It's important to conduct experiments. I don't really have a problem with this.
However, I also don't use Google Search. I use (and pay for) Kagi. So I'm not the intended audience for this.
However, I also don't use Google Search. I use (and pay for) Kagi. So I'm not the intended audience for this.
Edit: When Google IPO'd, the offer was for $2,718,281,828 worth of stock. That was a signal about who was in charge and it colored the company's identity.
This is the opposite.
Back in the 90s Google proved you could make "all" available better via search than the Yahoo catalog a d thus became the landing page.
Nowadays the pure search bar is integrated into the browsers addressbar and Google as starting page has been replaced with Twitter/X, Reddit, news sites, .. and Google has to find something to become the start page again.
I use the $5/month tier ($60 per year) of Kagi.
Google doesn't cost you money... but there is a cost associated with using it, and I'm not willing to pay that cost.
Plus, Google Search's quality has dramatically dropped in the last ten years.
doesn't everyone?
for clarity, the $5 tier gives you 300 searches a month. with 300 I just know that some months I'd go well over, and some months I wouldn't come close. it's just the perfect number where there's uncertainty. 200 I'd always hit. 450-500 I'd probably never
they should just tell marketing/sales to fuck off and charge per search. they'd gain me as a user
>Google's search quality has dropped
yeah it has, but its still better than any of its free competitors. around a year ago I tried a few of the free alternatives (DDG, Bing, Ecosia, Brave Search). what I found is that Google is still by far the best at understanding what you're searching for, where it struggles is prioritising results
the problem is that every other search engine I tried has the exact same issue, but doesn't know what the fuck you're searching for half the time
Brave is slightly different in that it is better for avoiding SEO dreck but it isn't fantastic at understanding you and it misses certain search operands
Without getting too specific, maybe 10% of my searches are programming-related, 25% current events, 25% sites or information that was current 20+ years ago, and 40% "other."
Basically... Kagi is better at returning results I'm interested in. I use DDG for searching on my work laptop, because separation of concerns. Google, though? It doesn't work for me.
If it works for you, great. Keep using it.
As for Brave... well, I don't abide cryptocurrency in any form, so that's an ideological "nope" for me.
>As for Brave... well, I don't abide cryptocurrency in any form, so that's an ideological "nope" for me.
I understand distrusting crypto, but this seems like really childish reasoning. I think it's fair to generally distrust strangers at first. does that mean that you should never interact with them?
Brave has an optional crypto feature that I turned off once and never saw again. reddit also has in-built crypto features, do you refuse to use reddit too?