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.
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 dozen people all looking for answers to some issue. Everyone was coming up empty with Google, and I was able to find something that solved the issue pretty quickly with Kagi.
Honestly, it's got to the point where 8 or 9 times out of 10 I switch to Google search because I'm unhappy with the results I'm getting... and really it's at the point where, why am I even still using it?
It's just not very good.
It reminds of something like AltaVista back in the day, or one of those other old skool search engines, with how poor its results are relative to evil old Google.
But only once did Google actually give me what I was looking for. Every other time the Google results were the same SEO garbage I was getting with DDG.
Maybe I should try switching to Google for a full month to see if my search quality generally improves.
But I think the AI overviews in DDG and even Google have helped a lot.
AI has helped search tremendously. I only search for things that should have exact answers.
Google is the only search engine allowed to index Reddit [1].
Kagi had a post discussing this which made the front page of HN about a month ago [1]:
> Google does not offer a public search API. The only available path is an ad-syndication bundle with no changes to result presentation - the model Startpage uses. Ad syndication is a non-starter for Kagi’s ad-free subscription model.
See this previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46708678
[0] https://www.404media.co/email/4650b997-7cc3-4578-834c-7e663e...
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 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.
What made this easy for me is that Google is also no longer Google. Ever since it started basically ignoring my actual search query, I stopped using it. I used to be very good at using Google, too.
DuckDuckGo is quite bad at times, yes. But then, so is Google. If I need to find something I cannot put into search terms, LLMs are helpful. From my trial experience I would say Kagi is also a capable search machine, for some niches.
Agree with this. DDG just seems to have less ‘in’ it.
I’ve been playing with old 8052 microcontrollers recently, and it’s not unusual for DDG to return zero results on slightly esoteric technical searches, when Google will have plenty of relevant results (and it’s not just that Google is less strict about search terms - often I’m searching specifically for keywords).
ChatGPT is the only general-purpose search engine that seems to have any chance of producing a link that is both new to me and useful. Of course, I try not to use it too much, people say it’s bad for the planet or whatever.
I don't dig in reddit frequently so that specific issue is not one for me
Search is hard.
Breaking up with Google is even harder, but definitely worth it. I still have a Gmail account that is used for spam/low effort email nonsense (I currently use hey.com for most email...a decision I am considering revisiting in the future since I've found a good way to host my own email with a provider that won't get auto rejected/blacklisted). That and the searches I mentioned above are my only use of Google Products at this point in time. Maps is gone. Photos is just a memory. I kicked Android out the door years ago. All my home integrations are via open source and/or Apple, and I'm finding ways to NOT have to rely on even Apple for that.
I never really used docs or other services. For storage I am currently using OneDrive and iCloud, however I am about to push all of the cloud storage stuff to Backblaze and Cloudflare.
While I almost never see ads, when I do see them, I notice that they are never targeted ads. Even some of the odd "coincidences" have gone away...say, verbally chatting with my spouse about how I am thinking about buying such and such a product...only to see an ad for it later on (and assuming it was a coincidence)...things like that have stopped.
I've also been avoiding Amazon as well, for the same reason.
Just my 2 cents.
> 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 decision-making steps? I simply don't see how you can conclude this, unless you assume it. In which case the assumption may easily be totally incorrect.
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.
(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.
Happy user of the DDG mobile browser though.
It’s hard to describe but the results are just better, and it loads incredibly fast.
With DDG I always had this 20% wish to have Google back and frequently queries with !g bangs, not so much with Kagi.
At least DDG lets you block results which Google does not.
Also, how would a search engine for recipes work? How does THAT search engine find when a new recipe site is created? It would be to scrape the whole internet just to find all the recipe sites….
- it could work like the Kagi smallweb. people submit sites and you can’t submit your own until you submit (and have accepted) enough of others
- I’m also envisioning a parallel world where the big tech monopolies next existed. Maybe there could be crawler/indexer companies whose product was the stream of new content. Then you as a specialist search engine could consume the stream to build your own custom index and weights
Of course, back then they had thousands of websites to categorize not billions.
