The hardest part of leaving big platforms usually isn't technical, it's psychological
Leaving Google has actively improved my life
251–260 of 273 posts
Re: Leaving Google has actively improved my life
#252> 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 de…
A lot of "this service is terrible" turns out to be "I've accumulated ten years of bad habits around this service"
Re: Leaving Google has actively improved my life
#253The 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 syst…
I think that's mostly right, but Google still is part of the problem because it normalized the idea that the tradeoff should be invisible
Re: Leaving Google has actively improved my life
#254Earlier quoted context omitted.
Someone who is willing to pay for a service is also an extremely desirable person to show advertisements to. You've just demonstrated you have disposable income.
I think this is why so many YouTubers do sponsored segments: it’s the only way that I, a YouTube premium subscriber, will see an ad. (YT Premium still lets you skip to the end of the segment.)
Sponsored segments is no different to Netflix (and other producers) selling "product placement" in TV shows or films. If anything they are far more subtle and effective as the viewer isn't usually aware.
I remember once watching an episode (can't remember the show) where the dialogue included characters talking about how good their new car was. The B-rolls would show almost every angle of the car too.
Sure enough, according to the end credits, the episode had product placement from the car manufacturer.
This instance it was a little _too_ obvious but I have no doubt I've been exposed to hundreds of in-film/show adverts.
Re: Leaving Google has actively improved my life
#255Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think this is why so many YouTubers do sponsored segments: it’s the only way that I, a YouTube premium subscriber, will see an ad. (YT Premium still lets you skip to the end of the segment.)
Sponsored segments is no different to Netflix (and other producers) selling "product placement" in TV shows or films. If anything they are far more subtle and effective as the viewer isn't usually aware. I remember once watching an episode (can't remember the show) where the dialogue included characters talking about how good their new car was. The B-rolls would show almost every angle of the car too. Sure enough, ac…
“House” did this for some episodes during one season. It was, indeed, obvious and truly horrible. An ugly stain on an otherwise excellent show.
Re: Leaving Google has actively improved my life
#256Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
I’ve also been using Kagi for the past ~2 years. At first I would always also search Google to see if I was missing out on better results, but after a couple of months I no longer bothered because Kagi did better 99% of the time. It’s worth the cost, I’d keep it over Netflix if I had to choose. TLDR Kagi is what Google would have been if they had kept improving instead of transitioning to enshitifying ~10yrs ago.
It only took me a couple of weeks to go from "I can't ever imagine paying for search" to "I will never use free search again". Kagi is the best bang for buck of any subscription I pay for.
Re: Leaving Google has actively improved my life
#257Earlier quoted context omitted.
Try using Yandex and Baidu next. Non-US search engines are great for LOTS of censored content, including DMCA and pirated. I dont think most here realizes just how censored our internet really is.
Those would however censor different things that the regimes they are hosted in dislike.
Exactly.
Its like how theres no unbiased news. But you can news from multiple sources, and piece together the bias and see through to the underlying facts.
Same with search engines. You can search on multiple places in opposition to the local propaganda, and get to a better ground truth.
Re: Leaving Google has actively improved my life
#258Earlier quoted context omitted.
Someone who is willing to pay for a service is also an extremely desirable person to show advertisements to. You've just demonstrated you have disposable income.
I think this is why so many YouTubers do sponsored segments: it’s the only way that I, a YouTube premium subscriber, will see an ad. (YT Premium still lets you skip to the end of the segment.)
Install sponsorblock and those too go away.
Re: Leaving Google has actively improved my life
#259> 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 de…
I wish there was some way to A/B test search engines while blinded. I think DDG is worse than Google last I tried it, but I can never really know without a blind trial. There ought to be some proxy service that shows you results in the same UI from a random source and you can mark the results as good or bad.
This would probably be a good business idea for Kagi to implement, if they are confident they would win.
Re: Leaving Google has actively improved my life
#260The 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 syst…
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…
All you are saying here is that the sites with ads are so much better than the actually-free sites that people still use them despite having ads. Which is maybe not a signal that ads need to be banned.