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Leaving Google has actively improved my life

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Re: Leaving Google has actively improved my life

#171

Post by ge96 »

Aurornis wrote: post #7

> 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…

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.

Re: Leaving Google has actively improved my life

#172

Post by pkulak »

ge96 wrote: post #171
Aurornis wrote: post #7

> 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…

Google's indexing is insanely quick too, I'll post a question on Reddit and I search Google and the reddit thread is there same day/minutes which is funny. False hope thinking someone else had my problem but it's me.

Doesn't Google have some agreement with Reddit? They are probably hooked into some kind of firehose stream and index everything in basically real time.

Re: Leaving Google has actively improved my life

#175

Post by _23sd »

monooso wrote: post #154
sethops1 wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Kagi sources their search results from Google.

This is false. Kagi had a post discussing this which made the front page of HN about a month ago [1]: > Google does not offer a public search API. The only available path is an ad-syndication bundle with no changes to result presentation - the model Startpage uses. Ad syndication is a non-starter for Kagi’s ad-free subscription model. [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46708678

For the purposes of the discussion at hand, yes some results do ultimately come from Google, just via third-party SERP providers rather than Kagi paying Google for access since Google doesn't offer their own public API (and neither does Bing anymore).

Re: Leaving Google has actively improved my life

#177

Post by rpdillon »

monooso wrote: post #154
sethops1 wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Kagi sources their search results from Google.

This is false. Kagi had a post discussing this which made the front page of HN about a month ago [1]: > Google does not offer a public search API. The only available path is an ad-syndication bundle with no changes to result presentation - the model Startpage uses. Ad syndication is a non-starter for Kagi’s ad-free subscription model. [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46708678

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

Re: Leaving Google has actively improved my life

#178

Post by martin-t »

WarmWash wrote: post #37

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 syst…

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.

Re: Leaving Google has actively improved my life

#179

Post by jerbearito »

al_borland wrote: post #144
Aurornis wrote: post #7

> 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 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…

+1 for Kagi. It's been my daily driver for 2.5 years and I have no complaints.

Re: Leaving Google has actively improved my life

#180

Post by drnick1 »

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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