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Comment by eth0up | Hacker News Reader

It would hardly accomplish the unseating, but influencing people to stop using it even if just for search, would be helpful.

Duckduckgo is the only thing that has come close to doing this, but insignificantly. Unfortunately, while DDG seems less sinister than Google, it is also less functional - I find it one of the worst engines for most things. I really miss Scroogle!

Google is a monster, and as much as many would love to see it go away, it's here to stay without some unprecedented paradigm change. Thankfully the work of some few provides some options around it. I try to support this, though am frequently perceived as odd for doing so.

If it helps any, Amazon is shitting its own formidable pile of waste upon the internet. I can't find an article on any consumable product without wading through dozens of blogurgitations exalting the magnificent cloaca of Lord Bezos - regardless of search engine!

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Have you tried Kagi? I am very happy with it. I went Google -> DuckDuckGo -> Kagi in the last 6 years.

I was under the impression that kagi is a paid service. I don't mind what others do, but I'm personally opposed to paying what I consider extortion fees to avoid being smothered in toxic waste. As a bit of an idealist, I hold that some things should be free, notably access to freely extent digital data.

That said, even if I've mistaken, I frequently see positive reports of kagi.

Thanks for the recommendation.

You're not paying for access though. You're paying for curation. Access to any given site is free (ignoring the cost of internet access itself) assuming you know the URL. What is not free is someone taking your query and finding sites that might be what you want. You pay in currency or attention. Take your pick.

We all need to think about paying for the internet because literally none of it is free. Not even the hobby blog on a random desktop in someone's basement. It still costs them that bit more in electricity. If no one will pay then we all deserve to drown in ads because that's what we say we wanted with our non-dollars.

I do not deny that there's validity to your points. For me, it's the wrong interpretation. Again, I understand the points, but the way I gaze into the future reflects an ugly picture if we allow ourselves to go this direction. We're immersing ourselves in a service (no production) economy which could easily result in a nightmare situation where too many people are trying to survive by creating problems to solve and every individual's primary existential purpose is to be economically, perpetually gnawed at by fellow parasites. The entire concept of currency is problematic and I foresee such things severely exacerbating it.

I won't hold you back, but I will myself. And don't perceive my words as a challenge, insult or anything negative - it's just something that makes, perhaps, too much sense to me.

Are you saying that "the entire concept of currency is problematic", and therefore you want to get stuff for free, even though you know that those who provide this stuff do it in exchange of money?

Sounds like saying that in order to solve poverty, you steal everything... your reasoning makes absolutely no sense to me.

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