5 ms·

Google does not hate us... it is worse than that - it is indifferent to us. Hate requires some sort of recognition. I mean this single incident may not mean any

Google does not hate us... it is worse than that - it is indifferent to us. Hate requires some sort of recognition. I mean this single incident may not mean anything but overall google is heading to an _interesting_ place. In short, it was state of the art but in 20 years it became just another conglomerate sacrificing quality for shareholder gain, I think? As a search engine, it does not work for me. I see promoted links above the thing I actually search for. Moved to Kagi and didn't look back. As an AI it does not work for me. I am seeing an arbitrary usage limit, refreshing in 5 hours and a weekly quota given in a percentage. That is as opaque as it gets. Again, to give Kagi as an example I look at my usage details and I see how much is remaining in a clear way. Not working for Kagi by the way, I am just a happy customer. As a cloud storage, it does not work for me. Probably some shared folder I am working with others has a spam user and/or a hacked account and they periodically spam x-rated notifications. And that's not only me (https://www.reddit.com/r/techsupport/comments/1azf25v/mystery_google_drive_notifications/ https://www.reddit.com/r/techsupport/comments/1azf25v/myster...). Moved to apple iCloud and done with it. Mail is fine. After 22 years of usage, I kind of delegated it to a non-important stage in my life. The important bits have relocated to European providers anyway.

