I don't know what this allergy to features are. You can disable the features. It is not hard. I remember when they used to force conversation feature down everyone's throats. Some oldies hated it, but when they got used to it they appreciated it. Now they have an off feature.
One issue I also find with this sort of thing. It's hard to have a longer discussion that leads to building good alternatives. A thread appears, we comment and then it disappears. There needs to be more public discourse that leads to tangible results... To real issues that get solved.
Don’t play around with email. It’s not communication, it’s critical digital infrastructure - quite possibly your primary key on the internet. The consequences of getting locked out by a faceless provider for reasons you’ll never hear about are probably a lot bigger than you think.
Would I prefer this was all open technology instead? Yeah, of course. But it is abundantly clear that economic incentives don't allow open source to compete with the big players, and that's just how it is.
Never ever, will I return to big tech.
However, having said that, never ever, will I regret having joined. It was an amazing journey.
https://kagifeedback.org/d/5445-reconsider-yandex-integratio...
I also got myself out of the most of the Apple products from the Apple ecosystem too. I'm a 1Password user because I didn't want to be part of Google or Apple ecosystems.
Then I tried Kagi, and I find that works the majority of the time, including their AI. Someone else in the comments here said Kagi's AI models are bad, but I don't think they are for answering the fairly basic questions that I typically search. I'm not going to have Kagi's AI model refactor code or something though.
It didn't really make my life any better. And at this point, I think I see more value in having AI be able to piece together information to serve me up useful information than trying to protect my privacy within email (I couldn't get off Google Photos, it's just too useful).
Claude checks multiples websites, reads them all, and answers my question.
Originally, the differentiating features were multi-gigabyte storage limits and the public's goodwill towards Google, Inc.
Gigabyte storage is now the norm, public goodwill for Alphabet, Inc. is minimal, and so there's nothing that really sets Gmail apart anymore.
However, I've noticed that search seems to become less and less useful, like huge chucks of the net is just missing. A ton of pages also doesn't really make their content searchable, in the sense that videos and images aren't tagged in any meaningful why.
Mostly I feel the internet shrinking around me, the number of pages I go to becomes fewer and fewer. Brand new topics/content mostly comes from blogs recommended by friends and colleague.
> I do my best to boycott bad things. And I fail pretty often. I still use Amazon on occasion and I can’t get off Spotify. I use Uber and DoorDash a lot more than I’d like. And I have too many Apple products/services.
> Individual actions probably will not save the world, but big tech is bad
It's weird to see this without any context or justification or comparison to other industries. As if it's so self evidently true that the author never considered the reader might dismiss his wider point when coming across it with no explanation
I self host (feels damn great) but still check my old, antique, gmail once every 3-4 months. Makes me smile and say, I was one of them.
There are two reasons I can think I use Google and Chrome for:
- Search: If I want to be sold something - say I’m in the market for an electric heater, I’ll search for it on Google to be tracked and advertised.
- Chrome: because there are some flows and UX that simply don’t work well in other browsers
> Leaving Gmail also gave me the opportunity to start implementing better digital hygiene. I no longer give my primary email to fly-by-night sites, and I'm deliberate with what things I'm signing up for.
I also do this, but with my own custom domain - still in gmail.
Gmail is fine, imo. I also don't let them algorithmically sort my email - I use filters & such.
Especially when my search query is looking up something basic from the docs (like say library function name or argument order), it really just answers what i want.
Of course a big part of the problem is that google is inundated with seo spam when it comes to programming topics .
Also I still haven't found anything that replaces Google for finding local, physical businesses.
And Gmail? I have it mainly to give to random businesses. I like Hey.com more but I don't want the utility company or some online service I barely care about cluttering it up.
Also there is no YouTube equivalent. They pay creators the most so creators are all on YouTube.
I've had DuckDuckGo as my primary search engine for years and I couldn't disagree with this more. DuckDuckGo is fine for quickly getting to well known sites where I can't remember the URL, but it's objectively worse for trying to find everything from Reddit threads to Recipes. Their depth of indexing sites like Reddit feels dramatically worse lately and recipe search will predictably give me the same list of SEO spam blogs regardless of what I type in.
DuckDuckGo also seems to be doing the YouTube search thing that everyone hates where after the first several results it just starts throwing semi-related things at you instead.
I still add "!g" to my DuckDuckGo queries when I don't have time to mess around or if the first page of results is obvious SEO spam.
The other main point in this blog post isn't really about Google at all, it's just what happened when the author set up a a new e-mail address and didn't sign up for a lot of sites with it:
> Leaving Gmail also gave me the opportunity to start implementing better digital hygiene. I no longer give my primary email to fly-by-night sites, and I'm deliberate with what things I'm signing up for.
