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Comment by ninth_ant | Hacker News Reader

Implicit in this article is the idea that you have to use Google, and that Google Search equals “the web”. I’ll be the boring nerd, I guess, who has to be the one to say there are many other search engines out there.

If you don’t like Google (I don’t), or don’t like where they are moving their products (I don’t) — please use a competing search engine.

I’ve used DuckDuckGo for years and I don’t miss anything about Google. There are plenty of other good search engines out there too.

It’s not particularly difficult to switch away and get an experience more to your liking, so it’s a bit baffling when Google Search product decisions are equated with burying the web alive. Just don’t use it!

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You have control over what you use to search the web, but you don't have control over the incentives of publishers, the content of which google used to get big and monetize and is now cannibalizing.

That’s a fair assessment.

If the intent of the article was to say that Google is creating an environment which incentivizes publishers to lock away content from scrapers, then that’s probably correct in the medium and long term.

But I feel like the market described as being cannibalized here was already in the throes of death thanks to blogspam SEO. For many information categories, in my experience AI results are quite a bit better than the top-ranked results.

And typically for those types of results you want to quickly shuffle off general web search into something more specific like Wikipedia or a site with domain expertise.

> in my experience AI results are quite a bit better than the top-ranked results.

Only because the AI results haven't been infested with ads ... yet.

As soon as the VC lottery stops, the ads will get injected and the AI stuff will quickly go just as bad.

LLMs read like ad copy even when they aren't ads. LLMs presumably trained on a ton of ad copy. A lot of ad copy is considered "public domain". Aren't the ads already injected and the real trick will be getting the advertisers to foot more of the bill?

I half believe Gemini already has an "AdSense billing model" in the works.

> Aren't the ads already injected and the real trick will be getting the advertisers to foot more of the bill?

No, the ads aren't specifically injected. Yet.

When you start finding LLMs that call all sodas "Pepsi", you will know the ads have arrived.

(Side note: I avoided using "Coke" because there are already certain sections of the US where all sodas are referred to as "Coke".)

or "pop": https://archive.nytimes.com/ideas.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/09/...

When "to google" has literally become a verb in several languages, you know it's not going to be that easy to convince literally hundreds of millions of people to use something different. For many unsavvy people, Google is and continues to be their window into the web, and they wouldn't even know they can have it another way.

It's a seemingly patronizing joke meme, but I've repeatedly seen many of my relatives type in e.g. "Facebook.com" into Google search box, and then blindly click the first entry (which is completely at the mercy of being hijacked/prioritized based on either who's paying more money to Google, or latest fun extension / glitchy website they've installed).

I have not yet found a working approach to alter that behaviour - obligatory XKCD reference [0]

0: https://xkcd.com/763/

So true and the holy grail of being the first entry fuels the industry of reviews and stars which fuels the industry of bad review removal services etc and so on. This is such a vast ecosystem and so humiliating for the participants that it is only logical to let AI write, read and handle it. This is our chance to get a life. Lets not squander it.

I wish Duck Duck Go was fewer syllables so I could try to force it into conversations as a verb.

Definitely poor branding. It needs much better 2025 branding and it’ll probably take off in this AI search era where results are really poor tbh and very inaccurate at times.

let me quack that for you

Did you find that on quack?

They own duck.com. They should revert to that.

Why don’t you “kagi” that? Could work, but it’s not free (but very worth it IMO).

People said this about AOL for a long time, too.

Sure, and that also didn't vanish in a day. All I'm saying is that there is a ton of inertia, and people will not be switching to something different in an instant.

People (including me) said this for a long time about Yahoo! too. Kinda ironic they both merged and basically died together…

Yawho!?

Jawohl!

I don’t think AOL ever topped 40 million users while a significant chunk of humanity uses Google. This entire conversation hinges on their unprecedented scale and reach, I don’t think this is an apt comparison.

You miss the 'A' in AOL.

You don’t have to convince hundreds of millions of people to use something different, you can just use something different.

I have been using something different for over ten years now. It doesn't seem to have much of an effect. Do you have another suggestion for me?

