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.
> Smart features: Turn on smart features in Gmail, Chat, and Meet - When you turn this setting on, you agree to let Gmail, Chat, and Meet use your content and activity in these products to provide smart features and personalize your experience.
My wife turned this off because she didn't want typing suggestions or even grammar correction. After disabling the feature, she was much happier.
> I always thought I loved Gmail. Turns out I just had the habit of typing in “gmail.com” in my search bar. I honestly can’t tell you a single feature of Gmail that I miss.
> Leaving Gmail also gave me the opportunity to start implementing better digital hygiene. I no longer give my primary email to fly-by-night sites, and I'm deliberate with what things I'm signing up for.
I also do this, but with my own custom domain - still in gmail.
Gmail is fine, imo. I also don't let them algorithmically sort my email - I use filters & such.
> 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 depth of indexing sites like Reddit feels dramatically worse lately and recipe search will predictably give me the same list of SEO spam blogs regardless of what I type in.
DuckDuckGo also seems to be doing the YouTube search thing that everyone hates where after the first several results it just starts throwing semi-related things at you instead.
I still add "!g" to my DuckDuckGo queries when I don't have time to mess around or if the first page of results is obvious SEO spam.
The other main point in this blog post isn't really about Google at all, it's just what happened when the author set up a a new e-mail address and didn't sign up for a lot of sites with it:
> Leaving Gmail also gave me the opportunity to start implementing better digital hygiene. I no longer give my primary email to fly-by-night sites, and I'm deliberate with what things I'm signing up for.
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.
Yeah I still use Google for local restaurant info and geospatial stuff because it's just plain better.
I'm not sure if this is true anymore but years ago I heard from some business owners in my area that Google would call them to keep business information up to date. I imagine there's some form of automation these days (robocalls maybe?) but if that is the case it's kind of funny to think they are superior because they still do some stuff somewhat manually.
I would concur, although I am using Edge instead of Brave (work requires it, but I also adopted it as a personal alternative to Safari for when I need Chromium).
I wish there was some way to A/B test search engines while blinded. I think DDG is worse than Google last I tried it, but I can never really know without a blind trial. There ought to be some proxy service that shows you results in the same UI from a random source and you can mark the results as good or bad.
This would probably be a good business idea for Kagi to implement, if they are confident they would win.
I read a bunch of comments agreeing with this anecdote so I'll offer my own counter anecdote.
I don't know if it's what kind of information I'm searching for or something else but adding a !g has never helped for me. If ddg results is shit google has also been shit but with loads of ads. I barely bother trying anymore.
Not a fan of Google but I always find Gmail criticisms so weird.
Like, what does this guy even mean about the algorithm sorting his inbox? Legit what the fuck is he talking about? Non junk mail goes to my inbox. Spam goes to spam. What am I missing?
And speaking of spam, I have a bunch of proton mail accounts and outlook accounts and iCloud mail accounts and Gmail’s spam filter is easily the best. Like, it’s not even close. Protonmail is nearly as bad as outlook at dealing with spam. It’s impossible to overstate how bad both of them are at filtering spam vs Gmail.
I legit feel like I’m either being actively gaslit or I’m genuinely missing something big here.
As for search alternatives, I’d love to use Kagi full time but the cost is just unreasonably high for now IMO.
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.
It's like a drug - getting off is not so easy for many people. I still use youtube and a chromium-based browser. I want to become google-free eventually.
I hate that the Internet thought me now to distrust everything. In this case, I have the feeling that the author chose those words carefully to click bait us somehow without actually lying
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 system where the poor are naturally disadvantaged and the rich get unlimited benefit, so I don't think any of the complaining will go away anyway. Just a new set of problems.
The problem isn't that companies would be happy to pay money but people don't and so they put on ads. The problem is that many companies even when you pay them they show you ads. So, you have to look at products with this in mind: does this specific company have a history of behaving like this?
To 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.
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
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.
AI is an area where having decades of private data hosted and indexed by a third party is actually paying off with a direct return (vs just using it to surface ads). All moral qualms about FOSS and whatever else aside, asking a question in plain english and having an "AI assistant" digging through years' worth of photos, emails, events, chats, restaurant reservations and more and returning an incredibly detailed answer that no person ever could feels like the magic of tech being realized in front of our eyes.
