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 consum...

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A personal account of leaving Google's ecosystem after years of declining search quality and the introduction of AI features in Gmail. The author switched to Proton for email and Brave/DuckDuckGo for search, finding both to be superior alternatives. Key arguments include: Gmail's algorithmic sorting is unwanted, Google Search keeps users on Google rather than the open web, Google's dominance is maintained through dark patterns and a $20B deal with Apple rather than genuine user preference, and the 'free services' model is a trade-off for privacy and data. YouTube remains the one unavoidable Google product due to network effects.

Leaving Google has actively improved my life

I had the same Problem with youtube, i have built myself this using n8n, supadata api, youtubes RSS feed for channels and telegram:
<img src="https://media.daily.dev/image/upload/s--0dE2ZNyn--/f_auto/v1772706975/ugc/content_e43bee16-06e4-4c5e-a0dd-b08588a0eb81?_a=BAMAMiiu0" alt="1000107765.png">
<img src="https://media.daily.dev/image/upload/s--35UbmknY--/f_auto/v1772706983/ugc/content_4d60b456-5b42-4442-bc2f-250df451920b?_a=BAMAMiiu0" alt="1000107766.png">

The people who write this stuff suck lol there is no way proton is better than Gmail. Can’t wait until these people go away when data becomes currency.

There are no objective arguments in the article. The main theme is “big tech is bad”, “you are the product”, “there is no privacy”, etc. At this point, anyone and especially those of us on this site, should be aware of all such issues related to using Google products. Those of us who stay with Google stay because it’s “free” (and yes, we know we sell our data to advertisers). And I tried many alternative search engines including DuckDuckGo and they suck. And no, I don’t find any joy in digging up through articles on various websites to find an answer to my question, in fact these days I’m ditching google search entirely for Gemini and the like. And yes I’m aware of the dangers of this as well, but as long as I’m aware of them, I can live with that. Nothing beats e.g. a product comparison by Gemini, I would have to waste hours or days reading and watching reviews to match this.