I actually don’t use google (search or other services aside form YouTube) very often. As for “everyone”, I assume habit and momentum. People are used to it so it’s hard to change to something else. Many people also don’t know what alternatives there are.
If Google sucks then why is everyone still using it?
31–40 of 471 posts
Re: If Google sucks then why is everyone still using it?
#32Honestly I think people are completely underestimating the difficulty of a good search engine. Google was better ten years ago because search was an easier problem to solve back then. End of story. Nobody is coming along with a better search engine. There is too much spam, content gaming, and money to be made by hacking search. These posts should almost be blocked from hacker news. ITs a fantasy. Its like saying that…
Not sure if you read the post. They don't advocate for replacing Google. They want to add onto Google and other search engines.
Re: If Google sucks then why is everyone still using it?
#33I tell everyone to use Bing. It's decent, but better than using Google. Google invades our privacy, keeps users hostages for money. I wish Amazon has built a search engine so that Google's tyrannical regime on internet ends.
How, exactly, does Google keep users hostage for money?
Re: If Google sucks then why is everyone still using it?
#34Honestly I think people are completely underestimating the difficulty of a good search engine. Google was better ten years ago because search was an easier problem to solve back then. End of story. Nobody is coming along with a better search engine. There is too much spam, content gaming, and money to be made by hacking search. These posts should almost be blocked from hacker news. ITs a fantasy. Its like saying that…
Democracy would be best replaced with cashless society. Society based on everyone value of doing what they love doing most (aka hobbyist), and virtually everything else replaced by robots and technology we already have. This is what's coming eventually, but its not something that can be installed on the top of your "operating system"; you will have to format the whole hard-drive (civil war)
Re: If Google sucks then why is everyone still using it?
#35This article is really not that good, it suggests a bunch of obvious reasons why Google has a moat (Chrome, everyone's personal data) and misses some others (brand recognition). Then it goes and an explains reason why OP thinks Google sucks (to be fair I agree with him, but they're pretty subjective). Finally, OP claims that people are abandoning Google. Their single data point is that since 2009 there have been fewer searches for mortgages, because that couldn't possibly have been the result of an mortgage-driven recession in 2008.
Re: If Google sucks then why is everyone still using it?
#36> If Google sucks then why is everyone still using it? If prison food sucks why do prisoners eat it?
If Vladimir Putin sucks, why is everyone letting him be in charge over there? If Donald Trump sucks why did we ele-- If Barack Obama sucks-- The FBI sucks. Facebook sucks. C sucks. The WWW sucks. Fiat currency sucks.
Maybe the real truth is "the top N% of everything sucks?"
Re: If Google sucks then why is everyone still using it?
#37Recently managed to finally de-google my search.
SearXNG funneled through protonVPN
Re: If Google sucks then why is everyone still using it?
#38The moat is worse than we think. New search engines are not only hobbled by the bandwidth and processing power and storage required to spider the web, but by the websites who will preemptively disallow them because they're not Google. I can't imagine trying to build a new search engine when the landscape is intentionally (if justifiably) hostile to new search engines.
robots.txt is a joke tho.
Re: If Google sucks then why is everyone still using it?
#39I tried switching to DDG a few times over the past few years and always found that it got in my way, especially when working. So I usually got annoyed enough after a few weeks and switched back to google.
About two months ago, the opposite happened. Google gave me so much spam and advertising, the search got worse, now I ended up using DDG. It still sucks, for sure, but somehow it sucks less than google now.
Re: If Google sucks then why is everyone still using it?
#40Honestly I think people are completely underestimating the difficulty of a good search engine. Google was better ten years ago because search was an easier problem to solve back then. End of story. Nobody is coming along with a better search engine. There is too much spam, content gaming, and money to be made by hacking search. These posts should almost be blocked from hacker news. ITs a fantasy. Its like saying that…
No. Google is an actively hostile experience. Try it without adblock and get a taste of how most people get treated by Google. And for the search results, Kagi is already better for 90% of my queries.
It's much more difficult now to build a competitive search engine, but saying it's impossible and discussions should be banned is toxic. (And already basically proven wrong with existing competing search engines.)