andoando 5mo ago
The promoted links have gotten insane, the first 5-6 links often appear to be ads
- dfxm12 5mo ago
  Even after that, for whatever reason, the next tranche of links is a mixture of AI slop and shopping links. If I'm looking for information about something and not a product to buy, I often have to, gasp, go to the 2nd page of results.
- manwe150 5mo ago
  Worse, they often aren't even relevant: we searched "passport renewal" and you had to go the the second page to even get the government site that renews passports, and not ad scams masquerading as the real thing. Optimized for engagement, presumably. Edit: come to think of it, I don't know why I still use Google. I don't care if they track me. But when they have been actively try to prevent me from finding the information I'm looking for, and instead try to scam me?
  - flir 5mo ago
    > Edit: come to think of it, I don't know why I still use Google. A guess: because you type queries in the URL bar, and they're the default search engine in your web browser? (I'm convinced that these days, this is 90% of Google's advantage) Image search is so hyper-optimised for shopping it's useless.
    - manwe150 5mo ago
      A good guess for any phone or tablet user, but I’m technical enough to change that default. It was because their results used to be objectively better. It’s also not the default on Windows Edge, and I still remember the experiences just after reinstalling a Windows VM that I’d be confused why search results were suddenly so unreliable until I remembered I was getting bing by default. Small update: two thirds of my device browsers no longer default to google anymore. I’ll change the rest when relevant.
  - BLKNSLVR 5mo ago
    Like searching for an app in the store. The first result(s) are paid promotions that often have absolutely no relation to what I was searching for.
- Cider9986 5mo ago
  Why don't you use an adblocker or Brave browser?
idiotsecant 5mo ago
The 'mail is fine' is an impending apocalypse that most people don't think too much about. Google can dump you at any time for any reason or no reason. Your chances are small, but if it happens its incredibly disruptive. I don't know the durable answer, but I definitely need to complete that step of degoogling, the job just seems huge.
- yellow_postit 5mo ago
  Get a custom domain. Strat using that. Route to Gmail to start but easily decouple. It took me about a year of updates but now I rarely get anything to a @gmail
  - nonfamous 5mo ago
    This is what I do, but it comes with its own set of problems, the most significant of which is deliverability. Some businesses can’t deliver mail to my custom domain at all (a fact I can only discover by trial and error). Some can deliver, but the forwarding to @gmail fails silently — Google just eats the mail without so much as a bounce, let alone dropping it into a spam folder. It’s the best option we have, but it’s no solution to the crapshoot that is email today.
RankingMember 5mo ago
I feel like a crazy person, but I've been using Yandex as the last resort and having positive results in finding stuff that I know is out there but Google has decided to stop letting me see. (I tried DDG but for my use it's been worse than Google).
- siva7 5mo ago
  Nah you're not crazy. I also felt crazy when i discovered that some obscure censored russian search engine gives me overall better search results in 2026 than google.com
  - ai_slop_hater 5mo ago
    It's not "obscure." Yandex is Russia's Google.
    - deleted 5mo ago
      [deleted]
  - pooploop64 5mo ago
    This is a funny (if it wasn't so sad) aspect of enshittification that was revealed to me through Chinese electronics. There is a line we cross where the lowest quality, most bottom dollar crap is actually better than it's actively malicious "premium" counterparts. It's like if a company spent billions of dollars creating the most perfect hammer that also happens to make itself bend to miss nails if you don't use the approved Hammertech GripGlove that plays ads and is slippery. Or you could use a random rock with a flat side, which is a much better hammer than that in every way. In the exact same fashion, Yandex blows Google out of the water. Not because they have smarter people running it or because the code is more elegant or because they have more money. They just don't have the means or motivation to actively screw with you to the same degree as Google, and that makes it better. Anyone at this point could make a better search engine than google just by running a basic text search algorithm and not doing anything else, it just so happens that Yandex never bothered to go as far beyond that as the mainstream ones.
remarkEon 5mo ago
Mail is terrible. The central conceit of Gmail, and unfortunately what made it immediately popular, is that you should not have to care about deleting emails because you “have enough” storage. Over time this evolved into an awful incentive structure that results in 100s if not 1000s of spam/useless/irrelevant/garbage marketing emails a day and a reminder that the next tier up is just $1 a month (for now). In the end, the state of mail is emblematic of the whole problem with that company.
badc0ffee 5mo ago
I found that if I search Google Maps for a specific restaurant, it assumes I must just be hungry in general. Just now, I looked for A&W and also got results for Tim Hortons, Popeyes and McDonald's. Apple Maps never does that. Still, I usually use Google as I want an accurate idea of whether a business is actually open and what its hours are.
- zx8080 5mo ago
  Gmaps always zooms out when I search. No idea of that happens for others or not.
  - dcminter 5mo ago
    Occasionally it scrolls me over to a different continent...
  - throwway120385 5mo ago
    Apple Maps always assumes I'm trying to get directions to a place from wherever I'm at, even if it's on another continent.
- jorvi 5mo ago
  I just tried "McDonalds" and only got 50 straight McDonalds results. "Burger King" nets 23 Burger Kings, one "Spareribs King" and one "Burger Chicken King". Gotta love inconsistent experiences between customers / regions. Also, Apple is gearing up to stuff ads (cough "sponsored results" cough) into Maps, at which point it will probably start suffering the same problem..
- astolarz 5mo ago
  Try searching for a type of food that has a place in it's name, like "Nashville hot chicken". It'll either center the map on Nashville, TN, and show you results for "hot chicken", or sometimes will zoom all the way out and show you results for "hot chicken" in both where the map was originally centered and in Nashville, TN.
- mingus88 5mo ago
iv0Shandoor 5mo ago
[dead]
aucisson_masque 5mo ago
> Google doesn't work I can relate. Just today I was working on my car and I asked Gemini how to remove the Steering ball joint. It all started well, wrote a lengthy answer and then suddenly wiped it all and instead wrote 'i can't answer that, try to ask about another subject'. For the love of God, talking about cars are now also being forbidden by Google. And it's not a one off, I asked multiple questions about other parts because I had a lot of issue and it was the first time removing the Gimbals and replacing the Gimbal head on that car. Google is beyond infuriating, they are a tech company and behave like some old fashioned administration lady. Completely out of touch with real life. On this last part, I'm convinced that it's because Google management must be completely out of touch with real life. Tech world is special, add millions on top of that.. The best that could happen to this company is to break it's monopoly so that they are forced to get rid of these lunatics.
- pooploop64 5mo ago
  I'm surprised it's still a standard thing to let us see the message getting typed up before it's finalized. The term "literally 1984" gets thrown around a lot but wow what a dystopian feeling when that happens. It's so much creepier than if it just said "sorry that question violates our guidelines" without showing anything.
  - philposting 5mo ago
    Agreed, especially as with images it does the opposite. It waits until the image is finalised, then tests it for suitability, and decides whether or not to show it. It would be interesting to see the intermediate steps, but they're not shown.
gonzalohm 5mo ago
How do you use Kagi AI? I have been paying for their search service for a year now but I haven't looked into their AI offerings
- f4stjack 5mo ago
  Well, I have created several assistants for writing checks, the researcher module is really good and am using it when the need is there. It is expensive but the chained search queries it does is extensive and solves my problems so... that became something invaluable. For the normal queries and questions though I use their cheaper selections from the normal screen. My go-to is Kimi usually and I like how, unless specified, the chats disappear in 24 hours.
Melatonic 5mo ago
Kagi is great That being said a giant corporation like Google releasing free but amazing research like AlphaFold or (less so) something like Gemma is still cool. They're the ATT PAC Bell or IBM of our age it seems
globular-toast 5mo ago
"Don't anthropomorphise the lawnmower".