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.
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.
It also suppresses open protocols. Protocols stagnated as the Internet centralized and commercialized for a reason. Some of these things could just be protocols.
Not saying that would cover everything, but I am sure those two factors would “step in” to replace some aspects of the ad-supported Internet, if the ads went away. How much, I don’t know.
I'm assuming you mean exclusive disjunction here, but in reality it's something closer to a conjunction, if not occasionally an inclusive disjunction. So many subscription services also have ads and if they don't, they eventually do.
The problem isn't that people want things for free; hell, we all pay for access to the internet already. The problem is a shit-ton of monied interests want to squeeze every possible dollar from people always. So we're slammed with ads and our behavior is manipulated and tracked and monetized and sold.
This was not how things were on the internet or the web in mid 90s. It was not the ethos then, but it became the ethos when monied interests took over.
That will cover the physical infrastructure of your Internet provider. But there are a lot of websites and software on the internet that require either ads or payment to survive. Free usually means "surviving with somebody else's money aka investors"
It's the same vein as criminals using cash vs Bitcoin; both can hide crime, but one is way easier to scale up.
20-something years ago, when I paid for my internet connection, I also got an email address (or 5…) and some personal web space (5MB maybe?) and access to their NTP servers as part of that. No ads.
Of course if I left the ISP I would lose access to it, as I stopped paying for it. I’ve long since left the ISP, and they’ve dropped all these value adds.
Presumably because people wanted cheaper plans and jumped to other providers which did internet access and nothing else.
There are people willing to pay a reasonable amount for fair services. I pay for various Google and Apple services, including for email. Those that don’t, have ads based plans.
The old "If you aren't paying for a product, you're the product." adage doesn't apply anymore when even if you're paying, you're _still_ being productized.
The real problem is increasing concentration of _everything_ into ever-fewer (viable) players.
Doctorow's book "Enshittification" goes into way more examples of this phenomenon (though I'm far less optimistic than he is about the ability to reverse this trend).
The "low-cost airline" style of business.
You'd want such a platform to be relatively open to allow anyone to participate, but you'd also have to be pretty aggressive at policing as bad actors would be all over the place trying to artificially drain an account. Maybe it's something that could be built into the browser? You could get a "X would like to charge you for a visit" which you could approve or deny and you could configure to always approve.
Transaction fees would be a beast.
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-free. This is also a good thing.
We can put limits on how advertising is done, give control over your data, etc etc. But the fundamentals stay the same.
So no: paying your way towards internet products won't save the average person money.
I think I get more than $10/month of value out of search engines, and I would rather give money to a company instead of them selling all my data and/or spamming me with a bunch of advertisements. If I am paying for something, then almost by definition the company has a means of making revenue that doesn't require ads.
I hate self-promotion but I wrote about this a bit ago [1], but the TL;DR is that I think people are actually more willing to pay for things if they actually like those things. Something Awful has fallen out of favor now, but for awhile people were happy enough to buy an account because Something Awful was fun to be on [2], and a one-time $10 fee wasn't enough to "exclude" anyone, but it did become a way to support the site in the process. I don't think this model was or is broken, I think SA fell out of fashion because Lowtax stopped caring after a certain point.
Kagi has been growing; I don't know if it's profitable yet, but it has been steadily growing an audience and regardless of your opinion on this specific service, I think this indicates that people will pay for things. At least some of us will.
[1] https://blog.tombert.com/Posts/Personal/2026/02-February/Peo...
[2] It actually still is! I bought a new account about a year ago and I had forgotten how funny a lot of the posters actually are. It's a blast.
I pay ~$150/month for internet itself. I pay close to $90/month in internet services and media. I have coworkers spending hundreds each month on multiple AI subscriptions just because they have a better product for their work than Google. If tiktok and reels cost money then people would be ripping copper wire out of street lights to pay for it.
As opposed to the current system where everyone is disadvantaged and the rich get richer?
