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Leaving Google has actively improved my life

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Re: Leaving Google has actively improved my life

#221

Post by Spinfusor »

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…

I had a mostly bad experience with Kagi, but I have to say I miss the account-level domain blocking.

Re: Leaving Google has actively improved my life

#222

Post by mbesto »

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…

Kagi + Perplexity have all but eliminated the need for Google search for me

Re: Leaving Google has actively improved my life

#223

Post by cantalopes »

I stopped using google for search too, but saying that ducksuckgo or brave is better at search is not true in my ipinion. Sure, the ai summary sucks and you will gwt spobsored results at top, but google is pretty damn good at searching. No other search engine (besides paid kagi) gave me as good results

Re: Leaving Google has actively improved my life

#224

Post by 1vuio0pswjnm7 »

"So no one is really choosing to use Google Search. It's being chosen for them."

Google tries to argue that based on so many people using it that it must be the best

But only a small percentage of people actively _choose_ to use it

Very few people know about "settings", "default settings" or how to change them

If they knew how, then would they change them

If the default was something other than Google, then would people chaange the settings to Google

Google pays billions becuse it knows most people will never become aware of settings or try to change them

Re: Leaving Google has actively improved my life

#225

Post by bsder »

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…

> The problem isn't Google.

Wrong. Google is very much the problem. If Google had not been allowed to buy YouTube, for example, YouTube and Google would have had to compete with one another.

> 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".

We have evidence against. Several video sites were taking payments back before YouTube became dominant (especially the Japanese ones, for example). YouTube squashed them all by being "free" not by being "better".

Re: Leaving Google has actively improved my life

#226

Post by magarnicle »

robin_reala wrote: post #2

I degoogled back when they announced AMP email, and am in broad agreement with the author here. The only things I’ve found it hard to replace are YouTube, Arts & Culture, Google Books, and Books ngrams. Everything else has great alternatives to move to 100%, and Books is just a backup alongside archive.org and Hathi. Even if you just stop using one piece of Google you’ll find yourself in a better place.

What do you look for in Arts & Culture? I find https://www.getdailyart.com/ pretty great if you are mostly just interested in painting.

Re: Leaving Google has actively improved my life

#227

Post by foresterre »

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 think that DDG's search resulrs worsened from the moment they've dropped the Yandex index, a few years back.

That, and they seem to havr focussed more on localized results, which makes searches related to software development worse. This is also a problem with Google's search engine, but it's much harder to work around on Google.

Re: Leaving Google has actively improved my life

#228

Post by pibaker »

bengale wrote: post #98
layer8 wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Critical services like email and search should be treated as a public utility. Those cost money as well, but are affordable to almost anyone, and social safety nets should be taking care of those who don’t.

Government email, sounds great. Sign me up.

Just make sure you don't say anything against our glorious leader while you are on it. Surely nothing will go wrong if we give the state physical control over private communications.

Re: Leaving Google has actively improved my life

#229

Post by ipcress_file »

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…

You might be better off with duckduckstart.com instead. It's the best of both worlds: you get Google results via startpage by default and can use duckduckgo !bangs when necessary.
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