De-Google Is Hard
I recently switched my default search engine from Kagi to Brave Search.
After using Kagi for about a year, it started to feel a bit unpolished to me. The UI feels somewhat rough, and some of the newly added strings still rely on community translation. I actually contributed quite a few Simplified Chinese translations myself.
That said, Kagi’s Simplified Chinese search experience is genuinely good. One feature I especially liked was the ability to manually rank different domains. It meant I could push sites like CSDN — and other low-quality content farms — out of my search results.
Kagi Assistant, however, is probably the thing I am least likely to use. I already have ChatGPT and Claude, so I do not really need another AI layer in my search workflow.
Another reason I started looking at Brave again is that they recently announced Brave Origin. One of the reasons I never got used to the Brave browser was that it bundled too many things I did not need: VPN, AI, Wallet, Playlist, Talk, News, sponsored ads, and so on.
Brave Origin has already sparked quite a bit of discussion, especially on Reddit. Honestly, I am fine with paying $60 as a one-time purchase. And use BRAVE30 at checkout also get 30% off.
Of course, I still need to wait until they ship v1.91 and actually try it myself. I know there are Nightly and Beta builds, but I do not really want to test buggy software right now. Recent Windows update problems and macOS bugs have already given me enough headaches. In the long run, the more important question is whether Brave can actually deliver on its promises.
As a side note, I also found that Brave Search has a similar reranking feature for search results, though it seems to be limited to Raised and Discarded.
In the end, de-Googling is painful because you are basically signing up for a lot of self-inflicted inconvenience.
I also do not want to become too extreme about it. Fortunately, I barely use Google services anymore. The only one I still use heavily is YouTube.
Thanks, GFW, I guess. (´･ω･`)