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Comment by alanfranzoni | Hacker News Reader

Of course you don't strictly need Google. You can live without it.

But will the quality of your internet life be the same? Good luck with alternative search engines result quality.

And the price? Just the email provider you suggest will cost you $48 a year - vs $0 for Google.

Would you like to pay? Fine. The whole point is that Google, in order to provide all those services without paying, actually asks something from you - your data. Just like Facebook and Twitter. Consider G Suite as well, since its privacy guarantees are different from free gmail accounts.

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I started using DuckDuckGo a few years ago. Initially, I would find myself using Google at least a few times a day if DDG didn't turn up what I was looking for.

As time went on this was less and less the case, and now I hardly ever use Google for web search. DDG results are a lot better than they used to be and almost always as good as Google in my experience.

I've also had this experience with DDG. Other people I've turned on to DDG have also experienced this.

I can't tell whether their search algorithms have gotten better or I've gotten used to DDG results.

This also depends on what you're searching for. If you're hunting for a lot of academic stuff from journals, DDG just isn't good enough. On top of that its agonizingly slow. I try to give it a chance everywhere: phone, office workstation, home laptop. It's just not enough.

I switched to DuckDuckGo a couple of years ago, and it really does just fine. Besides, if DDG's results aren't good enough, you can just add !g to your query string and search again - this time DDG will act as a frontend for Google search. I used to do this frequently but DDG's results have improved steadily while I've been using it and now I rarely bother.

Or !sp which sends your result to startpage which is a proxy for Google.

> But will the quality of your internet life be the same?

The same? No. But, that's the point: Whether life gets better or worse is an empirical question, which means that it can be answered experimentally.

As for the cost of the experiment, consider that $50 is less than what many of us spend on renewing dormant domain names each year.

"But will the quality of your internet life be the same?"

Initially? Probably not.

But given enough time, I think dependence upon Google and continued contributions of ones personal details will be a major detriment.

There is no free lunch.

How will it be a major detriment? You can't just say something like that and expect people to understand what you mean.

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