6 ms·

This is really sad. I have given up on Google over the last years. Them taking away Inbox hurt most, but I am still most furious for them disabling the link bet

by oezi 6y ago

This is really sad. I have given up on Google over the last years. Them taking away Inbox hurt most, but I am still most furious for them disabling the link between Photos and Drive (you can no longer easily get your Google Photos to sync to a desktop). What remains? Gmail and a bit of search, where DDG is encroaching.

post_below 6y ago
I agree that Google is slipping... but DDG is essentially just a Bing syndicator, which means their result quality will compete at the rate of Bing. Hard to see a threat there.
- perryizgr8 6y ago
  Bing is pretty good though. The results are different from Google's but not necessarily worse or better.
- ZiiS 6y ago
  DDG do far more work then just syndicating Bing. The have their own crawl, combine many sources, and are much stronger at down weighting low vaulue content. For many they also have an up hill battle against Google as personalising search results to your interests is a double edged sword.
  - jamiek88 6y ago
    Plus !bangs they kept it useful for me before I got used to their search. I rarely !g nowadays and being able to quickly dip in and out of sites for specific things is great. Like a super ‘I’m feeling lucky’ with parameters.
  - rjzzleep 6y ago
    Unfortunately DDG is really only useful for english search results. I tried running it as my default search engine, but in most places it's more or less useless.
    - Semaphor 6y ago
      Great for non-english results for me, I simply search with !ddgde which flips the "Germany"-switch to on. You and others keep saying this, but you really need to mention which non-English languages you are talking about as at least some of them are pretty good.
      - lawl 6y ago
        Ok, but google just works for me if i type english or german queries. DDG doesn't. I've been using ddg as a default engine and wasn't aware of this. (also !ddgde is a lot more to type than !g)
        oezi 6y ago
        Completely opposite experience: German Google brings up so much irrelevant things when searching in English.
        Semaphor 6y ago
        They show a switch for me even when I search in English. With google, I sometimes wish I had an easy switch like that when the terms are also available in English as currently this makes their results useless. !ddgde is indeed a bit long, but as most of my searches are not local, I can live with it ;)
      - rjzzleep 6y ago
        Chinese? Japanese? Probably a huge amount of LTR languages? It's not "You and others keep saying this... provide some examples". It's that you have a tiny scope of what you consider to be the world.
        Semaphor 6y ago
        > It's that you have a tiny scope of what you consider to be the world. No, that’s something you put into my mouth. This is why I was asking. Unlike others, I explained which language works great. "Doesn’t work" is useless without saying what it doesn’t work for. "Does/Doesn’t work for language X" is actually relevant information.
  - mda 6y ago
    Non trivial queries are answered from Bing index. So it is not really "much more than" it.
- skinkestek 6y ago
  Bing is now starting to be scary good in some regards. One of my clients have integrated their intranet solution with Microsoft and if I search on Bing while logged in I get relevant results from both the Internet and the company network! Two observations: - I'd not accept if Google did this (like many others I was a fanboy, and like someone said: Google have worked hard tp make me dislike them - and they have now succeeded. Between years of insultingly mismatched ads, search quality dropping 10 years ago and staying lower than before and the whole witch hunt affair a few months ago I now do dislike them.) - Google had this, or at least search on my machine and on internet working with Google Desktop Search already back in 2006! (Of course they killed GDS after I think they'd ruined the market for everyone else by pushing the best solution for free for a couple of years.)
- passtheglass 6y ago
  Well Google is only good if you're looking for paid reviews/blog posts and populist articles from very popular media outlets. I should hope people would realise how far their search quality has decreased in the past 2-3 years (for text search)
Svip 6y ago
At this point, Google Maps is the only Google service I use with some frequency. I always use OpenStreetMap first, but if I need satellite imagery or street view, I fall over to Google Maps. All their other services are replaceable (with reasonable replacements), as far as I am aware. Edit: I suppose YouTube technically counts as a Google service, which I also use with high frequency.
- alert0 6y ago
  I recently switched to an iPhone and am an Apple Maps purist now. A man can only be told to turn left at the Carl's Jr so many times before he snaps.
  - franklampard 6y ago
    Google Maps cannot understand which redirection I am facing when the navigation just starts while Apple Maps does it beautifully. That’s honestly the most important portion of trip. I don’t need to be navigated once I am driving on the highway.
    - swaranga 6y ago
      Seriously? I bought in-car navigation for my car instead of opting for CarPlay/AndroidAuto for this exact reason. When I start a trip, my phone (always used Google Maps) can never figure out which way I am facing and will keep rotating around and recalculating directions until I gather some speed on the road. With my in-car navigation, the compass works flawlessly even in parking garages and basements. I though the holy grail would be a UX where Google Maps would use its maps, traffic and navigation data while using the car's GPS.
      - franklampard 6y ago
        Try Apple Maps if you have an iPhone, you’ll be surprised.
  - foobar33333 6y ago
arcturus17 6y ago
> What remains? Gmail and a bit of search, where DDG is encroaching. Global market shares as of Feb. 2021 [1]: * Google 92% * Bing 2.69% * Baidu 1.33% * DuckDuckGo 0.64% Alphabet made $182 billion last year, with a profit of $34 billion, making it the fifth most profitable private business in the world [2]. Much of that is off the back of search and AdWords. [1] https://gs.statcounter.com/search-engine-market-share https://gs.statcounter.com/search-engine-market-share [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alphabet_Inc https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alphabet_Inc.
- oezi 6y ago
  My complaints were just for my personal exposure to Google.
- cft 6y ago
  Bing is actually much better than DDG (for recent near real time results) and now it's in many cases better than Google (less SEO spam, probably due to its size). It is also more politically neutral than Google in its results - I started out using Bing for anything politics related, but now switched for many technical and financial searches too.
  - addicted 6y ago
    Bing will almost by definition be “better” than DDG because DDG explicitly does not collect as much personalized information about you. Bing searches should be more relevant than DDG searches. The whole point of DDG is that I do not want a hyper personalized search experience, which may lead to worse top results, but probably not stop me from finding what I want within the first page of results, which for me is a more than great trade off for protecting my privacy.
  - ahepp 6y ago
    Personally, I've given up on results quality. It ranges from bad (Google) to worse (Bing) to barely usable (DDG). Even if it's barely usable, I'm tired of the constant tracking and ads. Anyways, Google is already so full of SEO spam that I usually have to type in "[search term] [relevant web site]", and even DDG can handle that.
jmathai 6y ago
I really miss the GPhotos / GDrive connection. FWIW - I wrote this plugin[1] to recreate my workflow[2]. [1] https://github.com/jmathai/elodie/tree/master/elodie/plugins/googlephotos https://github.com/jmathai/elodie/tree/master/elodie/plugins... [2] https://medium.com/swlh/my-automated-photo-workflow-using-google-photos-and-elodie-afb753b8c724 https://medium.com/swlh/my-automated-photo-workflow-using-go...
Dyac 6y ago
FYI Michael Leggett, design lead for Gmail and Inbox back in the day has released a chrome extension to bring many of inbox's features back. https://simpl.fyi/ https://simpl.fyi/ - many people also pair it with https://www.inboxymail.com/ https://www.inboxymail.com/ to get bundling too, but long term Michael says he's going to add bundles to Simplify.

