[spaghettiToy]

I know I should hate google for some reason, but despite the SEO spam, they are still better than bing and duck duck go.

I think my cocktail of degoogled Google products + adblock solutions + being that person who doesn't care about privacy has made Google 'fine'.

I avoid using Google products unless they are FOSS. I'm not going to get screwed by "play music" or similar again.

Out of FAAMG, I think I like Google the best. But that doesn't say much.

[mrweasel]

> I know I should hate google for some reason

I've come around a bit, after getting asked at an interview: "So, why no apply at Google?". Google doesn't align with my personal values. They contribute a great deal to our industry, they provide good jobs to a large number of people and they have a number of good products, like GCP.

My problem with Google is they reliance on ads. It's not a model I wish to support. It damages they primary product, search (well, I mean, their primary product is ads now), and damages their credibility and overall brand. We haven't been able to trust product like Chrome or Android for years.. That is they choice, but I don't have support it, or help them build these products. Not that I think they'd hire me.

But I don't hate Google, they're just not particular relevant to me anymore. Other search engines provide just as good searches. DuckDuckGo happens to be a little better and have a better interface than Bing or Ecosia, even if they're all "just Bing".

[mccorrinall]

Hey, even the founders of google knew in 1998 that the ad system can hurt them:

"Currently, the predominant business model for commercial search engines is advertising. The goals of the advertising business model do not always correspond to providing quality search to users. For example, in our prototype search engine one of the top results for cellular phone is "The Effect of Cellular Phone Use Upon Driver Attention", a study which explains in great detail the distractions and risk associated with conversing on a cell phone while driving. This search result came up first because of its high importance as judged by the PageRank algorithm, an approximation of citation importance on the web [Page, 98].

It is clear that a search engine which was taking money for showing cellular phone ads would have difficulty justifying the page that our system returned to its paying advertisers. For this type of reason and historical experience with other media [Bagdikian 83], we expect that advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers."

http://infolab.stanford.edu/pub/papers/google.pdf

[tomrod]

I hear ya.

This thread has made me realize what I don't like about the ad model Google uses (as well as others) beyond the noise.

It totally disconnects the user, such that the user is not actually cared about.

I got that academically but reading the vociferous defense of the fake "how many results you get" figure, I now see that it is inherent. That bit of information benefits no one. It doesn't serve the user. So why keep it? Branding. But its a lie. It's a little lie in terms of who it hurts, but it's common lie. So what else does Google not care about due to the model it uses?

[waynesonfire]

> Other search engines provide just as good searches.

That's just plain false. Perhaps better stated is you're tolerant to the results provided by alternatives.

I tried DDG for a few months and found myself having to re-run my query on Google 60-70% of the time. It was an annoying experience.

[mrweasel]

> That's just plain false.

I think it's subjective. If 90% of your results are ads, then it's not actually better. What I believe it boils down to is what you search for, and slightly how you search. Personally I'm at a point now that if DDG can't find something, then neither can Google. The difference is that Google will yank out the primary keyword, if it thinks that will yield results, but those are obviously always wrong.

Some things are unsearchable on bother DDG and Google, topics like weightloss, have just been SEO'ed to death and are no longer available online. Others maybe two ads on DDG, but an entire page on Google.

[cpeterso]

I've used DDG for 5+ years. Its results used to be mixed, but for the last 2-3 years, its results are good. I only fall back to Google for less than 2% (1 in ~50) searches, though I do rely a lot on DDG's !bang searches that redirect to specific sites for different technical topics. But I don't see that as a failing of DDG. When I do fall back to Google, it's for "needle in a haystack" searches.

[scotty79]

Try DDG browser on your phone. That was what got me over to the other side. After few unsuccessful attempts on the desktop.

[hackernewds]

What's wrong with ads? What is another better system?

[mellavora]

It isn't a problem with ads. The problem is the misalignment between the business model and the product, and also the misalignment between the business model and the main users of the system.

