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Leaving Google has actively improved my life

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Re: Leaving Google has actively improved my life

#51

Post by alexjplant »

jeffbee wrote: post #27
bitpush wrote: post #23

> 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 doesn't make any models in-house - they use closed-source frontier models and OSS ones hosted by third-party providers. The former are on par with their own vendors' chat interface implementations (capabilities like file upload and custom tool use excepted).

Re: Leaving Google has actively improved my life

#54

Post by AvAn12 »

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…

Clearly YMMV but I have been very happy with DDG since switching over a couple of years ago. Maybe we are searching in different domains. From my experience, no ads and less ai slop, and fine search quality.

Re: Leaving Google has actively improved my life

#55

Post by skydhash »

Aurornis wrote: post #21
nomel wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Thanks, that explains Reddit. I see the same phenomenon on other smaller forums, too, though. DuckDuckGo always feels like it has a smaller database than Google, which isn't really a surprise.

I mostly use a web engine (DDG) to find web sites these days, not content. Then I use the site's search instead or just browse the navigation tree. Make everything simpler.

I much prefer to use scholar.google.com or npmjs.com for research. The URL is already in my history/bookmarks and the scoped query is more useful than the generic websearch.

Re: Leaving Google has actively improved my life

#56

Post by BoredPositron »

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…

Give Google two more years and Google will be as bad as ddg/bing.

Re: Leaving Google has actively improved my life

#57

Post by thallavajhula »

I used to have a custom domain setup via Google apps. Google decided to update it to something else (they changed their name several times and I lost track of the name now). I switched to iCloud+ Mail when iCloud introduced their custom domain support a few years ago. I do have notification summaries on my iOS turned on, but that's just a guilty pleasure of mine. The summarization is so bad that it's funny. I literally have the summarization feature turned on to laugh at how bad it is every time I see a new summary. Anyway, I used to be a everything-Google guy. Now, I just spread my app usage across multiple services, which I think is a win for me in the long run instead of being locked in to an ecosystem.

I also got myself out of the most of the Apple products from the Apple ecosystem too. I'm a 1Password user because I didn't want to be part of Google or Apple ecosystems.

Re: Leaving Google has actively improved my life

#58

Post by Aurornis »

shevy-java wrote: post #30
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…

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…

> I don't read that. Where do you see a backwards justification?

Most of the improvements he cited in his life were either unrelated to Google or things that he could have turned off in Gmail.

He complains about Gmail sorting his e-mail, but that's a feature he turned on. He could have just turned it off.

He complains about his inbox being polluted from putting his e-mail address into everything, but his new account doesn't have anything signed up yet. That's not a Google problem, that's an e-mail address problem.

He says that he's getting in the habit of skipping search engines and going straight to IMDB or Wikipedia or Reddit, but again that has nothing to do with Google specifically.

Re: Leaving Google has actively improved my life

#59

Post by fhdkweig »

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…

The image search is terrible on DDG. If I search for multiple keywords, the search only cares if an image matches just one word. Google ranks the results so that images that match all the keywords are presented at the top.

Re: Leaving Google has actively improved my life

#60

Post by paxys »

realprimoh wrote: post #52

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

This is the daily "Google is bad" post. Best to ignore it and move on.
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