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Leaving Google has actively improved my life

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191–200 of 273 posts

Re: Leaving Google has actively improved my life

#191

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.

Will I ever be able to pay for ecosia?

Re: Leaving Google has actively improved my life

#192
post #102

> actively improved my life Doesn't clarify beyond some trite remarks with no actual proof.

> actual proof You don't think their own opinion of their own life isn't self-evident proof?

When it's poorly explained, no.

Outside of a small handful that do go in-depth, these "switching off of Google" people just repeat the same thing over and over again, and expect everyone to instinctively agree with their views.

This has the classics like: - "Google’s services are actively worse than the alternatives" (not actually listing which services they're talking about. Not showing specific features or design decisions which are worse than the alternative. Youtube is certainly not worse than the alternatives.) - "I do my best to boycott bad things" - "but big tech is bad" - "The old adage of “if you’re not paying, you’re the product” is certainly true here." (do we need to hear this banality for the thousandth time?, also there's plenty of actually free services, like this site we're discussing this on.)

Re: Leaving Google has actively improved my life

#193
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 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.

Welcome to 90% of HN blog post submissions :))

I switched to Proton mail 2 years ago. Now I'm in this weird limbo where I want to go back but I can't because Proton's email search is so bad that I often default to Gmail where I still keep forwarding a copy of all my emails just for searching them later on. And this is even with the setting to search through the contents of the mail being turned on.

You might think "well, that's no biggie, I can manage that" but no. I didn't realise how important searching your email was until I was at a bank and they kept asking me some documents from years ago that were only inside my email.

The proton client on the phones are particularly bad and unusably slow in such emergency situations. Now I can't switch back to Google workspace because I started using a lot of the email aliases provided by Proton and it's going to be a clusterfuck once I unsubscribe.

Live and learn.

Re: Leaving Google has actively improved my life

#194
I have had proton as a paid customer for 8 years and it's been nothing but good. They keep adding features, it works, it's secure and I can have 15 emails that go to the sam inbox!

Proton VPN and drive was a nice addition, then they added a production suite and password manager honestly its 100% a great deal and they keep working hard to make more secured services.

I run a searXNG server so it searches multiple engines for me anonymously!

Re: Leaving Google has actively improved my life

#195
post #15
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…

> from Reddit threads Google is the only search engine allowed to index Reddit [1]. [1] https://www.lifewire.com/google-reddit-deal-8685766

Holy shit have we come far.

Re: Leaving Google has actively improved my life

#196
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…

Same experience here. DDG works fine for getting to that Wikipedia article with a non-obvious title, but any search where I'm less sure of what I'm looking for tends to fall flat on it's face, with zero sites of interest shown with any given search. Local (non-American, and even more so non-English) searches fail consistently.

I'd imagine you could fix some of this problem if you could (massively) prioritise results from certain sites. If Wikipedia, Reddit and Stack Exchange, not to mention the various forums I find during my travels, were consistently pushed to the top, my experience would be a lot better, since then I could at least know with some confidence that the sites I'd expect to get something from don't have what I need.

This would probably necessitate having an account to save those settings, although they do already have a 'block site' feature, which does come in handy. It also necessitate them actually having indexed Reddit and all the various forums for me to be confident that an empty search result really is the result whatever I'm looking for not actually being out there.

I really should try Kagi, to see if its as great as sliced bread. Since if Kagi does search as well as the Google of old, and I can adjust its searches to prioritise results from known good (to me) sites, then that probably is worth paying for; it's just a shame that it's necessary to begin with, since Google already did that for free back in the day.

Re: Leaving Google has actively improved my life

#197
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…

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.

Re: Leaving Google has actively improved my life

#198

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 se…

Yup.

It's a poorly written article, and the writer comes across as unpleasant to talk to. Saying "big tech is bad" with no extra context has to be one of the dumbest things I've seen on a post with this many upvotes.

Re: Leaving Google has actively improved my life

#199

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

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.

not uninteresting, poor quality. you're

Re: Leaving Google has actively improved my life

#200
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…

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.
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