Why I've stopped using Google Search. Hi everyone,
Leo Notenboom here for askleo.com. A quick reminder, I have a weekly
newsletter at newsletter.Askleo.com where you can stay up to date
with all the articles and videos that I publish throughout the week. So Google's search engine
essentially is how Google started. They made a better search engine
than any of the other alternatives at that time and they were very,
very good for a very long time. I definitely ran tests periodically
against some of the other search engines to just see who gave me the
best results because it was the best results that I cared about. Unfortunately, there's a term
that's come into play in the industry and it has started to apply to Google search. That term is and shitification. It's a four step process. In the beginning, they're
good to the users, then stage two, they start to abuse their users
in favor of their business customers. Stage three, they start to
abuse even their business customers in favor of their bottom line. And then in stage four, well, they die. Google, in my opinion, when it comes
to search at least, is solidly somewhere between stages two and stage three,
we are as users being abused. And I want to show you how that happens. So we'll head over here to google. com as my search engine. I'm going to search for coffee makers
because I think I'm in the market. So here are some search results,
except these are not search results. In fact, there is not a search result
to be found on this page. If you look carefully over on the left
hand side, you can see that it says sponsored that tells you that this entire
row of coffee makers that are being displayed are not the result of your
search, but rather the result of companies paying to be displayed on the page
that you are searching for this particular term on. So for example, maybe Keurig,
I don't know the others, but these companies are coming in
and saying, hey, I will pay you. I don't know, a nickel, say
every time you display my coffee maker on a search related to coffee makers. And of course they set up
a whole list of keywords that they try to make themselves appear for. And appearing at the top of
the search results like they are here is something that you can pay for. In other words, yes, you can
buy the first position in Google search results and that's what
these companies have apparently done. In fact, if I scroll down,
you'll see that there's even more. And it's unclear to me whether
or not these are ads or not. My guess is they probably are. My guess is that this sponsored
may apply not just to this first row, but also to the second. But I'm not sure these could
be legitimate search results. We just don't know. If we scroll down a little further,
of course we get people also ask. And then finally, after scrolling down
basically a couple of pages, we get what we would really consider to
be traditional search results targeting, the term that we've been searching for. Google has been termed these days
as an ad delivery company that happens to occasionally show search results. And that's really unfortunate because
I think it misleads a lot of people. What they're clicking on are not
what the results of an actual search are, but rather they're clicking
on what advertisers have purchased to put in that position. So with that as the problem,
what are the alternatives? Well, there are of course several. They each have their pros and cons
and I want to talk a little bit about those and which ones I'm actually
using and playing with myself. We'll start with bingo. Bing is probably the most obvious
alternative to most people simply because it's ubiquitous and that ubiquity
actually is one of its problems. I'll talk about that in a second. Once again, we'll hit coffee makers. Same thing here, though. We start with the results
of paid advertisements. This top row once again is as pointed out
by this item in the right hand side, ads. These are ads for coffee makers. They are not necessarily the results
of Bing going out and searching. They are the result of advertisers
paying to show up in this position. It's not until we scroll down a little bit
that we now start to get more traditional search results for coffee makers. Now, in this case, Bing has shown us
fewer ads and they've been obvious. They've been marked as ads. It's better. But I resist Bing on principle,
and that principle is simply this. Microsoft is trying so hard to ram Bing
down our throats that I resist the fact that it's the search engine used in many
cases, even though you've got a different search engine specified, bugs me. Similarly, as with edge sometimes being
the browser that gets used regardless of what your default browser is,
and edge, of course, defaults to using Bing as its search engine. These are things that I
don't think should be in place. I think our choices should be respected if
Bing wants to be a better search engine, if they want to be the search engine
that more people use, they just need to be a better search engine. They need to be demonstrably
better than Google. And honestly, right now,
it's not that hard to do. You've seen how bad Google is right now. So if I'm avoiding Bing,
what's next on my list? Well, this is one that you've
probably heard of. It's duckduckgo. And once again,
I will type in copy makers. Now, to be clear,
DuckDuckgo is also ad supported. And you can see here that it, too,
includes a line of ads across the top. Then there's another ad. Then there's another ad.
And another. The good news here is that
these are all clearly labeled as ads. Yes, they are still ads. Like I said, DuckDuckgo needs to
make money somehow, and they do it like everybody else with advertising revenue. Now, the reason DuckDuckgo is better still
than both Bing and Google, in my opinion, are their privacy policies. The ads that show in the search engine
are not based on your prior behavior. We've all seen ads that
follow us around the Internet. Well, that's because those ads
are based on our prior behavior, the things we've looked at, the sites
we visited, the things we've clicked on, and that also affects the search results. Ads in both Google and Bing, it does not. In DuckDuckgo, these are ads and
search results that are based on your search term, not your prior behavior. Again, it's a privacy enhancement
that I believe makes Duckduckgo a better, basically more favorable browser. And in fact, it's what I've
been using as my default browser for some time, and it works fine. I get the results that I want. Now, there is one other alternative
that is completely ad free. That's kaji.
com dot. The reason that kaji. com has no ads is that it
is a paid service. It's not expensive, and you do have,
I think, a number of searches you can do for free as a trial to see if it's
going to be something worth it for you. But the bottom line here is that
rather than relying on ads for revenue, Kaji simply asks you to subscribe,
and I've done so. If we now look for coffee makers here,
we get coffee makers, and that's it. There are no ads on this page. That, to me, is worth
every penny of my subscription. It's now clear what I'm getting. Now, one of the issues with
both Kodji and DuckDuckgo is where they get their search engine results. As it turns out, they get
many of their results from Bing. So in a sense, we're
getting some of the results. We're actually using Bing indirectly,
but in this scenario, we're actually using them through a third party. That, in my opinion, gives us better
results than Bing itself would give us. The other thing, of course,
is that I believe Duckduckgo. But I know that Kodji also relies on
some additional sources of search engine results based on the nature
of whatever it is you're searching for. But again, none of this
is based on your behavior. And in the case of Kaji, there are
no ads to mislead or confuse you. Now, there are some other search engines. In fact, there's probably many more
search engines that I'm even aware of. Four more that I want to at least
tell you about in case you want to experiment with them, include AOL. Yep, they're still around. Brave from the creators of
the brave browser, another privacy focused search engine perplexity, AI. This one I find interesting. I haven't played with it too much yet,
but as its name implies, it's using AI to maybe gather or or enhance
the results that it shows you in response to a search and@yahoo. com dot@yahoo. com has been around forever. They are yet another search engine
that you might want to experiment with. Some of these, once again,
may get their results from other search engines like Bing, but
they may be wrapped up in a way that is clearer and perhaps more useful to you. So bottom line, what should you do? My recommendation is simple. If you want to avoid Google
and you want to avoid rewarding Microsoft, my recommendation
is that you use Duckduckgo. If you're interested in getting rid
of ads completely in your search engine, then I actually do recommend kaji.
com. I've been using it for a while. The results are good, and it
is honestly very refreshing not to have any ads intermixed for updates,
for comments, for links related to this topic and more, visit askleo.com/170290. I'm Leo Notenboom, and this is askleo.com. Thanks for watching.
