written by
| a former Google user. Confusing title to see on hackernews.
| jcgrillo wrote:
| It took me until the 3rd paragraph to figure this out
| aalukabi wrote:
| 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.
| dlev_pika wrote:
| 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
| jajuuka wrote:
| 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.
| alex1138 wrote:
| Is there a legitimate reason why only Google can trawl Reddit or
| is it just more monopolistic bullshit?
| karmelapple wrote:
| 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.
| elxr wrote:
| > actively improved my life
|
| Doesn't clarify beyond some trite remarks with no actual proof.
| pkilgore wrote:
| > actual proof
|
| You don't think their own opinion of their own life isn't self-
| evident proof?
| TeeWEE wrote:
| 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.
| dismalaf wrote:
| 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.
| alabhyajindal wrote:
| 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.
| hosteur wrote:
| 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.
| s_dev wrote:
| 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.
| andrewk17 wrote:
| 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).
| Sparkyte wrote:
| 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.
| bilekas wrote:
| 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...
| Willish42 wrote:
| 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.
| herrherrmann wrote:
| 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).
| ethbr1 wrote:
| 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.
| tetrisgm wrote:
| I switched from Fastmail to iCloud Mail and I'm happy.
| bawolff wrote:
| 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 .
| numbers wrote:
| 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.
| highwaylights wrote:
| 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.
| arthurjj wrote:
| 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
| nashashmi wrote:
| 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.
| nunez wrote:
| 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.
| barnacs wrote:
| 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
| Telemakhos wrote:
| 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.
| dandano wrote:
| > 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.
| QuiEgo wrote:
| 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.
| jmspring wrote:
| 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.
| pkilgore wrote:
| 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.
| rappatic wrote:
| This is the way. Vote with your wallet!
| drnick1 wrote:
| 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.
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