Leaving Google has actively improved my life

> 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.

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.

This being on the front page of hacker news is embarassing. Low substance post that is misleading if anything - I was hoping for a career reflection. Not a low-quality "pat on the back" post of no value

I'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.

> 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.

It is very easy to get rid of Google, at least for the kind of person on HN.

Search -> DuckDuckGo

Drive -> Own networked file server

Phone -> Flash Graphene on your Pixel

Browser -> Firefox

Email -> Host your own (this is the hardest)

Youtube -> uBlock Origin (for Firefox), logged out

The last one isn't really a replacement, but Google certainly isn't making any money. Now do the same with Apple and Microsoft by running Linux on your machines and you are close to 100% free of big tech.

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)

Fastmail and Kagi are not noticeable expenses (to me) but are a noticeable increase in quality of life.

Might not have been true at one point but if you can spare the cost I highly recommend either.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

> 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.

Gmail can be made vanilla. It sounds like switching emails and improving their email hygiene was the real improvement.

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).

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.

Couldn't agree more. Kagi for search, Fastmail for e-mail, Apple Maps for navigation (though I rely on Google Maps for reviews). Once a realistic not-Office 365 alternative for docs and spreadsheets appears, I'm going to bail on Drive too.

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 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.

He lost me at paying for services. Sure, me in my 40s can afford to pay for a good 200$ worth of services, but when I was starting out in high school and college, I could not even fathom paying for anything. And that was the time I was doing real work in my life, not like now.

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.

> My inbox is so much cleaner now, and I patiently await the newsletters I’ve signed up for like a gleeful child waiting for the postman.

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.

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.

I highly recommend self-hosting a meta-search engine to get away from any single provider without losing the benefits of either. I have been using searx[0] happily for years.

[0]: https://github.com/searxng/searxng

This is not written by a former Google employee, it's written by a former Google user. Confusing title to see on hackernews.

> 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.

I don't even use Google's regular search that often... but I'm addicted to Google Books, and nobody is offering to replace that. Google Scholar is also amazing. In those niche spaces, Google is a defacto monopoly.

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.

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.

This is the way. Vote with your wallet!

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.

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.

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.

I'm in the process of de-googling. It will take time (changing third party contact emails - banks, etc is annoying) - I honestly wish there was the equivalent of "moving" where emails could be updated the same way.

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.

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

"How to replace Amazon, Google, X, Meta, Apple – and more" - https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/feb/26/how-to-re...

It's like a drug - getting off is not so easy for many people. I still use youtube and a chromium-based browser. I want to become google-free eventually.

I 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.

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.

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.

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.

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...

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.

> actively improved my life

Doesn't clarify beyond some trite remarks with no actual proof.

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

> 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.

FWIW Google Gemini is currently like the Google of old - the search pretty much always finds what I want with no b.s..

I’m sure someday it will be aggressively monetized and enshitified but enjoying it while it lasts.

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 .

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.

Startpage is good

"Leaving Google" = "stopped using Google services" in this case (vs. "quit working at Google")

Is there a legitimate reason why only Google can trawl Reddit or is it just more monopolistic bullshit?

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.

"conscience," not "conscious."

Kagi, Fastmail, Immich, LibreOffice are all excellent alternatives to Google Garbage.

I saw someone on Safari having to actually watch YouTube ads.

It was so bizarre! I forgot those even exist.

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.

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.

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.

[dead]

> 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.