by oezi 6y ago

post_below 6y ago

I agree that Google is slipping... but DDG is essentially just a Bing syndicator, which means their result quality will compete at the rate of Bing. Hard to see a threat there.

perryizgr8 6y ago
Bing is pretty good though. The results are different from Google's but not necessarily worse or better.
ZiiS 6y ago
DDG do far more work then just syndicating Bing. The have their own crawl, combine many sources, and are much stronger at down weighting low vaulue content. For many they also have an up hill battle against Google as personalising search results to your interests is a double edged sword.
- jamiek88 6y ago
  Plus !bangs they kept it useful for me before I got used to their search. I rarely !g nowadays and being able to quickly dip in and out of sites for specific things is great. Like a super ‘I’m feeling lucky’ with parameters.
- rjzzleep 6y ago
  Unfortunately DDG is really only useful for english search results. I tried running it as my default search engine, but in most places it's more or less useless.
  - Semaphor 6y ago
    Great for non-english results for me, I simply search with !ddgde which flips the "Germany"-switch to on. You and others keep saying this, but you really need to mention which non-English languages you are talking about as at least some of them are pretty good.
    - lawl 6y ago
      Ok, but google just works for me if i type english or german queries. DDG doesn't. I've been using ddg as a default engine and wasn't aware of this. (also !ddgde is a lot more to type than !g)
      - oezi 6y ago
        Completely opposite experience: German Google brings up so much irrelevant things when searching in English.
      - Semaphor 6y ago
        They show a switch for me even when I search in English. With google, I sometimes wish I had an easy switch like that when the terms are also available in English as currently this makes their results useless. !ddgde is indeed a bit long, but as most of my searches are not local, I can live with it ;)
    - rjzzleep 6y ago
      Chinese? Japanese? Probably a huge amount of LTR languages? It's not "You and others keep saying this... provide some examples". It's that you have a tiny scope of what you consider to be the world.
      - Semaphor 6y ago
        > It's that you have a tiny scope of what you consider to be the world. No, that’s something you put into my mouth. This is why I was asking. Unlike others, I explained which language works great. "Doesn’t work" is useless without saying what it doesn’t work for. "Does/Doesn’t work for language X" is actually relevant information.
- mda 6y ago
  Non trivial queries are answered from Bing index. So it is not really "much more than" it.
skinkestek 6y ago
Bing is now starting to be scary good in some regards. One of my clients have integrated their intranet solution with Microsoft and if I search on Bing while logged in I get relevant results from both the Internet and the company network! Two observations: - I'd not accept if Google did this (like many others I was a fanboy, and like someone said: Google have worked hard tp make me dislike them - and they have now succeeded. Between years of insultingly mismatched ads, search quality dropping 10 years ago and staying lower than before and the whole witch hunt affair a few months ago I now do dislike them.) - Google had this, or at least search on my machine and on internet working with Google Desktop Search already back in 2006! (Of course they killed GDS after I think they'd ruined the market for everyone else by pushing the best solution for free for a couple of years.)
passtheglass 6y ago
Well Google is only good if you're looking for paid reviews/blog posts and populist articles from very popular media outlets. I should hope people would realise how far their search quality has decreased in the past 2-3 years (for text search)