Another better system? Look at the early days of Google, they never would have gotten off the ground without very generous support from academia and specifically their university. What if it had been kept a university-based product?

And yes, it could have reached its current search capacity and still remained a Stanford-based initiative. Stanford has the resources. We might not have gotten any of the other google products out of that, but Google seems to cancel them all anyway, so I don't see a huge difference.

[lrem]

Does Stanford actually have that kind of resources? Based, say, on Randal Munroe's estimation of Google's capacity?

[joshuamorton]

You can get a better estimate from Google's CapEx in it's financials.

Stanford's endowment is ~30 billion. Google's CapEx is ~20 billion a year and has been for the last 4 years or so. You can weasel about exactly how much of that is attributable to search as opposed to other initiatives, (but even if you look back a decade to when Google was mostly search, it was running a CapEx of ~5 billion/year). So even making pretty favorable estimations, you'd be looking at Stanford being bankrupt around now.

[mrweasel]

For some products it's obviously a fine system. A majority of people will never pay for a search engine, or social media, so ads are a good way to pay for those services.

Where I think companies, such as Google or Meta, goes off the deep end, is the amount of money you can realistically extract from advertising, without compromising your product. Both Google and Meta (much to my surprise) are extremely wealthy, but at the cost of what I'd call decency or morale. Both could have fine products and successful business, but somewhat smaller, and be financed by ads.

If you look back that the original Google ads, where they not successful? They certainly seemed to pay the bills back them. My point is: If your company is financed by advertising, you need to accept that there's a limit to your potential growth, if you still want to be view in an overall positive light.

[mrkramer]

Yes, there is a limit on how many ads they can show to you without deteriorating user experience but sometimes they just don't care. They think like this: Q2 results were weaker than expected, let's show more ads to users in order to boost our Q3 results.

[specialist]

Conflict of interest. Search and ads must be separate entities. Meaning, Alphabet can certainly sell ad space, but via a separate broker.

Ditto Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, Meta, etc.

[scarface74]

Giving money to businesses in exchange for goods and services?

[tomrod]

Subscription, typically, to align customers with users.

[rentfree-media]

I don't think you have evaluated the quality of your results from Google very carefully.

Research is part of my job. I routinely find things on Google that I circle back to later to check up on and find that they've disappeared (not things disparaging to anyone that one would be motivated to get off of google, talking about things just disappearing for inexplicable reasons).

For the first time in a decade, during the past year I have started using alternative search engines because the quality of Google results is bad.

[tuckerman]

Perhaps we are searching in different domains or have different expectations but I haven’t had the same experience. I use DDG as my primary search engine but very often I end up adding !g to get to results that are usable and it’s to the point where for a lot of things I !g straight from the start.

[mellavora]

Haven't had the experience of things disappearing off of google?

Of things which were a top result a year ago but now show on page 20?

What domains are you searching on??? Google explicitly personalized your search results, which means it is intentionally presenting different results with every search.

Google might be your current best option, but that doesn't discredit the poster's view.

[tuckerman]

I've not experienced any of the things which you describe and I find personalization to be generally valuable. I also think its less personalized than many people believe it to be. (Disclaimer: I used to work at Google/Alphabet but not on Search).

I didn't say Google was the best for everyone all of the time, just for me most of the time. I just didn't agree that anyone that uses Google hasn't carefully evaluated the quality of the results: I intentionally made an alternative my default and, despite it being harder for me to use Google now, I still fall back to it more often than not.

[rentfree-media]

Perhaps, in my case in some of these cases I remember wording / sentences explicitly that I can recite from memory, or failing that, I surely remember a string of keywords that will only appear in a handful of articles.

And like I said, it's not uncommon to find something on Google one day and have it just gone six months later.

[threads2]

Same! the google maps m! is just too good for me not to use DDG. (does Google have an equivalent?)

