Comment by eitland | Hacker News Reader

Comment by eitland | Hacker News Reader

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I think it is time we realize that Google in its current form is broken in many ways.

This is just one example. Others include:

- insisting on captchas,and not just one, even when I'm logged in with my >10 year old, paid for account with two-factor enabled

- not being able to detect flag attacks against legitimate accounts (as seen on the front page today)

- killing reader, trying to force everyone to use a single identify, then at the same time name their otherwise brilliant social network the same thing as the hated identity solition

- then killing said social network

- not being able to even keep the quality on their flagship user facing product (for us who knew it 10 and 15 years ago what we see today is a mockery.)

I hope someone here can submit applications for next batch of YC:

- like Google search in 2008. I'll happily turn off your adblocker for you and be glad to see simple, relevant text ads. Or pay up to USD5 monthly if thats better (more if necessary and if the quality is good enough, although at some point I'd probably need to expense it.)

- like Google+ but not owned by Google

- like Google Reader but not owned by Google

And, probably also (unrelated to Google):

- like stackoverflow but focused on answering questions, not playing political and nitpicking games

- like WhatsApp before they were acquired (and with a strong guarantee that this new company will stay independent)

Some possible alternatives you could try:

For search engine I'd suggest duckduckgo, it's far from perfect but I don't see any other viable alternative, if anyone knows anything please let us know.

For messaging I would suggest Signal. The problem there is that most people don't know of it and they won't ditch whatsapp to go on something that their friends won't be on.

That's the same problem that a new social network is going to face. I think it's safe to say that if even Google with all their capital couldn't make it work, then it's going to be extremely difficult to find investors to bet on a random guy's idea. Facebook with all the shit it has been and done has almost 2bn users, how are we going to convince even 5% of them to abandon it for something new without anyone they know there?

Thanks! I mostly agree.

I already use duckduckgo. It is not as good as Google used to be but a lot less annoying - and Google is not as good as it used to be either, so I consider duckduckgo best now. Also trying with Google after duckduckgo is faster than the other way around.

I already Signal but although more and more people join, nobody uses it for day-to-day texts and family updates.

Everyone I know uses Telegram and even after following all discussions here I'm fine with that.

> That's the same problem that a new social network is going to face. I think it's safe to say that if even Google with all their capital couldn't make it work, then it's going to be extremely difficult to find investors to bet on a random guy's idea.

Partly agree. But I think an Instagram or WhatsApp style bootstrapping of a new social network is still possible and no one has stepped up to take the plave of Google+.

Remember, it was Google that ran it. I suspect it was utterly mismanaged.

A number of things can work very well even if Google can't make it work.

> Also trying with Google after duckduckgo is faster than the other way around.

And with the '!g'-bang you can still have privacy and use google.

How would this yield better privacy than searching directly from Google?

For programming related things (in general, everything non mainstream), I find ddg to be nearly unusable and I always have to go back to Google. The results I get on ddg are almost always only in the general area of the search terms, while Google gives me specific results that are relevant and helpful. Sadly that's why I can't switch as much as I want to.

I do not find this; I've been using ddg exclusively for several years now.

> - like Google search in 2008. I'll happily turn off your adblocker for you and be glad to see simple, relevant text ads. Or pay up to USD5 monthly if thats better (more if necessary and if the quality is good enough, although at some point I'd probably need to expense it.)

I'd happily pay significantly more if it's good. The amount of time I'd save with a good search engine will easily be calculated in hours per month. $50 a month to save me 5 hours and lots of mental energy not spent on skimming useless results? Where do I sign up?

> like Google Reader but not owned by Google

Since Reader was shut down, we've gotten a lot of really good options for RSS.

Feedly, Inoreader, TinyTinyRSS, Newsblur, The Old Reader, Feedbin, FeedHQ…

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