andoando 5mo ago

The promoted links have gotten insane, the first 5-6 links often appear to be ads

dfxm12 5mo ago
Even after that, for whatever reason, the next tranche of links is a mixture of AI slop and shopping links. If I'm looking for information about something and not a product to buy, I often have to, gasp, go to the 2nd page of results.
manwe150 5mo ago
Worse, they often aren't even relevant: we searched "passport renewal" and you had to go the the second page to even get the government site that renews passports, and not ad scams masquerading as the real thing. Optimized for engagement, presumably. Edit: come to think of it, I don't know why I still use Google. I don't care if they track me. But when they have been actively try to prevent me from finding the information I'm looking for, and instead try to scam me?
- flir 5mo ago
  > Edit: come to think of it, I don't know why I still use Google. A guess: because you type queries in the URL bar, and they're the default search engine in your web browser? (I'm convinced that these days, this is 90% of Google's advantage) Image search is so hyper-optimised for shopping it's useless.
  - manwe150 5mo ago
    A good guess for any phone or tablet user, but I’m technical enough to change that default. It was because their results used to be objectively better. It’s also not the default on Windows Edge, and I still remember the experiences just after reinstalling a Windows VM that I’d be confused why search results were suddenly so unreliable until I remembered I was getting bing by default. Small update: two thirds of my device browsers no longer default to google anymore. I’ll change the rest when relevant.
- BLKNSLVR 5mo ago
  Like searching for an app in the store. The first result(s) are paid promotions that often have absolutely no relation to what I was searching for.
Cider9986 5mo ago
Why don't you use an adblocker or Brave browser?

idiotsecant 5mo ago

The 'mail is fine' is an impending apocalypse that most people don't think too much about. Google can dump you at any time for any reason or no reason. Your chances are small, but if it happens its incredibly disruptive. I don't know the durable answer, but I definitely need to complete that step of degoogling, the job just seems huge.

yellow_postit 5mo ago
Get a custom domain. Strat using that. Route to Gmail to start but easily decouple. It took me about a year of updates but now I rarely get anything to a @gmail
- nonfamous 5mo ago
  This is what I do, but it comes with its own set of problems, the most significant of which is deliverability. Some businesses can’t deliver mail to my custom domain at all (a fact I can only discover by trial and error). Some can deliver, but the forwarding to @gmail fails silently — Google just eats the mail without so much as a bounce, let alone dropping it into a spam folder. It’s the best option we have, but it’s no solution to the crapshoot that is email today.

RankingMember 5mo ago

I feel like a crazy person, but I've been using Yandex as the last resort and having positive results in finding stuff that I know is out there but Google has decided to stop letting me see. (I tried DDG but for my use it's been worse than Google).

siva7 5mo ago
Nah you're not crazy. I also felt crazy when i discovered that some obscure censored russian search engine gives me overall better search results in 2026 than google.com
- ai_slop_hater 5mo ago
  It's not "obscure." Yandex is Russia's Google.
  - deleted 5mo ago
    [deleted]
- pooploop64 5mo ago
  This is a funny (if it wasn't so sad) aspect of enshittification that was revealed to me through Chinese electronics. There is a line we cross where the lowest quality, most bottom dollar crap is actually better than it's actively malicious "premium" counterparts. It's like if a company spent billions of dollars creating the most perfect hammer that also happens to make itself bend to miss nails if you don't use the approved Hammertech GripGlove that plays ads and is slippery. Or you could use a random rock with a flat side, which is a much better hammer than that in every way. In the exact same fashion, Yandex blows Google out of the water. Not because they have smarter people running it or because the code is more elegant or because they have more money. They just don't have the means or motivation to actively screw with you to the same degree as Google, and that makes it better. Anyone at this point could make a better search engine than google just by running a basic text search algorithm and not doing anything else, it just so happens that Yandex never bothered to go as far beyond that as the mainstream ones.

