Leaving Google has actively improved my life (pseudosingleton.com)
261 points by speckx 3 hours ago
Aurornis 2 hours ago
> 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.
al_borland 5 minutes ago
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 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.
bartread 2 hours ago
Same experience with DuckDuckGo. I've probably been using it as my primary search engine for, well, I'm not absolutely sure, but I want to say it was sometime during the pandemic so that must be, what, 5 years?
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.
expensive_news an hour ago
Do you find the results are better when you use the same query on Google? Because I’ve also exclusively used DuckDuckGo for the past 5 or so years, and every now and then I get frustrated by the results try 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.
toast0 34 minutes ago
2muchcoffeeman an hour ago
mitchell209 10 minutes ago
Lol this is the same thing that's been repeated about DDG for over a decade. I had the same exact complaints and eventually switched back to Google since I was using !g bangs so often, and that was when I was in high school. Which is why, when I learned about Kagi I switched and never looked back. Even as a "casual" user I still find value because of the lack of obnoxious ads and control I have over boosting or blocking sites from my results completely.
ericd 7 minutes ago
nomel 2 hours ago
> from Reddit threads
Google is the only search engine allowed to index Reddit [1].
elliotec an hour ago
Kagi has tons of results from Reddit and they're always high and relevant. I don't know if this means they're doing it even though they're "not allowed to" or what but they definitely get it somehow.
hoppyhoppy2 33 minutes ago
sethops1 10 minutes ago
kyleee an hour ago
thayne an hour ago
That sounds like some excellent fodder for an anti-trust suit if you ask me.
alex1138 32 minutes ago
Aurornis 2 hours ago
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.
skydhash an hour ago
dheera 34 minutes ago
I'm sure Baidu could safely index Reddit if they wanted to.
jrmg 2 hours ago
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.
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).
fuzzy2 an hour ago
Well, yes, DuckDuckGo is not Google. You have to accept that. Not just surface-level, but for real.
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.
shevy-java 2 hours ago
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 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.
Aurornis an hour ago
> 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.
Arainach an hour ago
> 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.
phito an hour ago
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.
css_apologist an hour ago
I felt this way until about a year or 2 ago, google has gotten so bad DDG is not worse for my uses
I don't dig in reddit frequently so that specific issue is not one for me
yakkomajuri an hour ago
This is exactly my experience. I've had it as my primary search engine for 6-7 years now but add !g to about 80% of queries.
Happy user of the DDG mobile browser though.
dangus an hour ago
Kagi has been an upgrade compared to DuckDuckGo for me.
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.
bigstrat2003 19 minutes ago
Same! I tried to switch to DDG at first (5-6 years ago now), but all too often the results were poor and I had to use !g to search Google to get somewhere. Since I started using Kagi, I've never once had that issue.
dgacmu 36 minutes ago
Ditto. Basically the only thing I !g for now are maps and other geo-specific queries like the names of local restaurants or stores. Google still outperforms Kagi on those, but for nearly everything else I prefer the Kagi ad-free, ai-summary-onlt-if-requested results.
AvAn12 an hour ago
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.
fhdkweig an hour ago
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.
BoredPositron an hour ago
Give Google two more years and Google will be as bad as ddg/bing.
direwolf20 2 hours ago
What if we had more specialized search engines? There should be a recipe aggregator that searches for recipes and nothing else, and prioritizes high value recipe sites.
cortesoft 2 hours ago
Then we would need a search engine for search engines…
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….
bikelang 2 hours ago
Aldipower 2 hours ago
hn_acc1 an hour ago
Reminds me a bit of how yahoo got started: categories, sub-categories, etc..
Of course, back then they had thousands of websites to categorize not billions.
websap an hour ago
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.
WarmWash an hour ago
The problem isn't Google.
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.
bubblewand an hour ago
Actually-free gets suppressed by free-with-ads. We don’t know how much the truly free hobbyist-volunteer ecosystem would pick up without competition from ad-supported options (often with deep pockets for advertising and promotion, plus monopolist positioning to cross-promote with other products in some cases). Ad-supported options suppress usership of truly free options, which suppresses interest in volunteering time and resources.