[ukyrgf]

Yep, I've had this as my first bookmark on my toolbar for years:

> javascript:(function(){$('.js-search-input').val('!g '+$('.js-search-input').val());$('.js-search-form').submit();})()

[brightball]

I’ve given week at a time committed tries to several other search engines at this point.

I tried Kagi, DDG, Bing and Brave Search. I was surprised that I kept getting good results from Brave. Still using it and generally don’t need to look elsewhere for most searches.

The others were more of a mixed bag.

[vic-traill]

> I was surprised that I kept getting good results from Brave

Agreed. I'm expecting the Brave Index to let me down almost every time I use it, however it does a pretty good job.

I don't find the same results, but I see good results.

[devin]

Dedicated Kagi user here. It is extremely rare that I !g or use another engine. Not affiliated with them in any way, but I like to plug them when I can as I really enjoy a model that isn't ad-supported. It's a great product IMO.

[fcoury]

Came here to post about Kagi, have been using them almost exclusively accross all my devices, alongside the Orion browser. Happy customer and zero affiliation as well.

[brightball]

I enjoyed Kagi too. I think it has a lot of promise fwiw.

[AlotOfReading]

DDG and brave have been my default search engines for the past couple years. Despite that, only 2 of my last 10 or so searches weren't followed up with !g.

Take the last search ("bronze patina thickness"), where I wanted to know how thick a typical bronze patina is. The first brave result is a hardware store in Spokane (not even my state!) that sells door latches. The rest of the page is SEO content about watches.

The first result on Google links a paper and the results excerpt tells me 40-50um, up to 70um with prolonged exposure. The performance still isn't close for me despite the clear decline in Google search quality over the years.

[knoebber]

Results from https://kagi.com/search?q=bronze+patina+thickness

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patina

2. https://www.adamsbronze.com/bronze-patinas/

3. https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/materials-science/patin...

3a. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S23524...

4. https://www.corrosionpedia.com/important-facts-you-might-not...

5. https://www.accurateimageinc.com/CutMetals/Finish_CutBrnzPat...

[kevin_thibedeau]

DDG has been falling down in the past week with "no results" showing up frequently for trivial searches.

[lcampbell]

Are you using the no-javascript version (“HTML” version), by any chance? If so, you might find the “fully-featured” version has better^W results, at the cost of requiring Javascript and all that entails.

[AlbertCory]

Since you've seen me elsewhere in this thread, you might have pegged as "google fanboy."

Not a bit of it. I go out of my way to use DDG and it's almost always adequate. I said "almost."

I haven't tried the others you mentioned.

[wizofaus]

I suspect those who find the alternatives effective aren't using search engines the way I and many other users are: asking a specific question to which there is a definitive answer that we expect Google to know. In almost every case I ask such a question, Google comes up with the goods, whereas the others (Brave especially) often do not, or at best the answer is buried somewhere in one of the first few pages found.

Edit: I just signed up for and tried Kagi. Strangely it seems to do well for searches based on my current physical location (despite never explicitly granting it permission to make use of that) but if I qualify my questions with "in America", not so well. But definitely better than DDG/Brave.

[Kuinox]

Your IP give away your current location.

[mrkramer]

Google is no longer place where do you go to find useful information and good websites. First page of Google Search results is always a mix of popular websites like WSJ, NYT, BBC, Guardian, Reuters, Forbes, Bloomberg or any other famous and popular site like for example Reddit and other part of the mix are some low quality, spammy, copy-paste content random sites that are of no real use. Google prefers popular information instead of useful information and on top of that nobody really knows how exactly Google's ranking algorithms work not even Google's engineers but general rule is like I said popular content must be on the first page.

One thing I like about Google tho is their Knowledge Graph[0] because I can type keywords like time, temperature or convert in the search box and Google will do this small task for me. I see it as a set of little web apps on top of Google which help us users to automate our tasks.

[0] https://support.google.com/knowledgepanel/answer/9787176?hl=...

