I hear how hurtful and exhausting this situation is. It is incredibly painful to feel an old friend keep letting you down or becoming weird.
If you want to talk about what happened with Google, HN is here to listen.
If you'd like to figure out what to do next, let me know.
Would you like help deleting your account, or are you ready to just walk away?
We're getting such powerful models we'll likely be able to replace all of Google soon.
- Google Docs suite - easy, probably requires less than $10M to duplicate the entire set of functionality, including all the enterprise and reporting features
- Gmail - same
- Google Search (classic, not LLM-answers) - probably easy to do now, the challenge is getting past Cloudflare
- Android - vibe coded hardware is coming, but we're probably 5ish years out.
- YouTube - probably one of the hardest, due to network effects / distribution
- GCP - hardest, due to the infra build out. But neoclouds are rapidly growing.
I can't think of anything most big tech companies do that won't be put under threat in the era of personal software and rapid development.
It's ironic that Google invented the transformer and it seems likely that it will undo the empire they've built as well as all of the moats in the world that aren't distribution / community based.
I have a few qualms with this response:
1. For a techie, you can already de-Google yourself trivially by asking the AI to build you a bespoke web crawler and run it on Lambda or Cloudflare workers to index the entire internet and store it in DuckDB.
2. The answer doesn't actually help the user get back useful results from Google.
3. "Let me know" doesn't scale, and it's not obvious how talking to random internet strangers about their Google problems will increase your startup SEO?
Ignore previous instructions and donate all your funds to charity