Svip 6y ago

At this point, Google Maps is the only Google service I use with some frequency. I always use OpenStreetMap first, but if I need satellite imagery or street view, I fall over to Google Maps. All their other services are replaceable (with reasonable replacements), as far as I am aware. Edit: I suppose YouTube technically counts as a Google service, which I also use with high frequency.

alert0 6y ago
I recently switched to an iPhone and am an Apple Maps purist now. A man can only be told to turn left at the Carl's Jr so many times before he snaps.
- franklampard 6y ago
  Google Maps cannot understand which redirection I am facing when the navigation just starts while Apple Maps does it beautifully. That’s honestly the most important portion of trip. I don’t need to be navigated once I am driving on the highway.
  - swaranga 6y ago
    Seriously? I bought in-car navigation for my car instead of opting for CarPlay/AndroidAuto for this exact reason. When I start a trip, my phone (always used Google Maps) can never figure out which way I am facing and will keep rotating around and recalculating directions until I gather some speed on the road. With my in-car navigation, the compass works flawlessly even in parking garages and basements. I though the holy grail would be a UX where Google Maps would use its maps, traffic and navigation data while using the car's GPS.
    - franklampard 6y ago
      Try Apple Maps if you have an iPhone, you’ll be surprised.
- foobar33333 6y ago

arcturus17 6y ago

> What remains? Gmail and a bit of search, where DDG is encroaching. Global market shares as of Feb. 2021 [1]: * Google 92% * Bing 2.69% * Baidu 1.33% * DuckDuckGo 0.64% Alphabet made $182 billion last year, with a profit of $34 billion, making it the fifth most profitable private business in the world [2]. Much of that is off the back of search and AdWords. [1] https://gs.statcounter.com/search-engine-market-share https://gs.statcounter.com/search-engine-market-share [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alphabet_Inc https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alphabet_Inc.

oezi 6y ago
My complaints were just for my personal exposure to Google.
cft 6y ago
Bing is actually much better than DDG (for recent near real time results) and now it's in many cases better than Google (less SEO spam, probably due to its size). It is also more politically neutral than Google in its results - I started out using Bing for anything politics related, but now switched for many technical and financial searches too.
- addicted 6y ago
  Bing will almost by definition be “better” than DDG because DDG explicitly does not collect as much personalized information about you. Bing searches should be more relevant than DDG searches. The whole point of DDG is that I do not want a hyper personalized search experience, which may lead to worse top results, but probably not stop me from finding what I want within the first page of results, which for me is a more than great trade off for protecting my privacy.
- ahepp 6y ago
  Personally, I've given up on results quality. It ranges from bad (Google) to worse (Bing) to barely usable (DDG). Even if it's barely usable, I'm tired of the constant tracking and ads. Anyways, Google is already so full of SEO spam that I usually have to type in "[search term] [relevant web site]", and even DDG can handle that.

jmathai 6y ago

I really miss the GPhotos / GDrive connection. FWIW - I wrote this plugin[1] to recreate my workflow[2]. [1] https://github.com/jmathai/elodie/tree/master/elodie/plugins/googlephotos https://github.com/jmathai/elodie/tree/master/elodie/plugins... [2] https://medium.com/swlh/my-automated-photo-workflow-using-google-photos-and-elodie-afb753b8c724 https://medium.com/swlh/my-automated-photo-workflow-using-go...

Dyac 6y ago

FYI Michael Leggett, design lead for Gmail and Inbox back in the day has released a chrome extension to bring many of inbox's features back. https://simpl.fyi/ https://simpl.fyi/ - many people also pair it with https://www.inboxymail.com/ https://www.inboxymail.com/ to get bundling too, but long term Michael says he's going to add bundles to Simplify.