There has never been a better time for someone to swoop in and remake web search. Hell, there are probably dozens of software engineers from Google that have direct experience with search AND were laid off.
I'm surprised that no one is trying to compete with Google at the weakest point it's been since going public.
I think the problem is that search does not make money. Ads make money, and subscriptions make money. Convincing people to switch from Google ads to New Google ads would involve dumping tons of money into becoming popular enough to attract advertisers. Convincing people to pay for search, like Kagi is doing, is probably even harder.
Great. now the search engine will tell me "I am not designed to provide that information" when I don't use the specific, constantly changing magic words it wants.
This also reminds me that I'm still annoyed my phone options are more or less limited Android and iPhone.
googles search results got so bad in the last few months that i switched to a searXNG instance and couldn't be happier at the moment. no profit incentive, so i get no-bullshit results. they can keep their SEO-infested AI garbage results.
Nah. It's not going to be "AI." It's going to be YouTube results, followed by Reddit results, followed by "Sponsored" results, followed by AI-written Bot results, then a couple pages of Amazon results and finally, on page 10 or so, a ten-year-old result that's probably no longer relevant.
This is really funny to me because Google ruined their own search engine for advertising purposes; so much so that they now need to add "AI" to it to look good and hip again. Only if the "AI" results are actually good, it will hurt their advertising revenue, and it's not quite so simple to tweak it the same way they cooked their search algorithms to serve you more ads, plus it will burn an ungodly amount of money to process each request. And if it's bad, they'll have wasted billions on it and will ruin their reputation even worse.
It will not hurt their revenue. There's no way any of these companies haven't thought about how to increase revenue with what they're doing.
Just because we haven't seen how yet, doesn't mean it isn't planned.
And it will not cost an "ungodly amount of money" to process these requests. Ofc Google will cache answers, because alot of what people ask, are the same. Then maybe the info can be updated sometimes, but ofc they won't do it every time.
Sadly, old Google doesn't work either thanks to the efforts of SEO and the AI generated garbage.
The problem with search is that the motives of those being searched aren't to provide you with the most helpful answer. The motives are to get you to visit their website then stay/click/buy as much as possible. They'll tailor their content to match whatever algorithm the engine is using.
That's why Google's new plan is to collect all of the information ahead of time and skip the "visit other websites" step. Then you can stay/click/buy on their website as much as possible.
Seriously though. Just skip all this nonsense, you selfish piece of shit, and open your wallet so the hungry corpos can feast on its contents - they have poor, innocent, starving shareholders to feed... you monster.
Proton Mail has taken care of email for me. Their transfer process was extremely easy, and since I have my own domain and had already aliased an email to my previous one, I didn't need to change my email on my accounts.
Google Photos is still a thorn on my side. It's just too good to leave.
I have had proton mail with premium for the VPN and password manager for a good couple months now but how good is the mail. I really only have it for like steam and few game accounts
Edit: after looking through my light post history probably been on proton for six months. Man how time flies, by my question still stands even if I haven’t used the email as much as I’d have liked to
It's really hard to give a review of an email service. It sends mail, it receives mail, and the user interface is pretty enough for what it needs to do.
It's a bit cheaper than a comparable service from Google Workspace, and it encrypts emails when it's possible to do so, which is nice.
An extra plus is that it allows you to use your domain as an alternate email, both for receiving and sending. So if you don't like @proton.me, you can replace it with a domain that you own.
A minus is that you need to install a bridge to use standard SMTP clients like Thunderbird.
All in all, I'm happy, and I'll continue to use it.