Comment by sshine
4 years ago
I see a silver lining: When Google no longer has economic incentive to deliver quality search results, new search engines can finally take a market share. For a year I've been using DuckDuckGo and Startpage, and they're both great, but sometimes there's something they just don't give me, and I've felt the need to Google it. Now that Google's results are deteriorating, I find myself doing that less. I've been able to quit Gmail, but YouTube and Search have been hard.
"Searching" has for almost two decades been synonymous with "Going to Google and feeling lucky." -- the fact that searching requires effort (and possibly more than one search engine) feels frustrating and refreshing at the same time.
I've tried to move away from Google several times over the last decade but always found myself coming back because Google has always provided me with better results and I would often struggle to find what I needed on other search engines. These days I find myself in the opposite position to the point where I'm using other search engines as default depending on what I'm looking for.
Image searches on Google are just terrible now I normally use Bing by default. Anything news / politics related tends to be heavily censored / curated by Google so I normally use DuckDuckGo for that. Really the only thing I still prefer Google for is code related searches which to be fair probably makes up 90% of my searches. As soon as I feel I can get comparable results on another search engine I'm done with Google.
I've also recently been using ProtonMail as a Gmail alternative and I've been really impressed. It's also nice knowing that should Google's AI ever randomly lock me out of my Google account I can still access my emails.
At some point in the last 3 or more years, Google has been actively optimizing for profit over search quality. Google already has 98%+ of search engagement, maybe they think they can improve quality when competition appears?
Any serious appearing competitor could also be squashed by legal fuckery before getting a chance to earn enough to afford defending themselves in court. Throw in an out of court acquisition as part of settlement and Google can be confident about managing threats.