Would I prefer this was all open technology instead? Yeah, of course. But it is abundantly clear that economic incentives don't allow open source to compete with the big players, and that's just how it is.
Some of Google's products have really dropped in quality. In the past 5 or so years all the changes I've seen in Search, Youtube, and Gmail have been for the worse.
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[ 4.2 ms ] story [ 69.5 ms ] threadEven if you just stop using one piece of Google you’ll find yourself in a better place.
Specifically in Gmail Settings:
> Smart features: Turn on smart features in Gmail, Chat, and Meet - When you turn this setting on, you agree to let Gmail, Chat, and Meet use your content and activity in these products to provide smart features and personalize your experience.
My wife turned this off because she didn't want typing suggestions or even grammar correction. After disabling the feature, she was much happier.
(googler, opinions are my own)
It was so bizarre! I forgot those even exist.
> Leaving Gmail also gave me the opportunity to start implementing better digital hygiene. I no longer give my primary email to fly-by-night sites, and I'm deliberate with what things I'm signing up for.
I also do this, but with my own custom domain - still in gmail.
Gmail is fine, imo. I also don't let them algorithmically sort my email - I use filters & such.
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 depth of indexing sites like Reddit feels dramatically worse lately and recipe search will predictably give me the same list of SEO spam blogs regardless of what I type in.
DuckDuckGo also seems to be doing the YouTube search thing that everyone hates where after the first several results it just starts throwing semi-related things at you instead.
I still add "!g" to my DuckDuckGo queries when I don't have time to mess around or if the first page of results is obvious SEO spam.
The other main point in this blog post isn't really about Google at all, it's just what happened when the author set up a a new e-mail address and didn't sign up for a lot of sites with it:
> Leaving Gmail also gave me the opportunity to start implementing better digital hygiene. I no longer give my primary email to fly-by-night sites, and I'm deliberate with what things I'm signing up for.
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'm not sure if this is true anymore but years ago I heard from some business owners in my area that Google would call them to keep business information up to date. I imagine there's some form of automation these days (robocalls maybe?) but if that is the case it's kind of funny to think they are superior because they still do some stuff somewhat manually.
This would probably be a good business idea for Kagi to implement, if they are confident they would win.
I don't know if it's what kind of information I'm searching for or something else but adding a !g has never helped for me. If ddg results is shit google has also been shit but with loads of ads. I barely bother trying anymore.
Like, what does this guy even mean about the algorithm sorting his inbox? Legit what the fuck is he talking about? Non junk mail goes to my inbox. Spam goes to spam. What am I missing?
And speaking of spam, I have a bunch of proton mail accounts and outlook accounts and iCloud mail accounts and Gmail’s spam filter is easily the best. Like, it’s not even close. Protonmail is nearly as bad as outlook at dealing with spam. It’s impossible to overstate how bad both of them are at filtering spam vs Gmail.
I legit feel like I’m either being actively gaslit or I’m genuinely missing something big here.
As for search alternatives, I’d love to use Kagi full time but the cost is just unreasonably high for now IMO.
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.
I think he meant my conscience.
Used to think Google was awesome when they were hyper accurate, fast, and not enshittifying products.
Now I am convinced they are just a little bit better than Meta.
> Sometimes I will use Kagi's "assistant" model whilst coding. Particularly to clean up existing code/stylesheets
The only moral abortion is my abortion.
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 system where the poor are naturally disadvantaged and the rich get unlimited benefit, so I don't think any of the complaining will go away anyway. Just a new set of problems.
The problem isn't that companies would be happy to pay money but people don't and so they put on ads. The problem is that many companies even when you pay them they show you ads. So, you have to look at products with this in mind: does this specific company have a history of behaving like this?
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.
I still scratch my head how DuckDuckGo has made people excited for Bing search results in a way Microsoft never has.
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.
Would I prefer this was all open technology instead? Yeah, of course. But it is abundantly clear that economic incentives don't allow open source to compete with the big players, and that's just how it is.
> Leaving Gmail also gave me the opportunity to start implementing better digital hygiene.
Which is to say, everyone else's spam filtering is awful, so you need to restrict access to your email so they don't fill your inbox.
This is literally the same logic that says we shouldn't vaccinate women against HPV because then they won't learn to practice abstinence.