I thought there was going to be some substance to this post but it reads like someone congratulating themselves for a choice they made and then trying to backwards justify it.
The problem is that people want a "free internet" without ads, and without any form of data harvesting. But they also don't want to pay any money, because the internet, as we all know, "is free".
In 30 years, no one has figured this out. So I feel pretty confident in stating that it's either gonna be ads or payments. And if we switch to a payment model, then the internet becomes another system where the poor are naturally disadvantaged and the rich get unlimited benefit, so I don't think any of the complaining will go away anyway. Just a new set of problems.
> Sometimes I will use Kagi's "assistant" model whilst coding. Particularly to clean up existing code/stylesheets
The only moral abortion is my abortion.
We’re moving to our own index, which we are building in collaboration with Qwant, under the name European Search Perspective.
I do see the point of the article however.
Even if you just stop using one piece of Google you’ll find yourself in a better place.
Also,
> I do my best to boycott bad things. And I fail pretty often. I still use Amazon on occasion and I can’t get off Spotify. I use Uber and DoorDash a lot more than I’d like. And I have too many Apple products/services.
OK, I can intuit why most of those are bad, but can somebody give me a good-faith interpretation on what's bad about Apple?
I'd assume it's the working conditions and material extraction processes in China, parts of Africa, and elsewhere, but isn't that true of every piece of consumer technology? The only better companies for consumer hardware that come to mind are Framework and Google for recycling parts and raw materials, but the whole point of the article is about de-googling and Framework's products are relatively niche and at a much lower price and performance / market category.
Specifically in Gmail Settings:
> Smart features: Turn on smart features in Gmail, Chat, and Meet - When you turn this setting on, you agree to let Gmail, Chat, and Meet use your content and activity in these products to provide smart features and personalize your experience.
My wife turned this off because she didn't want typing suggestions or even grammar correction. After disabling the feature, she was much happier.
(googler, opinions are my own)
I still scratch my head how DuckDuckGo has made people excited for Bing search results in a way Microsoft never has.
Doesn't clarify beyond some trite remarks with no actual proof.
If the thought of privacy doesn't turn you off, you must love the thought of unsolicited marketing emails getting amplified through ads that Google serves you.
Like, what does this guy even mean about the algorithm sorting his inbox? Legit what the fuck is he talking about? Non junk mail goes to my inbox. Spam goes to spam. What am I missing?
And speaking of spam, I have a bunch of proton mail accounts and outlook accounts and iCloud mail accounts and Gmail’s spam filter is easily the best. Like, it’s not even close. Protonmail is nearly as bad as outlook at dealing with spam. It’s impossible to overstate how bad both of them are at filtering spam vs Gmail.
I legit feel like I’m either being actively gaslit or I’m genuinely missing something big here.
As for search alternatives, I’d love to use Kagi full time but the cost is just unreasonably high for now IMO.
It was so bizarre! I forgot those even exist.
> Leaving Gmail also gave me the opportunity to start implementing better digital hygiene.
Which is to say, everyone else's spam filtering is awful, so you need to restrict access to your email so they don't fill your inbox.
This is literally the same logic that says we shouldn't vaccinate women against HPV because then they won't learn to practice abstinence.
Also the "if something is free you are the product" is so obviously false if you think about it for a minute. A lot of people pay for Amazon Prime, yet they are still the product. Just because you had a company money does not mean they will won't maximize profit by monetizing your information. Not to mention Blender is free. Are they the product as well? It's just a saying with good mouth feel and nothing else. Definitely not something anyone should change their life around for.
What made this easy for me is that Google is also no longer Google. Ever since it started basically ignoring my actual search query, I stopped using it. I used to be very good at using Google, too.
DuckDuckGo is quite bad at times, yes. But then, so is Google. If I need to find something I cannot put into search terms, LLMs are helpful. From my trial experience I would say Kagi is also a capable search machine, for some niches.
ChatGPT is the only general-purpose search engine that seems to have any chance of producing a link that is both new to me and useful. Of course, I try not to use it too much, people say it’s bad for the planet or whatever.
I think I get more than $10/month of value out of search engines, and I would rather give money to a company instead of them selling all my data and/or spamming me with a bunch of advertisements. If I am paying for something, then almost by definition the company has a means of making revenue that doesn't require ads.
I hate self-promotion but I wrote about this a bit ago [1], but the TL;DR is that I think people are actually more willing to pay for things if they actually like those things. Something Awful has fallen out of favor now, but for awhile people were happy enough to buy an account because Something Awful was fun to be on [2], and a one-time $10 fee wasn't enough to "exclude" anyone, but it did become a way to support the site in the process. I don't think this model was or is broken, I think SA fell out of fashion because Lowtax stopped caring after a certain point.