I used DuckDuckGo for 3 years, the only thing I found it useful for was the g! bang, in my opinion it wasn’t a good search engine.

If Google Search gives you the experience you want, you should probably keep using it. I was discussing options for people who are dissatisfied with their product or product direction.

What do you use now?

I switched to kagi like half a year ago and it does the job but iam still unsure if I want to pay the 20 bucks for that service.

I went back to Google but I’m pretty addicted to Claude with the search plugin. I think it’s insane.

I don’t like the Google AI summary thing because you can’t seem to “converse” with it.

kagi has an AI summary tool to which is pretty good as far as i can tell.

I did use Kagi actually, for a while, it was good, not sure it was worth the money in my opinion. Might give it another go.

I find that yearly works better for me psychologically for stuff like this.

I got a 1 yr professional of kagi just to try it. IMO the results work. I've never seen Google do better when I compare; I have seen the Google AI responses be consistently straight up wrong.

To me it's worth the cost knowing I'm paying a sustainable rate for a service. Plus I want no part in whatever the hell Google is doing these days with search.

DuckDuckGo has not been infected yet, but for example also with Bing, if I make some search, a good part of the screen is wasted with some unwanted "Copilot Answer".

As expected, the "Copilot Answer" is not only useless for me, because I always want to see the original sources, but it is also unreliable.

Just today, I have made a search for the public holidays in some European country for the year 2025, and the "Copilot Answer" has presented a list with most of them. However, one holiday was omitted despite existing, and it was exactly the one in which I was interested, because I was not sure if it is a non-working day in that country and I did not know which is its date in 2025.

I've been using Brave search and it has had the AI answers for much longer than Google has. I would even go so far as to say Google stole the idea from Brave, but then someone will point out a different search engine that was doing it longer than Brave.

I find it extremely challenging to believe you actually think that. I can't even host my own email anymore without all of my messages getting filtered as spam, because if your email service doesn't play nice with Google, then you might as well not exist. Not to mention youtube, adsense, Android (Google is trying to kill AOSP to sink their claws more deeply into Android in light of the recent antitrust suits),

Google owns too much. They're easily on the same level as standard oil and the railroad tycoons.

When a company is paying millions annually, just towards psychologists, to keep people hooked, telling people "lol just turn the computer off" is disingenuous at best.

I've been using a private email server for decades now, but it's become clear that none of the email I send using it arrives at its destination. I can receive email with them, but not send.

If this was a sudden and complete change, you may have landed on a spam blacklist.

That's certainly possible. I've had repeated issues over the years with my compilers being identified as "malware" because the object code did not match the Microsoft C runtime library. I.e. the code was not a match for anything in their databases.

For one, I didn’t say anything about email or you had to boycott Google completely. You can just change your browser to use another engine it takes like 10 seconds max. Google Search is not the web.

Second, since you brought up email —- I’ve used Fastmail for a decade and it works just fine.

> Google owns too much. They're easily on the same level as standard oil and the railroad tycoons.

I agree 100% but since regulators largely refuse to deal with it, there’s nothing stopping individual people like you or me to make our own decisions. You literally just have to click a few buttons if you’re unhappy with the service Google Search is providing.

I pay for FastMail with my own domains, and a huge portion of my email gets silently dropped, even when sending via FastMail vended domains. It's awful.

> Implicit in this article is the idea that you have to use Google, and that Google Search equals “the web”. I’ll be the boring nerd, I guess, who has to be the one to say there are many other search engines out there.

This is true for us, but a majority of non-software savvy people associate Google/Chrome (search implictly) with "the internet".

DDG is perfectly serviceable in ways Google is not.

But - Google owns the household name game. Anyone who does not just use whatever is the browser default quickly switches to Google because they are used to it and conventional wisdom is they are the best.

FWIW in terms of results, Bing is fine, I just fucking hate all the extra shit on the pages. I just want plain text.

> so it’s a bit baffling when Google Search product decisions are equated with burying the web alive. Just don’t use it!

HN doesn't make up the Google users; it's the 85% of end users out in the world that do. They're not going to switch to DDG.

Precisely. I bet 99+% of non-HN peeps have never heard of DDG/Kagi/Brave etc.

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