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Leaving Google has actively improved my life

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Re: Leaving Google has actively improved my life

#201

Post by AlotOfReading »

hoppyhoppy2 wrote: post #114
elliotec wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.)

Kagi uses a third party API that scrapes Google results for their searches. Possibly SerpAPI? Either way, Google doesn't get paid because you can't pay for the kind of search access they want.

Re: Leaving Google has actively improved my life

#202

Post by KolmogorovComp »

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’ve been using DDG for close to ten years and only use !g about once a year or less. What are your typical queries? I mostly search CS-related (though less nowadays with LLM) or simple stuff.

Re: Leaving Google has actively improved my life

#203

Post by freddydumont »

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…

Ads weren’t that much of a problem when they were contextual. I remember video game websites younger me used to visit having their background plastered with latest release by a AAA studio. This is contextual advertisement. It has no privacy concern.

The issue is that ads now are behavioural, privacy invasive and centralized. No matter what site you visit you’ll get unrelated, possibly scam, advertising that depends on a profile built by a large American corporation. It’s just not reasonable in this context to avoid using an ad blocker.

So yes, the problem is indeed Google (and Meta etc) who monopolized the advertising market. I would say the root cause is lack of antitrust enforcement.

Re: Leaving Google has actively improved my life

#204

Post by SpaceNoodled »

mortos wrote: post #190
ge96 wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

DDG (Bing I guess?) is pretty quick at that as well. 35 minutes later, your comment is already indexed. Though I can't speak to their speed with Reddit, who is actively hostile to non-Google indexers.

Yes, DDG is just Bing wearing a duck hat.

Re: Leaving Google has actively improved my life

#205

Post by SpaceNoodled »

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 guess this where I have to remind everyone that DuckDuckGo is really just Bing under the hood. Feel free to run your own experiments with those engines sandboxed.

Re: Leaving Google has actively improved my life

#206

Post by drnick1 »

aaaronic wrote: post #76
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…

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 "E…

Yes, and that is precisely why I have no qualms about piracy, especially considering that buying isn't owing when it comes to these platforms.

Re: Leaving Google has actively improved my life

#207

Post by nonfamous »

jrmg wrote: post #22
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…

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 re…

As pointed out in the sibling thread, this isn’t DDG’s fault. Reddit has an exclusive agreement with Google [1] to index Reddit content, and other web search sites are blocked.

[1] https://redditinc.com/news/reddit-and-google-expand-partners...

Re: Leaving Google has actively improved my life

#208

Post by aetherspawn »

I’ll admit when it first came out I hated the Gemini summary. It hallucinated a lot. Back then it was useless.

But now I don’t mind it: it’s lightning fast (for an LLM capable of mid level reasoning), but more importantly unlimited and free. And it puts search results alongside the summary so I can ignore it if I like. These days I probably use it on around 90% of searches.

Re: Leaving Google has actively improved my life

#209

Post by sublinear »

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…

> it's objectively worse for trying to find everything from Reddit threads to Recipes

This is the whole point of using DDG for me. For at least the past 5 years now I don't want anything from reddit in my results because it's full of liars and bots. The content from there or quora is often worse than even the blogspam.

Re: Leaving Google has actively improved my life

#210

Post by dannyfritz07 »

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…

Isn't that because Kagi is just filtered Google results?
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