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.
simon666 20 minutes ago
> So I feel pretty confident in stating that it's either gonna be ads or payments.
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.
Gooblebrai 2 minutes ago
> we all pay for access to the internet already
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"
yardstick 28 minutes ago
I agree.
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.
dwayne_dibley 23 minutes ago
I miss the online storage. My ISP let you use it to host your own site. So I hosted and tinkered - bliss
layer8 an hour ago
Critical services like email and search should be treated as a public utility. Those cost money as well, but are affordable to almost anyone, and social safety nets should be taking care of those who don’t.
bengale an hour ago
Government email, sounds great. Sign me up.
sollewitt 28 minutes ago
aaaronic an hour ago
But some of Apple or Spotify Premium's recent moves Re: advertising show that even those who _are paying_ end up getting the ad experience eventually.
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).
yaky an hour ago
Amazon Prime is the same way. Thanks for paying, please watch ads for first two season of The Boys. Also look at this catalog of movies you can rent for an additional fee.
The "low-cost airline" style of business.
amelius 40 minutes ago
The internet is not free. Somebody is paying for those ads. And this somebody is us, collectively. And you know what? We are paying more than if we would pay for these services directly, because advertising companies are taking a cut. And on top of that we are paying with our data.
yacthing 34 minutes ago
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-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.
jonahx 9 minutes ago
danny_codes an hour ago
The options are ads, pay, or public funding. Public funding is obviously the best option in many cases. For example, non-profit basic internet services
cogman10 6 minutes ago
I think the pay solution could potentially work. The biggest issue is the decentralized nature of the internet. If I could setup an account which gives me access to everything ad free, but deducts what the page would earn in advertisement (say something like $0.001 for a visit) and most of the internet which does a pay wall participated in this scheme, then I'd do it. I'd happily put in $10 to such an account and recharge it when I start finding the internet being locked away.
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.
tombert 14 minutes ago
I pay for Kagi primarily for this reason.
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.
duped 12 minutes ago
> But they also don't want to pay any money, because the internet, as we all know, "is free".
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.
sharifhsn an hour ago
Government can subsidize the poor. Remember Obamaphones? Just expand that idea.
dec0dedab0de 43 minutes ago
...or the post office
skydhash an hour ago
There are so many locked platform that I struggle to understand the not paying part. Imagine a better Github Search (or ACM search for papers), I bet it would find users.
imiric an hour ago
> 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
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".
BizarroLand an hour ago
1: If given the choice between ads or payments, megacorps will always choose both. If the choice is between ads or payments or data harvesting, megacorps will always choose all three.
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.
Willish42 21 minutes ago
I've been meaning to get off Gmail, and Proton Mail does seem like my favorite of the alternatives from a quick glance, but I'm also concerned about privacy focused services like Proton getting blocked or compromised in the US... This was a pretty good read
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.
herrherrmann 16 minutes ago
Apple is very anti-consumer, locking devices down, using planned obsolescence, fighting hard against movements for more open and fairer market practices and standards (e.g. switching to the standard USB-C port, allowing third-party app stores, exploiting developers releasing software on their platforms).
nashashmi 3 minutes ago
[delayed]
realprimoh an hour ago
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
wavemode 5 minutes ago
Your comment is of even less value than the article. The fact that you find this subject matter uninteresting, is also uninteresting. Clearly other people feel differently.
paxys an hour ago
This is the daily "Google is bad" post. Best to ignore it and move on.
bitpush 2 hours ago
> 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.
jeffbee 2 hours ago
Kagi's models are also incredibly bad. I can't imagine how this person believes they are getting fair value from them.
alexjplant an hour ago
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).
dpe82 an hour ago
Kagi assistant includes all Anthropic, Google, OpenAI and Grok models as well as all the common open weights models.
abtinf an hour ago
> Kagi's models are also incredibly bad.