Kagi has been growing; I don't know if it's profitable yet, but it has been steadily growing an audience and regardless of your opinion on this specific service, I think this indicates that people will pay for things. At least some of us will.
[1] https://blog.tombert.com/Posts/Personal/2026/02-February/Peo...
[2] It actually still is! I bought a new account about a year ago and I had forgotten how funny a lot of the posters actually are. It's a blast.
Kagi, however, has been a different experience for me. I haven’t felt the need to go to Google at all. If I can’t find it with Kagi, I’m confident I won’t find it with Google either. There have also been several times where I was on an outage call with a double dozen people all looking for answers to some issue. Everyone was coming up empty with Google, and I was able to find something that solved the issue pretty quickly with Kagi.
Google is the only search engine allowed to index Reddit [1].
Honestly, it's got to the point where 8 or 9 times out of 10 I switch to Google search because I'm unhappy with the results I'm getting... and really it's at the point where, why am I even still using it?
It's just not very good.
It reminds of something like AltaVista back in the day, or one of those other old skool search engines, with how poor its results are relative to evil old Google.
Agree with this. DDG just seems to have less ‘in’ it.
I’ve been playing with old 8052 microcontrollers recently, and it’s not unusual for DDG to return zero results on slightly esoteric technical searches, when Google will have plenty of relevant results (and it’s not just that Google is less strict about search terms - often I’m searching specifically for keywords).
It also suppresses open protocols. Protocols stagnated as the Internet centralized and commercialized for a reason. Some of these things could just be protocols.
Not saying that would cover everything, but I am sure those two factors would “step in” to replace some aspects of the ad-supported Internet, if the ads went away. How much, I don’t know.
Just run an ad blocker and be done with it. The business model of the website is not my problem; if websites cannot cover their costs without printing ads that I do not want to see, then they will disappear. We will be left with websites that are actually useful, for example businesses operating a website to sell things, or that are funded through donations (e.g. free software).
I worked on open source because I enjoyed the work and because it had control over the final result. Other people did it because of status it gave them in the community. There's plenty of people willing to work on something for "free" (no money) as long as they are compensated in other dimensions such as ownership, status, control or simply enjoyment.
UBI could help here too, since those people still need to eat. Or, society could admit how dependent it is on open source work and pay maintainers and contributors from taxes.
The issue is obviously that most people don't even know what open source is so it's not an interesting political debate topic.
Unfortunately, when needing to do deeper dives on things, Google is still more or less the best for results past the first page in my experience, though it's rare I need to dig that deep these days.
I can't wait for the European index.
I’ve also seen a lot of people using Cryptpad recently, which I think wraps OnlyOffice.
Probably nothing? It’s not like that’s a need that everyone has.
You don't think their own opinion of their own life isn't self-evident proof?
Stopped doing it in 2017 (according to them). https://fox59.com/news/google-will-no-longer-read-your-email...
Gmail has a feature that can break your inbox into a priority section and an everything else section. You have to put in some work to flag and unflag messages based on what you think is important. It's not perfect but with some training it's helpful.
Some people turn it on and expect it to read their minds about everything or think they can ignore the everything else section.
You can just turn it back off. You don't have to leave Gmail.
> And speaking of spam, I have a bunch of proton mail accounts and outlook accounts and iCloud mail accounts and Gmail’s spam filter is easily the best.
Agree. This person's reduced spam experience was due to the new e-mail address and being disciplined about not signing up for a million things on it, not because Proton is better.
I'm personally not so attached to this idea of Google being evil so I don't really get this at all
I'm assuming you mean exclusive disjunction here, but in reality it's something closer to a conjunction, if not occasionally an inclusive disjunction. So many subscription services also have ads and if they don't, they eventually do.
The problem isn't that people want things for free; hell, we all pay for access to the internet already. The problem is a shit-ton of monied interests want to squeeze every possible dollar from people always. So we're slammed with ads and our behavior is manipulated and tracked and monetized and sold.
This was not how things were on the internet or the web in mid 90s. It was not the ethos then, but it became the ethos when monied interests took over.
The old "If you aren't paying for a product, you're the product." adage doesn't apply anymore when even if you're paying, you're _still_ being productized.
The real problem is increasing concentration of _everything_ into ever-fewer (viable) players.
Doctorow's book "Enshittification" goes into way more examples of this phenomenon (though I'm far less optimistic than he is about the ability to reverse this trend).
