You guys are still using Google?
this post was submitted on 21 Mar 2026
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Technology
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I HAVE HAD ENOUGH!!!!!
Goddamn fuckers just won’t stop!!!
I tried looking for an instruction PDF for some stage lights the other day. No amount of "google-fu" could find the right thing. Links labeled as one model showed stuff for other models when clicked, and the god awful summary that it shoves in your face was just full of contradictions of itself. Google is warm trash water at this point.
What the fuck are we supposed to do when the services we use are monopolies which actively seeks to destroy its competition as well as enshittify itself to a point its unusable :|
Time to start self hosting.
Time to start self hosting
There is simply no usable self-hosted search engine. There are some projects like Yacy or Searxng, but they do not have their own index. And having your own self-hosted index is kind of impossible because you need to save the whole of the web on your own devices to be able to search it.
Time to start self hosting.
The time was 10 years ago.
And the next best time is now. Kinda like planting trees.
And pirate. Steal anything they try and sell to you
Point of order, if you mean pirate as in infringe copyright, that isn't stealing.
I mean get a group of friends together and start pillaging Target stores.
ten year ago there were still things we could have done to stop google. now is too late...
Thanks I fucking hate it.
💯
so many better Google alternatives out there:
- https://noai.duckduckgo.com/
- https://ecosia.org/
- https://searx.space/ (pick any of the 50+ instances)
- https://www.qwant.com/
- https://www.startpage.com/
Sadly Ecosia is not good for more niche topics or foreign languages. After a few months of use, I went back to Google with &udm=14 😕
I love Ecosia because I love trees and will keep using them until I can afford kagi or something.
But one thing that drives me through the wall.. If I search something in my native language, because I want results that are in my native language, google/bing (which ecosia uses) decides to translate reddit posts for me and Ecosia slaps them to the top of the results. Its rather annoying.
I have the same experience and it drives me nuts - if I wanted English results, I'd search in English!
Its such a weird thing to do. Especially when you click the translated link and it opens a page that is not translated. So if they think they are "helping" people who don't know the language, how exactly does it help that they translate the title and half a sentence in the search results.
Don't forget Kagi! (though it isn't technically comparable to the others since it's a paid, but without ads one)
Techbro feudalists are all in on AI. They promised it would replace the human workforce and got initial investments and repeated support from money that should have been smarter then that, but the allure of firing all their workers proved too strong.
Now, they’re sitting on a trillion dollar house of cards. They’ll continue to fail upward. The correction will be delayed as they all move money between each other to cover bad investments.
At least Dutch tulips provided actual value. They could be planted and grow to be something real. LLM “AI” was always a scam.
Tulips have no value. I don't care what anyone says.
You can care or not all day long but you’re still wrong.
Found the dutchman. I do envy you guys out there, free healthcare, good pay, a social safety net, and all the tulips you can eat!
Yeah I fuckin wish.
repeated support from money that should have been smarter then that
Why would you think that? Look around, everything humanity does is absurd
Ok wait... Can I use AI to change clickbait headlines into actual summaries of articles, without hyperbole, or people getting "slammed"? I am sure googles goal is only to create more clickbait, but if there was a way to do the opposite, that would be the first good use of AI I've seen.
Yeah, friend of mine did that as a hobby project 8ish years ago. You can do that with just a small self-trained language model.
So, with AI as in the current RAM-sucking, earth-boiling monstrosities that are being pushed? No, it's not a valid use case for that AI because it was already solved.
"Hey, we got this new invention that kinda works if you don't stress it too much, so we don't really know what to do with it, but it's hype so we must include it somewhere prominently. Ideas?"
Like reinventing the wheel, only it's "intelligent" now.
"But we already have headlines?"
Of course that does not address the economical/political conspiracies involved here.
AI is a scurge on humanity & our environment, and so is Google. Use other search engines.
If you use anything Google has touched, you’re an idiot.
Man how the hell are we supposed to degoogle so fast. I literally only became aware that they sucked like 2 years after them being cool for most of my life. Getting rid of gmail is going to be tough. There literally isn't a service the equal of YouTube or Gmail.
getting rid of gmail was actually the easiest part for me.
Google drive and maps was the hardest.
And I had replaced maps pretty well until magicearth decided to implode
tutamail.com. tuta.com. No phone required. No email required. No forced 2 factor authorization that is an excuse to grab your personal information to sell it. Never again on any of the tech email companies. Never again. I never agreed to give them my phone, they forced me to years after the fact when I needed to get in there suddenly.
at my work, one person decided to start an email group to connect everyone for after hours activities....
only 2 people out of 20 were non gmail accounts
I’ve found ProtonMail to be pretty nice. Easy to import your mail into too. YouTube has been hard though. PeerTube is cool but rather small (feel free to ask my any questions about it though). Ideally we’d be using stuff like Nebula and Patreon to support creators directly, but you can at the very least use a fronted to minimize contact with Google.
Proton mail is compromised I believe. In bed with the administration of the US.
What makes you think that?
Email might actually be one of the easiest to move off of, thankfully!
There's plenty of stuff out there, both free and paid. You can even use your own domain if you have an extra $15 or so a year. A lot of the paid options let you use your domain with them (and then if you ever need to change providers, you can keep your email address). And you can use both webmail and actual mail apps.
Youtube though... yeah, there aren't really any good alternatives for that.
-- Frost
Snowden was in 2013, bro.
Use a client for video content like Grayjay (gets rid of the ads too).
Look at Tuta Mail or Proton Mail as viable privacy focused alternatives.
There are alternatives to Gmail. I'd probably list out such services as Yahoo/AOL (I personally use the AT&T branded version of this service) and Hotmail (now known as Outlook.com), but instead I'll just tell you that you can enter a query like "free email provider" in your web search provider of choice and find several perfectly viable options.
Those are all awful, none of the corporate tech companies are better they are all garbage. If they force you to give them a phone number, they do not deserve your business.
They have been evil for over 20 years. What are you on about?
There are many email providers. Like… thousands. Personally, I use Zoho.