Congrats on totally discrediting yourself.
hosteur 28 minutes ago
Just use Kagi. I have been for several years now. I have not regretted it one minute. I have not missed Google at all. Kagi is just so much better. And I like the business model.
s_dev 16 minutes ago
It is better, I was a paying subscriber. Then I realised they pay money to Yandex and I feel and obligation to support Ukraine right now. When the war is over or Kagi drop Yandex support I will be a paying subscriber again.
highwaylights 11 minutes ago
You had me until Proton. I bang this drum every so often when it comes up but I’ve had terrible experiences with Proton locking me out of email permanently without warning or explanation in a way that made not just the email address but the accounts linked to it completely unrecoverable.
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.
stephantul an hour ago
Ecosia is not just Bing, we offer a bunch of indexes, including bing and Google.
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.
reddalo 32 minutes ago
I love Qwant and I think it works better than DuckDuckGo.
I can't wait for the European index.
kyrra 2 hours ago
If you don't like the AI feature, Google at least lets you turn it off: https://workspace.google.com/blog/product-announcements/upda...
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)
swiftcoder 40 minutes ago
Does this work outside of workspaces? I didn't think public gmail accounts had the option
asim an hour ago
This is very interesting and timely. I've been working on something to replace a lot of addictive or exploitive services we use today but there's some caveats. Will people pay? They pay for Kagi but will they generally pay for other things like news, maps, video, chat, weather, etc. The second question is what's stopping people from really quitting? I get the feeling it's sort of habits that we get stuck with. Even I still use Google. But the mention of brave and knowing brave has a generous free search tier for their api makes me think it's possible to replace Google search. But habits die hard. New habit formation may require an alternative approach hence so many buying into ChatGPT.
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.
xnx an hour ago
> 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.
nvr219 an hour ago
I use fastmail and kagi and love both. I wonder what OP is using instead of google docs for live co-authoring... Word Online? lol
spacebear an hour ago
Not the OP, but I alternate between self-hosted instances of Outline (https://www.getoutline.com/) and Nextcloud (with Collabora) for this. Outline I actually like better than Google Docs for most things. Nextcloud is a little rough, but it has change tracking, which I need sometimes.
I’ve also seen a lot of people using Cryptpad recently, which I think wraps OnlyOffice.
latexr an hour ago
> I wonder what OP is using instead of google docs for live co-authoring
Probably nothing? It’s not like that’s a need that everyone has.
paxys an hour ago
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.
seaucre 2 hours ago
Gmail can be made vanilla. It sounds like switching emails and improving their email hygiene was the real improvement.
direwolf20 2 hours ago
It will still always analyse your emails for advertising purposes.
jeffbee 2 hours ago
Gmail is one of the only three categories of user data that Google specifically says they won't scan.
hn_acc1 an hour ago
andrewk17 28 minutes ago
I spent the effort to de-google a several years back and switched to Proton. After years of being on Proton, I recently switched back to GMail.
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).
robin_reala 2 hours ago
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.
memset 2 hours ago
What have you done for email?
frakt0x90 2 hours ago
For me, Fastmail has been incredible.
calmbonsai an hour ago
prideout an hour ago
This is not written by a former Google employee, it's written by a former Google user. Confusing title to see on hackernews.
jcgrillo 11 minutes ago
It took me until the 3rd paragraph to figure this out
charonn0 an hour ago
> I can't think of any other differentiating features in Gmail. Ads in my mail? Nostalgia?
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.
alabhyajindal 35 minutes ago
I can highly recommend Brave Search to anyone who is looking for an alternative. I found it to be much better than DuckDuckGo. Feels like Kagi almost, but free.
Sparkyte 24 minutes ago
I've been piholing everything. Duckduckgo can feel clunky at times and having more than one search engine is a blessing. Duckduckgo is for obscure direct searches where as Google for me is the popular enriched searches.
arthurjj 6 minutes ago
I was thrown by
> 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
arcade79 an hour ago
Leaving Google was the best thing I did, some 10 years ago. It reduced my stress level dramatically. I had no idea about how stressed I was at G. The release, when leaving, was immense.
Never ever, will I return to big tech.
However, having said that, never ever, will I regret having joined. It was an amazing journey.
thallavajhula an hour ago
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.
karmelapple an hour ago
I used to use DuckDuckGo, until I realized I was using "!g" far too often.
