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Comment by KasianFranks | Hacker News Reader

Facebook has always been the next AOL. In comparison, you'll rarely hear someone say "I'm leaving Google search". Social nets vs Search and Search still wins. This is why there's still a large difference in value between them in terms of revenue, users and algorithmic technology.

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I am (trying to) leave Google search for Duck Duck Go. Many people I know are doing the same. Admittedly it is harder to leave Google search than Facebook.

What's keeping you? I switched my default search engine nearly a year ago and in large part I haven't really noticed. At first, occasionally I'd not find something I was looking for, and would switch to Google to see if I could find it. The number of times that I've found something on Google but not DDG in the past six months would be low single digits.

I did leave Google search. I so did many others on HN.

Social nets are much more easily duplicated than algorithmic search.

So... .000005% of the population?

Change and growth must start somewhere. I've used DDG for years but only recently I started recommending it to everybody, and endorsing Firefox as well.

Same here, ditched Chrome for Firefox and Chromium, and Google Search for DDG. Altough I don't see how I could stop using Android, maps, youtube and gmail :-/

I'm in the exact same spot. Android can be ditched for LineageOS. Gmail is risky because of security; using anything else is a big gamble. Maps is also irreplaceable right now, but over time competitors will get better.

You should ditch Chromium as well.

> Maps is also irreplaceable right now, but over time competitors will get better.

The last company to pour significant resources into maps was Apple and they have essentially given up. If the most valuable company ever created cannot defeat Maps, nothing will. Including OSM. There was a story on here a few months ago called Google Maps’ Moat. Give it a read. Maps is not going anywhere.

I read that article back then, I just don't agree with it ^.

With the rise of self-driving cars, maps will become a non-issue. All the companies that nail self-driving cars, and there will be several, will over time have a maps that is better than Google's today.

^ I mean, I do agree it's a moat, it just had the unusual property that the path to bring it down is pretty clear.

if you were really wanting to move away from gmail, I'd recommend a paid-for service, like fastmail

My comment about security still applies. In fact, I think it was precisely fastmail that a while ago I read on HN someone complaining that someone else hacked them by calling customer support and kind of guessing some questions.

So... I don't care what the rest of the population is doing?

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