Hacker News Reader

Comment by evanjrowley | Hacker News Reader

In my lists of Pros and Cons for sticking with the Google Pixel ecosystem, one of the Cons is the fact that Google definitely does not want you to have this valuable capability. If you stop looking things up, then you won't be looking at their search engine, their ads, and their recommendation algorithms. Every platform wants you to do that. It's why bookmarks in Google Chrome lack useful features like tagging. It's one of the reasons why so many vendors try to lock your data inside their walled gardens. Apple is well known for walled gardens, but for the most part, you can be sure they will let you change your default search engine without much hassle. They won't care so much if you want to use something like SearXNG to prioritize your knowledgebase first, however, the App Store, Apple Music, and Apple TV are the same story as Google - any attempts to influence the search results in your favor will be actively fought against.

View on HN

>Apple is well known for walled gardens, but for the most part, you can be sure they will let you change your default search engine without much hassle.

Respectfully, please, this below is an absolute joke--has it changed in a decade?

https://imgz.org/i6oyQ3QG.jpg

Image: Apple provides easy changing for Google, Yahoo, Bing, DuckDuckGo, and Ecosia. (That poor paid search engine that starts with a K has to mess around with extensions; I'm unaffiliated.)

Plus, even though I have it set to DuckDuckGo, when I ask Siri to "search {query}", it searches Google. So even the default I have set is not actually truly the all-around default. Embarrassing to have locked this down as if I didn't drop a grand on the phone.

Fun fact: for years now, asking Siri to "search Google Images" results in whitelabeled Bing Images (thankfully, exceptionally easy to remedy with the excellent Shortcuts: "Picture-Search" for Google, quality difference night & day unfortunately... anyway go SearXNG!, it lets you keep your soul).

This enlightening fact has burst my hubris bubble. Shows how much I know about iOS (e.g., the marketing). Well, I hope the EU comes up with a good alternative. I'm sure they'll have some law that requires all searches be age-verified and reported to the government, but at least we can bet the implementation will be "sovereign" and distanced from FAANG.

—-

Oops btw I said “exceptionally easy to remedy” when that isn’t true because I can’t say “{shortcut name} {query}”; must be two separate commands. Not first class unless I want Bing Images hehe (“search images {query}”, single dictation to Siri).

This seems obvious in retrospect! I've often wondered why Chrome's bookmarks (and, to a lesser extent, history) system is so bad, even to the point of thinking it was a bit suspicious, but I didn't put 2 and 2 together and realise that a better version could directly hurt Google's search business.

> Google definitely does not want you to have this valuable capability. If you stop looking things up, then you won't be looking at their search engine, their ads, and their recommendation algorithms.

Google is very interested in knowing about whatever you're interested in, and in knowing when, how often, and for how long you're interested in those things. In addition to looking at their search engine, their ads, and their recommendations, you're also feeding them more and more data about you.

This is why I switched to Kagi. Even if it's just proxying Google, it doesn't tell Google who I am.

My problem with Kagi is that it requires a login to be useful meaning that it always knows exactly who you are and can associate your searches to your identity. If you don't log into google they can only guess (although honestly they'll probably guess accurately given enough search data).

I think I remember Kagi was working on a way to allow users to create an anonymous account and if so I'll have to take another look at them.

Kagi Privacy Pass

https://blog.kagi.com/kagi-privacy-pass

FWIW, I'm also a paid Kagi user and would like very much if I could use it with SearXNG or potentially have it include my own self-hosted services as part of my personal search results.

Extend that to marketplaces too, all their search UIs have dark patterns forcing you to see their “recommendations” instead of being able to manipulate the results like you want.

Thank you for your insight and comment. I’ve witnessed this behavior but never thought to question it until now. It’s amazing how simple and devious it can be.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com