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Comment by clint | Hacker News Reader

I would say you are an extreme outlier. Most people use all these Google products with no problems nor do they seem to share your fears.

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At this point, I much prefer the results of bing. For the top few results, I don't have to guess what will be on the page, based solely on the pages title. Compare:

"how do mems absolute air pressure sensor work"

bing: https://www.bing.com/search?q=how+do+mems+absolute+air+press...

google: https://www.google.com/search?q=how+do+mems+pressure+sensors...

I've also seen many cases of "unfavorable" news articles being deranked, in google search results, while can be easily found on Bing. The best examples being during the pandemic, where there appeared to be a massive amount of curation.

The results are slightly different but where they overlap the summary/preview/description doesn't seem radically different to me. But I'm not familiar with the subject so maybe I'm not seeing it the way you do. Bing has more images/thumbnails from some of the results so maybe that's it?

For this case, the biggest tell of quality is the existence of a block diagram, schematic, or equations.

But, even without images, the "explore further" recommendations are fantastic, with direct links to research papers. Google seems to not recommend research papers (zero on my results).

Wow. For me the difference is night and day. On my phone, google gives me first two screenfuls of ads, then about the same amount of homepages of companies apparently selling mems sensors, and then some kind of wiki that seems to answer the question, maybe… Bing, otoh, has an explanation of what a mems sensor is and how it works as the first thing on the page. I guess I’ll try switching default search engine now. (For me, google results have definitely been getting way, way worse for a couple of years. At the moment, google search plainly _does not work_ for me probably 5-10% of the time, i.e. I _only_ get ads and unrelated results.)

While "extreme outlier" is probably true, here on HN many of us are extreme outliers. So while true, at least he's in good company.

I am on the road to de-Google my life, or at least add some backups in case of Google locks me out of my account. On HN I've seen articles about people who have been locked out of their Google accounts based on 1) taking a picture of a boy's genitals intended medical purposes, 2) submitting a chargeback for a Pixel phone that never arrived, and 3) unknown reasons, likely Google's AI incorrectly flagging an account.

Even on HN, you’re in the minority. If you took HN as a representative sample, you’d think Linux was the #1 OS by a long shot even though it’s a rounding error for personal usage. There’s a big old bubble here.

Far and away, the most used OS for personal usage in the world is Android.

If you squint, you can call that Linux.

At one point, my Gmail was my primary email. Losing it suddenly would have created some enormous pain. Since there would be no way of recovering it, short of a Google employee on HN or Twitter taking pity on me, that seemed like a highly unwelcome risk. Even if the risk was just 1 in a million, I didn't want to take that chance. Moved to my own domain name and services which will provide some customer support if there's any problem. That peace of mind is worth the small price vs. Google's free.

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