Everyone on HN isn't enough to have an impact. And telling friends and family isn't good enough because changing default behaviors is very difficult in practice and they would listen do you, but ultimately keep doing what they're doing.
I agree, but when my 70 yo mother was visiting last month I watched her look something up on her ipad and she typed in "duckduckgo.com" to do it! I was amazed and asked how she learned to do that. Apparently, she learned it from me! She said she thinks it gives better results. Then I set it to her default search engine so she wouldn't have to type it.
I have been using DDG as the default on all of my browsers for several years. However, there are still searches where I am not finding exactly what I want, and using the !g to perform the same search on Google comes up with better results. I don’t use Google unless I have to, and agree it has been degraded, but the idea that it’s now useless is unrealistic.
Google Search was awesome until it was ruined by Ads. Such a shame. There's dorking, however Google is actively de-indexing content, so much so that it makes you wonder what (monetary) motivation Google is serving with Search because it's not "information for all" anymore. The term "sell out" comes to mind, which sucks when you think about how cool Google was (i.e., the best and brightest doing the most so you could also do the most).
Anyone who has thought google was doing anything good after they bought doubleclick is living in fantasy land. They pretty much immediately started playing advertising extortion games and they optimize for more viewed google ads with things like AMP and making ads harder to notice. Google stopped caring about "information for all" the second after they made their original research paper and realized they had a significant competitive advantage to make some money with.
I used to love Brave search for this reason. Now I can never seem to find what I'm looking for, even for a simple search for some product a bit more obscure or smth the results are always wayy off from what I'm looking for. It is sad if it's due to their usage of entirely their own index, I was happy with that mix of Bing&Brave.
DuckDuckGo allows for supplement of Google Search, as does Brave, and other search engines. Google freaked out after the ChatGPT release (rightly so) and padded their hand a bit.
Impact would probably be Ads via Google Search Engine. Which, great, because Google Ads-generated results remain a huge vulnerability in terms of active phishing attacks. Maybe it's gotten better in the last month, however I don't really use Google Search anymore, to avoid phishing attacks.
And, this is one reason why I like Brave, because I can control what content cannot appear in my search results, to better mitigate phishing attacks.
HN has about 1/1000th of that. They do not click every link or make decisions in unison, so the number of people who would interested in such a boycott is probably 1/100th of that. Maybe less.