[kayson]

I've long since switched to DDG nearly exclusively and I've rarely felt like I am unable to find what I'm looking for. When I can't, I switch to Google (easily using DDG's !g bang) and almost always can't find it there either.

[MBCook]

To a degree that’s Google’s fault.

Every person doing a search is a data point. Every result they go to is a signal. You can use that information to do a better job of providing relevant hits to good quality websites.

Google is good -> gets more traffic -> gets more signals -> Google gets better faster.

Everyone could do that. But Google gets the most traffic. They have the most popular browser. The most popular phone OS on earth. And they pay for that same advantage from the only other popular phone/tablet OS.

If someone else was the default search on iOS they could improve much faster than they do today and be a bigger threat to Google.

So Google pays.

[joe_the_user]

While being better than Bing, Google has declined significantly over just the last few years.

Even with some small percent of Google's search results, Bing must have a lot of eyes and I suspect it's declined in the fashion of Google - trying to squeeze every dime of monetization out of each result.

The thing is, the Internet has facilitated the creation of a world of unlimited competition where no institution wants or can afford to trade squeezing out maximum profits now for building a better future they could benefit from.

[_8j50]

Ddg works for me for technical searches, google is better for digging up stuff though. I default to ddg but use google as needed.

[givemeethekeys]

I like Duckduckgo - it is my default search and I haven't felt the need to try other searches in a while.

[_vdpp]

DDG results are a little “different” than Google’s but no worse. Like somebody else said, usually when DDG can’t find the answer neither can Google.

[bergenty]

I don’t hate google, I like their product and everything about the company to be honest including the fact that they regularly kill off products. Do I miss the products? Yes but I like the churn and the idea that multiple teams are working on similar products.

[mark_l_watson]

I find it interesting that you don’t like Google Play Music (now called YouTube Music). You didn’t like the rebranding? The Google products I like: YouTube, YouTube Music, and GCP (my favorite hosting platform). For search, I usually use DDG - good enough for me.

[jdeaton]

GPM to YTM wasnt wasn't a rebranding, its a completely different (and much worse) product.

[scarface74]

I like a business model where I give a company money and they give me stuff. That leaves Google and Facebook as my least favorite company. Not surprisingly, those two have the worse “customer service” because you are not the customer.

[NayamAmarshe]

Brave Search has been a blessing. The results are even higher quality than Google, it's honestly surprising at times. Plus I don't have to sell my soul to use their services, it's great!

[2OEH8eoCRo0]

> they are still better than bing and duck duck go.

I'm not so sure about that. I curiously had to use Bing to find more information about this. Google kept showing me old news or this exact article.

[ErrrNoMate]

DuckDuckGo is Bing.

[lofatdairy]

>FAAMG

Is that with Netflix swapped with Microsoft? If that's the case, we might as well change the entire acronym to GAMMA to account for the Facebook -> Meta rename.

[MichaelCollins]

Or we could simply not comply with their attempt to launder their reputation, and keep calling them Facebook.

[waynesonfire]

No. FAANG is basically an eponym at this point. The companies that make up the acronym are irrelevant and they'll change overtime but the idea doesn't.

"FAANG is an acronym for the five best-performing American tech stocks in the market"

[sseagull]

I remember when there were The Four Horsemen (apparently even two versions):

Around 2000, it was Microsoft, Intel, Dell, Cisco

Later, around 2007, it was Apple, RIMM (Research in Motion/Blackberry), Google, Amazon

Source: https://247wallst.com/media/2007/06/06/cramers_new_fou/

[__derek__]

FAANG: Five Assets Appreciating 'N' Growing

[theandrewbailey]

F*** the MMAAAN:

Meta

Microsoft

Alphabet

Apple

Amazon

Netflix

[scarface74]

Netflix never deserved to be in the same sentence as Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft and Google. Their market influence and market cap were never in the same realm.