Earlier quoted context omitted.
What have you done for email?
For me, Fastmail has been incredible.
I concur on Fastmail. I only keep a "legacy" Gmail account for parental tech support.
Leaving Google has actively improved my life
41–50 of 273 posts
Re: Leaving Google has actively improved my life
#42Re: Leaving Google has actively improved my life
#43To some extend it feels like Google just gave up on search. I don't really share the notion that Google is still better than e.g. DuckDuckGo or Ecosia. In my experience if Ecosia can't find something, neither can Google.
However, I've noticed that search seems to become less and less useful, like huge chucks of the net is just missing. A ton of pages also doesn't really make their content searchable, in the sense that videos and images aren't tagged in any meaningful why.
Mostly I feel the internet shrinking around me, the number of pages I go to becomes fewer and fewer. Brand new topics/content mostly comes from blogs recommended by friends and colleague.
Re: Leaving Google has actively improved my life
#44> 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…
Yeah, the article is slop. Not even AI slop. More like guilty conscience slop.
I ran an experiment where I set DDG as my default on all surfaces. About 3 - 4 months in, I actually started hating searching, and a few weeks later most of my queries had the prefix !g
Gmail is hands down the best. I pay for Gemini, and Gemini outside gmail is much much better than Gemini inside gmail. I pay for ChatGPT, but for some reason, I trust Gemini with my email rather than ChatGPT.
Re: Leaving Google has actively improved my life
#45> 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 still scratch my head how DuckDuckGo has made people excited for Bing search results in a way Microsoft never has.
Re: Leaving Google has actively improved my life
#46> 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…
Exactly my experience too, to the point that I kinda ended up only using DDG for its bang features and never really do real searches with it... It's especially bad if I want local results for my country in my language.
Re: Leaving Google has actively improved my life
#47> 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…
That is also my experience with DuckDuckGo but all search engines. They ALL suck including Google Search. I don't know why, but the results are simply crap. > 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. I don't read that. Where do you see a backwards justification? Do you know the decisi…
> That is also my experience with DuckDuckGo but all search engines. They ALL suck including Google Search. I don't know why, but the results are simply crap.
(obligatory disclaimer: I work for Google but not in Search, all opinions strictly my own, yadda yadda)
It's a scale problem. An (in my opinion) unsolveable one.
Google - let's say all search engine companies combined - employ N engineers working on search engines. They allocate those teams X dollars, and let's pretend that's all these companies do and their total income is Y dollars.
Around the world there are orders of magnitude more people - let's say 1000*N, I don't know if anyone has even tried to gather this data - trying to game the search results and get their thing to the top. Those people have a combined budget dramatically larger than X and (I suspect) significantly larger than Y. Oh, and the best of them are almost certainly sharing notes and tactics with each other.
Even if everyone working on a search engine is a 10X genius engineer, they're still at a multiple-orders-of-magnitude disadvantage.
Re: Leaving Google has actively improved my life
#48I use fastmail and kagi and love both. I wonder what OP is using instead of google docs for live co-authoring... Word Online? lol
Re: Leaving Google has actively improved my life
#49> I don't knowingly use AI > Sometimes I will use Kagi's "assistant" model whilst coding. Particularly to clean up existing code/stylesheets The only moral abortion is my abortion.
Kagi's models are also incredibly bad. I can't imagine how this person believes they are getting fair value from them.
Kagi assistant includes all Anthropic, Google, OpenAI and Grok models as well as all the common open weights models.
Re: Leaving Google has actively improved my life
#50[dead]