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Google is going ‘all in’ on AI. It’s part of a troubling trend in big tech
(theconversation.com)
this post was submitted on 29 May 2025
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The two thing I use most, by far, from Google, is gmail and basic search.
Gmail, I'm looking to move away from it now, but I currently have every little addition to it disabled. Basic inbox and tags, no automatic filtering, no categories, no nothing.
Search, my browser is set to open the "web" tab with the query, no transformation, no summary, no "for you", no AI garbage, no "we thought you wanted video so there's only video in the replies". It still works fine.
Basically, none of what they added for years… maybe decade at this point, had held a glimmer of interest from me. It feels like this trend will continue. I just want something very basic that works.
Switch over to the Qwant search engine for your basic search and a good email provider like Tutamail or Proton. I have for a few months and there really is no reason to go back. It's simple and it works.
For search I'm really happy with Kagi
I'm self-hosting my mails; no need for another third party that will decide whatever whenever. The major difficulty is the decades of things that are reliant on the old one.
And I just said that google works fine for search, despite people claiming it's on the decline, broken, unusable, etc. That's not to move toward qwant, who are no less shady, burn money (sometimes coming from public money…), and despite wonderful claim of an autonomous index, completely stop working when Bing is down. As far as recommendations for search engine goes, google (and Bing for that matter) are far less disingenuous. All usable search engines these days are backed by the big ones anyway. Something like https://openwebsearch.eu/ would be a better alternative, assuming it follows on its promises.