Ask HN: Do you still use Google search? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Do you still use Google search?

13 pointsyosito34 comments

Between Kagi and Perplexity AI, I haven't bothered with Google search in over a year and I don't miss it at all. I'm wondering if other HN users are using Google search, and if not, which alternatives are you using?

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I switched to Kagi a few months ago and I’m generally happy with it. However, I still need to occasionally use Google for some very specific searches that Kagi doesn’t handle (or handles incorrectly).

E.g I can’t do timezone conversions with Kagi. I know I could just use an app for this, but it’s far quicker to type “10:30am EST to IST” into my browser’s address bar than to reach for yet another app.

Another thing Kagi doesn’t do yet is currency conversion. Once again, it might be easier/more accurate to use an app for this, but I usually just need a ballpark conversion and searching Google is quicker than using an app.

I live in India but my clients are often in the US. I also have a lot of friends/family living across the world. I suspect I do timezone/currency conversions roughly 8-10 times during a regular work day. This is why I still end up on Google Search despite not liking that company or their software one bit.

there is a chrome extension for that...

There is a chrome extension for everything. OPs point is (and I agree) that these things you only need once in a while are incredibly useful when they are only a search away. Installing a chrome extension for a few uses every other week is way too much effort.

u guys are the genius

Have you considered Spotlight or some equivalent software? They are excellent for these kind of conversions and searches.

I'm using Siri for timezone conversions and XE for currency conversions.

I have been trying to move away from Google for a long time. Kagi is what finally made that successful.

About 6 months ago my browsers default reverted to Google for some reason (probably something the IT department pushed out). I didn’t pay attention to the page header and when my eyes jumped down the page I physically recoiled at how bad things were. Bad results and useless junk everywhere. I looked up and saw it was Google. I truly don’t know how anyone still uses that site and considers it good.

I feel spoiled used Kagi. It’s so good.

GOOG perhaps for 10% of my previous volume, and some of that is just muscle memory. The new Google "AI results" seem cluttered and confusing.

ChatGPT is vastly more helpful, and perplexity may be even better, although I haven't made that a habit as yet.

Yes, but more and more I'm finding Google useless and just using ChatGPT for questions where appropriate (as opposed to links). They seem to be broadening the interpretation of the words I type so much it's useless. Using double quote operators (" ") only helps sometimes. Then the results you do get are just Quora and other useless blogspam and sites that don't actually show you what it said in the preview.

No. I haven't for years. I use a combination of brave search, duck duck Go, perplexity ai and now gpt4o

less and less. Most of the times i use bing's copilot to answer my needings and then from there on, I check on the links it shows me. Most of the times its sufficient for me. Big GOOGs results do not satisfy me anymore: The interpretation and overlooking of my searchwords is not an feature.

I feel like not only Copilot, but Bing’s general search has been better than Google’s for the last year or so.

I haven’t had a need to go to google for a very long time.

I mostly use Bing search or Perplexity for my searches these days.

- Bing for quick searches (as it is my browser default; I switched to Bing almost 4 years ago and never went back to Google Chrome).

- When I really want to dig into something, then I generally do a parallel search on both, Bing and Perplexity. But I am doing more and more perplexity searches these days.

- But my major use case for Google back in the 2012-2017 era was for searching code for code-related problems. That is completely replaced by 2 things: 1. My efficiency in reading and understanding official documentations; and 2. Direct questions to CodyAI (by SourceGraph) directly from within VSCode.

I mostly use Google to search on reddit, github and hacker news with "site:github.com".

It's also somehow good to find pdf files with "filetype:pdf".

As already mentioned, the occasional currency and time conversions are also pretty nice. I admit I use their calculator too sometimes.

Essentially, Google advanced search operators have been a pretty powerful feature that I've been using since I learned about it in 2011.

Other than that, I agree the generic search result are a bloody mess.

For a lot of other searches, GPT 4 helps a lot.

What is your favorite operator?

Kagi 100% for search. If I didn't have to administer a Google account for one of my family's vanity domains I'd leave Google entirely in the dust.

Google -> almost never (only by accident if using somebody else's device)

Brave Search* [0] -> almost always (if I don't like the results I prepend/append the bang [1] "!s" to switch to Startpage.

* with Firefox, not their browser

[0] https://search.brave.com/

[1] https://search.brave.com/help/bangs

I use SearX with search engines like Brave, DDG, Google, and Yahoo. Occasionally, I also utilize self-hosted Librechat and the Tavily free API search for searches.

Less than half as much. GPT 3.5 on my terminal answers most questions on the first attempt. If I wanted to say, change fonts on Apple's Pages, or find out how to connect an AWS thing to another AWS thing, GPT gets it right.

Kagi is intriguing, but most of my searches are done on incognito and it just messes with that workflow too much.

some new information all of you will like:

https://tedium.co/2024/05/17/google-web-search-make-default/

Full time Kagi user here, for almost 2 years I think, and you couldn’t pay me to go back to using Google.

For AI search, does anybody know of a better alternative to Perplexity, or is it the leader in this space right now?

Not anymore. Switched to DuckDuckGo few years ago but lately switched to Kagi.

Rarely, maybe for 5% of my searches. Moved to DDG over a decade ago.

I still use it on a couple of devices where I haven't been bothered to change the default. On devices I use a lot, I normally use Duckduckgo or Ecosia

I mostly use chatgpt. don't do google much unless i'm looking to shop or something, but then I usually just go to amazon or yelp

Perplexity starts to show bad signs, like you cannot middle click new tab yt videos. You are forced to watch them on their site. brrrr

It’s most useful for searching Reddit. For anything else is pretty comparable to all the other shit out there so Ddg is good enough

I use Google alot due to habit but DDG seems good enough and a bit faster so I might switch. I sometimes use Phind or GPT.

I'm still using Google. GPT4 has been pretty useless in my day to day as a software engineer.

100% duckduckgo. With google i must skip much more pages even with ublacklist.

For things that are current such as game scores, news, I use google search.

Kagi has been the only search engine worth any of my time over the last year.

Very, very occasionally I'll switch to startpage (google proxy) for queries that I think should have pulled a result that Kagi didn't show me. 90% of the time I'm still disappointed, so I've all but stopped doing this in recent months.

Even DDG gives me the same disgusted reaction as google. It's all spam and ads, and only the most common words in my query are considered. If the exact query returns nothing, DDG and google give me a bunch of garbage anyway. Kagi just shows a reasonable message that this query produced no results.

And let's not forget booleans and quotes and all the other advanced search techniques. Google et al just don't even have a horse in this race anymore. It's all just momentum and money, there's no product anymore.

Been using Kagi for 2 full years, all is well!

Hardly ever now

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