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.
mrweasel an hour ago
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.
dlev_pika an hour ago
Brave and DuckDuck have been my defaults for a long time.
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
TeeWEE 41 minutes ago
I hardly use Google anymore. I almost always use Claude. It can do the "higher level task" I often want to accomplish when I go to google.
Claude checks multiples websites, reads them all, and answers my question.
elxr 43 minutes ago
> actively improved my life
Doesn't clarify beyond some trite remarks with no actual proof.
bilekas 24 minutes ago
Just because Kagi is always mentioned in these type of posts, I can see already there's a lot of posts.
https://kagifeedback.org/d/5445-reconsider-yandex-integratio...
aalukabi an hour ago
I tried DDG for a while but got frustrated because it wasn't giving me what I was actually looking for. Now I’m using Google with the Searchonymous add-on, which has helped me get much wider results, uninfluenced by my previous search history.
johnbarron an hour ago
"How to replace Amazon, Google, X, Meta, Apple – and more" - https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/feb/26/how-to-re...
shevy-java 2 hours ago
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.
trilogic an hour ago
Leaving googles is for GROWN UPS and independent Individs. The ones that need to see more, to get out of the egg.
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.
its-kostya 2 hours ago
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.
rhcom2 an hour ago
> 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...
numbers 14 minutes ago
Wait till you move over to something like Kagi. It's really like an elevated experience when it comes to search. At first it's just less ads and none of that Google BS, but then eventually you start to use their other features. You realize, search could have moved in this direction a long time ago if Google wasn't motivated by ads.
bawolff 15 minutes ago
I used to hate the google AI summaries, but recently its like a switch flipped and im finding them actually useful.
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 .
pier25 an hour ago
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.
pavel_lishin 2 hours ago
> 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.
dtj1123 an hour ago
Startpage is good
alex1138 an hour ago
Is there a legitimate reason why only Google can trawl Reddit or is it just more monopolistic bullshit?
xnx an hour ago
"Leaving Google" = "stopped using Google services" in this case (vs. "quit working at Google")
hn_acc1 an hour ago
I assumed it was related to employment as well.
JohnMakin an hour ago
"conscience," not "conscious."
avazhi 2 hours ago
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.
jhhh an hour ago
Google had a feature in gmail for a long time that automatically sorts your email into categories like Promotions, Social, Updates, Forums, etc. It was automated and fairly effective imo. If you try to disable the 'smart' features they will then disable this categorization retroactively and dump thousands of emails in your inbox and then nag you about turning it back on.
avazhi an hour ago
I’ve clearly had it turned off for years(?) and I’ve never had it nag about it.
chroma_zone 2 hours ago
You may have turned this feature off (like I did) but by default Gmail sorts your emails into categories like Promotions, Social, Updates...
liquid_thyme 25 minutes ago
Google takes money to bypass their spam filters. They call those ads.
r_lee 2 hours ago
it's just someone who thinks degoogling himself has somehow elevated his entire existence to the sky
I'm personally not so attached to this idea of Google being evil so I don't really get this at all
Aurornis 2 hours ago
> Like, what does this guy even mean about the algorithm sorting his inbox? Legit what the fuck is he talking about?
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.
dismalaf 35 minutes ago
Pro tip: Gemini Flash is the new Google. Bypasses all the SEO and ad garbage.
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.
righthand 2 hours ago
Kagi, Fastmail, Immich, LibreOffice are all excellent alternatives to Google Garbage.
dude250711 2 hours ago
I saw someone on Safari having to actually watch YouTube ads.
It was so bizarre! I forgot those even exist.
wao0uuno 2 hours ago
Adblockers for Safari exist. Even on iOS.
dude250711 2 hours ago
They even work sometimes I have heard.
baggachipz an hour ago
jajuuka an hour ago
These types of articles always remind of conspiracy theorists. Being so excited to view something in a new way, to degradate something popular, to view themselves as unique individuals and in control again. That they are outside the mainstream and that is superior because they have the secret knowledge.
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.
ajross an hour ago
Some of this is... pretty tortured:
> 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.
OrvalWintermute 2 hours ago
> My conscious is a tiny bit cleaner
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.