Every business transaction in history has had a producer and a consumer, where both parties are in direct contact. Advertisers, on the other hand, insert themselves in the middle, promising to help both sides, while actually being a leech without doing any of the work. It is a despicable industry based on psychological manipulation, responsible for countless deaths, the corruption of every form of media ever invented, and of democratic processes throughout the world.
Sane business models are possible on the internet. Some of them exist already. But it's too late now for any of them to gain traction when advertisers are the same corporations that control it, and they have convinced the world that their products are "free".
2: We pay for access to the internet. It's on the provider to decide whether or not that level of access is sufficient. If it is not, restrict access only to those who pay more, ala Netflix/Hulu etc.
If I choose to put a publicly open service up onto the internet, and people choose to use it, that shouldn't automatically entitle me to spy on them, shovel ads down their throats, track their every movement and human connection, and then charge them for the privilege.
If I found out there was a person I knew who was doing that, I would at least chew them out and exhort them to stop being a worthless piece of shit, if I didn't kick their slimy asses for doing it in the first place.
I'm ok with ads existing. I'm ok with paying for services that charge for their services. I am not and will never be okay with data harvesters, and if I ever meet one I'm going to tell them to their face that they are shit people working for a shit company doing shit things to innocent people and that they should be ashamed.
If I meet someone who puts ads into paid services, I will do the same.
In the meantime, I'm doing everything I can to cut those pieces of crap out of my internet life.
Also,
> I do my best to boycott bad things. And I fail pretty often. I still use Amazon on occasion and I can’t get off Spotify. I use Uber and DoorDash a lot more than I’d like. And I have too many Apple products/services.
OK, I can intuit why most of those are bad, but can somebody give me a good-faith interpretation on what's bad about Apple?
I'd assume it's the working conditions and material extraction processes in China, parts of Africa, and elsewhere, but isn't that true of every piece of consumer technology? The only better companies for consumer hardware that come to mind are Framework and Google for recycling parts and raw materials, but the whole point of the article is about de-googling and Framework's products are relatively niche and at a much lower price and performance / market category.
At the end of the day, Apple exists to make money and keep shareholders happy.
If the business stops growing organically, do you really think they're going to benevolently use the massive control they have over their own platform?
"Apple" isn't privacy-focused. Their marketing strategy is currently privacy-focused and their economics currently permit them to be.
> Sometimes I will use Kagi's "assistant" model whilst coding. Particularly to clean up existing code/stylesheets
The only moral abortion is my abortion.
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)
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.
We’re moving to our own index, which we are building in collaboration with Qwant, under the name European Search Perspective.
I do see the point of the article however.
Unfortunately, when needing to do deeper dives on things, Google is still more or less the best for results past the first page in my experience, though it's rare I need to dig that deep these days.
I can't wait for the European index.
One issue I also find with this sort of thing. It's hard to have a longer discussion that leads to building good alternatives. A thread appears, we comment and then it disappears. There needs to be more public discourse that leads to tangible results... To real issues that get solved.
I've used Fastmail for a year now and haven't missed Gmail for a second. It even natively supports iOS push notifications for Mail, something Google refuses to implement.
Same with Kagi. I love having control over my search results, and custom bangs is life.
I still scratch my head how DuckDuckGo has made people excited for Bing search results in a way Microsoft never has.
I don't know what this allergy to features are. You can disable the features. It is not hard. I remember when they used to force conversation feature down everyone's throats. Some oldies hated it, but when they got used to it they appreciated it. Now they have an off feature.
The author didn’t go into detail here - but has anyone got a good system to achieve this? Or Is it a specific feature within Proton? I’ve just got mainly the one email and I’ve wanted to change to a better way for ages.
It didn't really make my life any better. And at this point, I think I see more value in having AI be able to piece together information to serve me up useful information than trying to protect my privacy within email (I couldn't get off Google Photos, it's just too useful).
I’ve also seen a lot of people using Cryptpad recently, which I think wraps OnlyOffice.