20-something years ago, when I paid for my internet connection, I also got an email address (or 5…) and some personal web space (5MB maybe?) and access to their NTP servers as part of that. No ads.
Of course if I left the ISP I would lose access to it, as I stopped paying for it. I’ve long since left the ISP, and they’ve dropped all these value adds.
Presumably because people wanted cheaper plans and jumped to other providers which did internet access and nothing else.
There are people willing to pay a reasonable amount for fair services. I pay for various Google and Apple services, including for email. Those that don’t, have ads based plans.
I see the same phenomenon on other smaller forums, too, though. DuckDuckGo always feels like it has a smaller database than Google, which isn't really a surprise.
But only once did Google actually give me what I was looking for. Every other time the Google results were the same SEO garbage I was getting with DDG.
Maybe I should try switching to Google for a full month to see if my search quality generally improves.
That will cover the physical infrastructure of your Internet provider. But there are a lot of websites and software on the internet that require either ads or payment to survive. Free usually means "surviving with somebody else's money aka investors"
The "low-cost airline" style of business.
You'd want such a platform to be relatively open to allow anyone to participate, but you'd also have to be pretty aggressive at policing as bad actors would be all over the place trying to artificially drain an account. Maybe it's something that could be built into the browser? You could get a "X would like to charge you for a visit" which you could approve or deny and you could configure to always approve.
Transaction fees would be a beast.
Those who are wealthier pay more into the tax system, allow those who are less well off to gain access to things they normally wouldn't. This is a good thing.
Likewise, those who are wealthier are buying more products that are advertised, allowing those who are less well off to gain access to the internet for closer-to-free. This is also a good thing.
We can put limits on how advertising is done, give control over your data, etc etc. But the fundamentals stay the same.
So no: paying your way towards internet products won't save the average person money.
At the end of the day, Apple exists to make money and keep shareholders happy.
If the business stops growing organically, do you really think they're going to benevolently use the massive control they have over their own platform?
"Apple" isn't privacy-focused. Their marketing strategy is currently privacy-focused and their economics currently permit them to be.
I much prefer to use scholar.google.com or npmjs.com for research. The URL is already in my history/bookmarks and the scoped query is more useful than the generic websearch.
But I think the AI overviews in DDG and even Google have helped a lot.
AI has helped search tremendously. I only search for things that should have exact answers.
27 Feb, 2026
In May of 2023, Google introduced “AI overviews” into their search engine.1 This followed years of decisions leading to worse search quality and the consummation of their mission to answer every query on Google instead of sending you to outside sites. This was upsetting but something I groaned about and then moved on.
Then, in January of 2026, Google introduced generative AI into their Gmail inboxes. For me, this was the last straw. I decided it was time to leave Google.
I always thought I loved Gmail. Turns out I just had the habit of typing in “gmail.com” in my search bar. I honestly can’t tell you a single feature of Gmail that I miss.
I used to let the algorithms sort my emails, but I realized this actually sucks. This is a “feature” that Gmail touts, but when I stepped back for a second I realized it’s not something I ever wanted. I sort my emails and have filters, but I’ve never wanted an algorithm to my email for me.
I can't think of any other differentiating features in Gmail. Ads in my mail? Nostalgia?
The email service I decided to switch to is Proton.2 But ultimately there are tons of great non-Gmail services around, some other notable ones being Fastmail, Tuta, and Mailbox. But this isn’t an article about how to de-Google or what services you should use, and all of these services are better than Gmail.
Leaving Gmail also gave me the opportunity to start implementing better digital hygiene. I no longer give my primary email to fly-by-night sites, and I'm deliberate with what things I'm signing up for.
My inbox is so much cleaner now, and I patiently await the newsletters I’ve signed up for like a gleeful child waiting for the postman.
Similar to my habit to go to Gmail, I think the only reason I’ve been going to Google is out of habit. But Google sucks. There’s no reason to Google things anymore.
After giving them a fair shot, I think I can now honestly say that Brave and DuckDuckGo are better than Google for >90% of searches.3
Leaving Google also makes finding stuff fun again. As far back as 2012, Google has tried to answer queries in a way to keep you on google, not other sites. And Google is not fun. The open web is fun.
By getting off Google and using a mix of search engines and independent sites, you are forced to make an initial conscious decision when you want to find something. You need to think not only “how do I find out this knowledge?” But “where can I find it?”
That’s a fun and fulfilling decision to make. You might still end up searching (on Brave or DuckDuckGo or Kagi or wherever, not Google), but you also may find yourself going directly to IMDB or Wikipedia or Reddit or your local news org or who knows where.
Taking Google out of things has brought me back to the yesteryears of “surfing the web” instead of just “Googling.”
