Leaving Google has actively improved my life • Hacker News Board

Re: Leaving Google has actively improved my life

#271

Post by iFreilicht » Sun, Mar 01, 2026, 3:40 PM UTC

mbesto wrote: post #222

al_borland wrote: post #144

Earlier 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…

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

Anything particular about perplexity that helps you replace web search, or do you mean any LLM-Chat with access to web sources would suffice?

Re: Leaving Google has actively improved my life

#272

Post by QuantumNoodle » Sun, Mar 01, 2026, 10:43 PM UTC

rhcom2 wrote: post #39

QuantumNoodle wrote: post #13

I haven't kept up with Gmail because I've left it many years ago, but last I heard they give themselves the permission to parse your emails and serve you targeted ads based on contents of emails you receive. If the thought of privacy doesn't turn you off, you must love the thought of unsolicited marketing emails getting amplified through ads that Google serves you.

> last I heard they give themselves the permission to parse your emails and serve you targeted ads based on contents of emails you receive. Stopped doing it in 2017 (according to them). https://fox59.com/news/google-will-no-longer-read-your-email...

That checks out, I switched to protonmail in 2014 and haven't looked around since. Surprised they reversed on this, but glad that was addressed.

Re: Leaving Google has actively improved my life

#273

Post by yacthing » Mon, Mar 02, 2026, 9:08 PM UTC

amelius wrote: post #182

yacthing wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is about as useful of an argument as when people say taxpayer funded services aren't free. Those who are wealthier pay more into the tax system, allow those who are less well off to gain access to things they normally wouldn't. This is a good thing. Likewise, those who are wealthier are buying more products that are advertised, allowing those who are less well off to gain access to the internet for closer-to-fre…

> Those who are wealthier pay more into the tax system, allow those who are less well off to gain access to things they normally wouldn't. This is a good thing. And what if there was a company (let's call it Google) that was extracting huge sums of money out of this social security/welfare system? Would this make you think that perhaps something was wrong about it? And that the system could be more efficient without…

There are inefficiencies with both. In a perfect world, yeah, it'd be more efficient to not have capitalism. You'd just have to get around inefficient labor allocation, increased fraud, etc.

At least for capitalism, the amount extracted by ad companies is known and taxed.

It's not fair to compare things in practice (captialism), and in theory (whatever you're suggesting).