remarkEon 5mo ago

Mail is terrible. The central conceit of Gmail, and unfortunately what made it immediately popular, is that you should not have to care about deleting emails because you “have enough” storage. Over time this evolved into an awful incentive structure that results in 100s if not 1000s of spam/useless/irrelevant/garbage marketing emails a day and a reminder that the next tier up is just $1 a month (for now). In the end, the state of mail is emblematic of the whole problem with that company.

badc0ffee 5mo ago

I found that if I search Google Maps for a specific restaurant, it assumes I must just be hungry in general. Just now, I looked for A&W and also got results for Tim Hortons, Popeyes and McDonald's. Apple Maps never does that. Still, I usually use Google as I want an accurate idea of whether a business is actually open and what its hours are.

zx8080 5mo ago
Gmaps always zooms out when I search. No idea of that happens for others or not.
- dcminter 5mo ago
  Occasionally it scrolls me over to a different continent...
- throwway120385 5mo ago
  Apple Maps always assumes I'm trying to get directions to a place from wherever I'm at, even if it's on another continent.
jorvi 5mo ago
I just tried "McDonalds" and only got 50 straight McDonalds results. "Burger King" nets 23 Burger Kings, one "Spareribs King" and one "Burger Chicken King". Gotta love inconsistent experiences between customers / regions. Also, Apple is gearing up to stuff ads (cough "sponsored results" cough) into Maps, at which point it will probably start suffering the same problem..
astolarz 5mo ago
Try searching for a type of food that has a place in it's name, like "Nashville hot chicken". It'll either center the map on Nashville, TN, and show you results for "hot chicken", or sometimes will zoom all the way out and show you results for "hot chicken" in both where the map was originally centered and in Nashville, TN.
mingus88 5mo ago

iv0Shandoor 5mo ago

[dead]

aucisson_masque 5mo ago

> Google doesn't work I can relate. Just today I was working on my car and I asked Gemini how to remove the Steering ball joint. It all started well, wrote a lengthy answer and then suddenly wiped it all and instead wrote 'i can't answer that, try to ask about another subject'. For the love of God, talking about cars are now also being forbidden by Google. And it's not a one off, I asked multiple questions about other parts because I had a lot of issue and it was the first time removing the Gimbals and replacing the Gimbal head on that car. Google is beyond infuriating, they are a tech company and behave like some old fashioned administration lady. Completely out of touch with real life. On this last part, I'm convinced that it's because Google management must be completely out of touch with real life. Tech world is special, add millions on top of that.. The best that could happen to this company is to break it's monopoly so that they are forced to get rid of these lunatics.

pooploop64 5mo ago
I'm surprised it's still a standard thing to let us see the message getting typed up before it's finalized. The term "literally 1984" gets thrown around a lot but wow what a dystopian feeling when that happens. It's so much creepier than if it just said "sorry that question violates our guidelines" without showing anything.
- philposting 5mo ago
  Agreed, especially as with images it does the opposite. It waits until the image is finalised, then tests it for suitability, and decides whether or not to show it. It would be interesting to see the intermediate steps, but they're not shown.

gonzalohm 5mo ago

How do you use Kagi AI? I have been paying for their search service for a year now but I haven't looked into their AI offerings

f4stjack 5mo ago
Well, I have created several assistants for writing checks, the researcher module is really good and am using it when the need is there. It is expensive but the chained search queries it does is extensive and solves my problems so... that became something invaluable. For the normal queries and questions though I use their cheaper selections from the normal screen. My go-to is Kimi usually and I like how, unless specified, the chats disappear in 24 hours.

Melatonic 5mo ago

Kagi is great That being said a giant corporation like Google releasing free but amazing research like AlphaFold or (less so) something like Gemma is still cool. They're the ATT PAC Bell or IBM of our age it seems

globular-toast 5mo ago

"Don't anthropomorphise the lawnmower".