It’s better.
I do my best to boycott bad things. And I fail pretty often. I still use Amazon on occasion and I can’t get off Spotify. I use Uber and DoorDash a lot more than I’d like. And I have too many Apple products/services.
Individual actions probably will not save the world, but big tech is bad, and Google is one of the worst. So it feels pretty good to have completely* cut out one of these bad companies. And it legitimately has made my life better.
I'm convinced the reasons people stay on Google are habit and dark patterns. Google’s services are actively worse than the alternatives, but people are forced to stay.
Google is not only the default on iOS, it’s also impossible to start a new search engine and be used on iOS. You are limited to: Google, Bing, Ecosia (which is just Bing), Yahoo (which is just Bing), and DuckDuckGo (which is also just Bing).4
Google pays Apple $20 Billion a year for this sweetheart deal. That’s around an 8th of all of their profit. Similarly, Google is the default in Chrome (of course) which ~70% of people use.5
So no one is really choosing to use Google Search. It’s being chosen for them.
Google has taught us that internet services should be free. But they’re not really free. Google is one of the most profitable corporations in history. They are profiting off of you to an enormous degree.6
The old adage of “if you’re not paying, you’re the product” is certainly true here. People should pay for the online services they use (I certainly do!), but I want to note that this is not an actual obstacle to getting off Google. All of the alternatives listed in this article offer free versions.
Google has convinced the world that a free product needs to be ripe with ads and privacy violations, but that’s a lie they’re peddling. Even if you can’t afford to pay for email or search or anything else, there’s still a better world out there without Google.
There’s a weird stigma around leaving mainstream tech.
But as someone who has switched from Google I can also say that most of that stigma was a façade. It turns out most people hate Google and are just looking for an excuse to quit. I’ve had so many conversations with people in every part of my life about how much they hate big tech.7
I would be remiss to not mention that Google owns YouTube. My one exception to being off of Google’s products is YouTube. Unfortunately, YouTube has a virtual monopoly on online video, and at this time there truly are no real alternatives.
Unlike Google itself, YouTube operates as a platform and benefits from massive network effects. It’s impossible to quit the platform unless you want to quit the creators you watch as well.
Note:
There is hope here for the future. Several large YouTubers have started to create alternate platforms, like Curiosity Stream and Nebula and Floatplane. Spotify has started to compete on the platform level. And independent groups like Dropout have also dipped into business models closer to Streaming and News publishing.
Have thoughts on leaving Google? Email me to talk about it! And if you'd like to subscribe to my RSS feed you can to that below too:
I had trouble believe it was this long ago, but sure enough: https://blog.google/products-and-platforms/products/search/generative-ai-search/.↩
I love Proton enough that I prepaid for multiple years, and I have infinite great things to say about their vision of privacy and their core features.↩
The exception maybe being local maps searches. But why are you on a general search engine for that anyway? Apple Maps or Yelp are objectively better for map searches. Plus, Google Local Search is now 95% ads anyway.↩
DuckDuckGo uses mostly Bing results mixed with its own index, and Ecosia is slowly moving to Qwant for its results. But search index consolidation is another topic.↩
https://help.kagi.com/kagi/why-kagi/why-pay-for-search.html↩
I have no idea why anyone is using Chrome. It is literal spyware. Safari, Firefox, Brave, Orion, and others are all infinitely better than Chrome in every possible imaginable way.↩
I've also learned that several friends I would never have expected are using DuckDuckGo
And what if there was a company (let's call it Google) that was extracting huge sums of money out of this social security system? Would this make you think that perhaps something was wrong about it? And that the system could be more efficient without this company?
[0] https://www.404media.co/email/4650b997-7cc3-4578-834c-7e663e...
See this previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46708678
It's the same vein as criminals using cash vs Bitcoin; both can hide crime, but one is way easier to scale up.
Kagi had a post discussing this which made the front page of HN about a month ago [1]:
> Google does not offer a public search API. The only available path is an ad-syndication bundle with no changes to result presentation - the model Startpage uses. Ad syndication is a non-starter for Kagi’s ad-free subscription model.
> Because direct licensing isn’t available to us on compatible terms, we - like many others - use third-party API providers for SERP-style results (SERP meaning search engine results page). These providers serve major enterprises (according to their websites) including Nvidia, Adobe, Samsung, Stanford, DeepMind, Uber, and the United Nations.
> This is not our preferred solution. We plan to exit it as soon as direct, contractual access becomes available. There is no legitimate, paid path to comprehensive Google or Bing results for a company like Kagi. Our position is clear: open the search index, make it available on FRAND terms, and enable rapid innovation in the marketplace.