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Comment by tkiolp4 | Hacker News Reader

Google as a brand is something I don’t trust anymore.

- cloud? You’re far better at aws than gcp

- email? Got my life-long gmail account blocked for no reason. I’m using icloud+ and custom domain now. I have a dummy gmail account just in case

- drive? I don’t trust my gmail account so, I cannot trust drive either

- search? Guilty. I’m still using it, but less and less

- youtube? Annoying af with ads. I don’t bother with blockers

- phones? Nexus 5 was great. It lasted me 4 good years. Nowadays if I want good quality I go to apple

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Just wanna throw my hat in for an unsolicited Kagi recommendation. I switched almost a year ago, and it's been great.

I'll second this, I can hardly recommend any subscription more than Kagi.

Despite the numbers, I'm always surprised when someone still uses G search... it's drowned in ads and exploitative results. Kagi lets you modify the weights of individual sites or even block them, so you can filter out blogspam and clickbait sites instantly. Best of all, it even has a leaderboard for most-blocked and most-promoted domains so you can literally just go down the list of some of the worst sites and block them before you ever see them in a search result.

I can second this. Although my queries per month are limited due to using free tier, they almost always get relevant results for technical questions. If Google keeps getting worse, I'll switch to Kagi's paid tier. The LLM demo they briefly made available a few months ago was also impressive.

kagi is great. It's overpriced, but if you are willing to pay the premium for unlmimited searches (you run out really quickly or aviod doing searches otherwise with the normal plan), it's really good

I don't know if it's overpriced, or if it is the sticker shock of _having to pay for search where almost everywhere else provides it for free_. I'd rather not pay, but I'd also rather pay and support something to get them to stick around long-term.

$10/month for about 400-600 queries? That adds up like crazy. $10/month invested elsewhere is a fortune after a number of years

I definitely don't disagree, although I typically do about double that count (albeit on the lower range).

I'm not a fan of subscriptions, but a search engine is definitely something I can understand requiring a subscription fee. Something like my calendar app? Nope (had to drop... some app because they moved from a perpetual license to a subscription).

I mostly use Google web search, too, but I've found that Bing is the first search engine actually at the same level.

Switch to Brave Search. You don't need Google.

iCloud + custom domain is definitely better than Gmail in every way except maybe the webmail client. So glad I discovered it.

Does it handle the case where your custom domain has multiple Apple IDs in it eg. a@example.com and b@example.com? Last time I tried to migrate this was the blocker for me.

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