Probably nothing? It’s not like that’s a need that everyone has.
DDG - I love the premise, but their search relies too heavily on Bing which - worked for msft, etc... - no idea why it sucks so much.
Claude/etc for search - artificial guardrails. "Hey give me an example of Charlie Kirk being a homophobe" - "I can't do that". Contrived example, but realistic result.
Google started out as a non-opinionated (outside of link weight) search engine that is now gemini and bs. But even search is not useful. DDG tries, but responses are sub-par.
Don’t play around with email. It’s not communication, it’s critical digital infrastructure - quite possibly your primary key on the internet. The consequences of getting locked out by a faceless provider for reasons you’ll never hear about are probably a lot bigger than you think.
Even if you just stop using one piece of Google you’ll find yourself in a better place.
Originally, the differentiating features were multi-gigabyte storage limits and the public's goodwill towards Google, Inc.
Gigabyte storage is now the norm, public goodwill for Alphabet, Inc. is minimal, and so there's nothing that really sets Gmail apart anymore.
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.
Never ever, will I return to big tech.
However, having said that, never ever, will I regret having joined. It was an amazing journey.
Then I tried Kagi, and I find that works the majority of the time, including their AI. Someone else in the comments here said Kagi's AI models are bad, but I don't think they are for answering the fairly basic questions that I typically search. I'm not going to have Kagi's AI model refactor code or something though.
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.
There are two reasons I can think I use Google and Chrome for:
- Search: If I want to be sold something - say I’m in the market for an electric heater, I’ll search for it on Google to be tracked and advertised.
- Chrome: because there are some flows and UX that simply don’t work well in other browsers
Doesn't clarify beyond some trite remarks with no actual proof.
Claude checks multiples websites, reads them all, and answers my question.
I self host (feels damn great) but still check my old, antique, gmail once every 3-4 months. Makes me smile and say, I was one of them.
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.
Stopped doing it in 2017 (according to them). https://fox59.com/news/google-will-no-longer-read-your-email...
https://kagifeedback.org/d/5445-reconsider-yandex-integratio...
I’m sure someday it will be aggressively monetized and enshitified but enjoying it while it lasts.
> I do my best to boycott bad things. And I fail pretty often. I still use Amazon on occasion and I can’t get off Spotify. I use Uber and DoorDash a lot more than I’d like. And I have too many Apple products/services.
> Individual actions probably will not save the world, but big tech is bad
It's weird to see this without any context or justification or comparison to other industries. As if it's so self evidently true that the author never considered the reader might dismiss his wider point when coming across it with no explanation
> 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.
Especially when my search query is looking up something basic from the docs (like say library function name or argument order), it really just answers what i want.
Of course a big part of the problem is that google is inundated with seo spam when it comes to programming topics .
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'm personally not so attached to this idea of Google being evil so I don't really get this at all
Gmail has a feature that can break your inbox into a priority section and an everything else section. You have to put in some work to flag and unflag messages based on what you think is important. It's not perfect but with some training it's helpful.
Some people turn it on and expect it to read their minds about everything or think they can ignore the everything else section.
You can just turn it back off. You don't have to leave Gmail.
> 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.
Agree. This person's reduced spam experience was due to the new e-mail address and being disciplined about not signing up for a million things on it, not because Proton is better.
It was so bizarre! I forgot those even exist.
Also I still haven't found anything that replaces Google for finding local, physical businesses.
And Gmail? I have it mainly to give to random businesses. I like Hey.com more but I don't want the utility company or some online service I barely care about cluttering it up.
Also there is no YouTube equivalent. They pay creators the most so creators are all on YouTube.
Also the "if something is free you are the product" is so obviously false if you think about it for a minute. A lot of people pay for Amazon Prime, yet they are still the product. Just because you had a company money does not mean they will won't maximize profit by monetizing your information. Not to mention Blender is free. Are they the product as well? It's just a saying with good mouth feel and nothing else. Definitely not something anyone should change their life around for.
> 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.
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.