> I've embraced other search engines again - and they're surprisingly good enough, finally.

Or perhaps Google is crap enough. I no longer find anything useful when the search term overlaps with something for sale.

Even Wikipedia search is better in that case, and I skip directly to it.

Absolutely. Google search is now my choice ONLY when I want to buy something, and it's likely to be from someone who'd advertise through google. Otherwise you've got to go a long way through the results, and then you get to just junk - pretty useless.

Google maps is just as bad - other than street names and a few "public" places, the only locations that show up seem to be those paying to appear. Given how many (most) businesses google has details on, it's obvious that maps is filtering out non-advertisers.

So google is no longer a search engine, or a maps provider - it's degraded to be a small-time "yellow-pages" advertising directory. Sad really.

I wish I could upvote this post multiple times. Google senior leadership should read this out loud at an all hands meeting.

They probably do, then give themselves a nice round of applause. They're getting rid of their (unprofitable) discerning users, and keeping all the (profitable) naive users. On average, this increases the effectiveness of their ads and decreases costs. It's a big win for Google's customers (not you).

I've run into this a lot as well. If I'm looking up a place that catches my interest, 9 times out of 10 I'm *not* interested in hotel rooms or flights there. One Firefox search bar feature that I dearly love is that I can quickly and easily override my default search engine.

I had my first DDG beats google moment yesterday

I searched for ‘low more guitar sound’ and top result was an awesome YouTube video recreating the guitar sound of Low - More (song with amazing guitar tone)

Went to my other computer that defaults to google, searched the same thing

Pages of irrelevant crap, searched for ‘low more %nameofyoutubechanbel’

Nothing

Searched for exact title of YouTube video

Nothing

Had to manually go to the YouTube channel and find the video myself

I've been using DDG for a few months for almost all my searches now. It gets me the results I want almost all the time. When I do switch to google when DDG isn't enough, google gives me SEO crap and I go back to DDG, rephrase and focus my search and get the results I want.

Why does google serve up so much irrelevant crap nowadays?

Ive tried this but Ddg just doesnt work outside of english language..

> I searched for ‘low more guitar sound’ and top result was an awesome YouTube video recreating the guitar sound of Low - More (song with amazing guitar tone)

I just tried this and the first result I got was "Why does my guitar sound low?" on Quora and the only youtube result on page one was titled "How To Fix Annoying String Buzz On Your Guitar"

The results on Google were just as useless and still arguably worse than DDG, but I was disappointed that our results should be so different considering DDG says they don't buy into the whole search bubble thing. I'd have thought they'd be more consistent

I've tried switching numerous times over the years and always found myself back at Google eventually. Played with it a today after your comment, and I'll definitely have to give it another go.

> I'm dropping (paid) GSuite/Workspace/whatever it's now called for my family, and for a couple of businesses.

What are you switching to? I'm in the same situation of a couple of family groups and a couple of small businesses on GSuite and looking for alternatives.

There are several options (including my domain host) that seem very attractive. Shockingly so is iCloud. My only iCloud issue (and I have ZERO Apple products) is that I can't find a way to mount the storage on Linux. If I could do that, it's what I'll choose.

For the record, I don't think I trust Apple either - but nowadays they're clearly less evil than the big G. Heck, I'm thinking of trying out the first iPhone I'll have used since 2010. That's my level of upset.

I have yet to buy an Apple product, but Android is making me consider it. The difference for me is that Apple seems to have little or no interest in people who are not Apple customers, whereas google has just become a generalized surveillance agency. Apple's values may be a little unpleasant, but at least they have some.

For mail, calendars, and address books we have, as a family, switched to Fastmail a couple of years ago. It has been great!

I've been using Fastmail for years. Love it. Rarely a problem. Support always responds within 24 hrs if there is. Ended up having to move my calendars back to Google Workspace so they could sync with Acuity (SquareSpace) Scheduling. Really annoying that they can't provide hooks into other standard CalDAV services.

Same. This is the last straw that has led us to unanimously decide to transition all our clients paid accounts from G. Some stakeholders were already on the fence but this is what tipped the scales for everyone. Doing the same for my family (we have also been using a Workspace for our emails, photos, and calendars).

It's not OK.