Just talking about search alternative; DuckDuckGo is my default search engine for over 2 years. It's incredibly good, the only caveat is you need to re-learn how to search. The same way you "changed yourself" initially for google.
Except google didn't need learning, in fact that's part of what made it so much more powerful, they early on dropped support for AND and OR and other boolean keywords which other search engines required to get good results. In fact one of google's early "hidden" successful features was using implicit AND not implicit OR, which had been the de-facto on other search engines, so searching for "gold plates" on other sear…
De-Googleify Internet
21–30 of 266 posts
Re: De-Googleify Internet
#22Why? To completely remove anything from your life that happens to have Google as a part of it would be so inconvenient. Gmail is objectively an amazing email app on both desktop browser and mobile. No search engine can come close to Google. Lots of great apps like Google Docs, Calendar, and Translate exist to make your life easier for free. Google Maps is kinda annoying with Uber ads but its navigation and UI is so n…
Re: De-Googleify Internet
#23Earlier quoted context omitted.
The major advantage DDG has is that it doesn't matter what it is behind the scenes. They can change whenever it suits them and the site will continue to act as an anonymizing front-end, complete with some useful extras.
So what you're saying is that instead of Bing they could be using Yandex, Baidu or Google?
Re: De-Googleify Internet
#24I'll stick linking people to http://alternativeto.net - thank you very much
Re: De-Googleify Internet
#25Why? To completely remove anything from your life that happens to have Google as a part of it would be so inconvenient. Gmail is objectively an amazing email app on both desktop browser and mobile. No search engine can come close to Google. Lots of great apps like Google Docs, Calendar, and Translate exist to make your life easier for free. Google Maps is kinda annoying with Uber ads but its navigation and UI is so n…
Re: De-Googleify Internet
#26Disclaimer: I work at a big company. I also worked at a small start-up in the past.
Re: De-Googleify Internet
#27That's kind of the problem though; they usually _do_ offer a better user experience.
If we want users to start using open source software rather than walled garden solutions from large companies, we're going to have to start building open source solutions which offer a comparable user experience to proprietary ones from large companies; a difficult task to say the least.
Re: De-Googleify Internet
#28Why? To completely remove anything from your life that happens to have Google as a part of it would be so inconvenient. Gmail is objectively an amazing email app on both desktop browser and mobile. No search engine can come close to Google. Lots of great apps like Google Docs, Calendar, and Translate exist to make your life easier for free. Google Maps is kinda annoying with Uber ads but its navigation and UI is so n…
Re: De-Googleify Internet
#29Just talking about search alternative; DuckDuckGo is my default search engine for over 2 years. It's incredibly good, the only caveat is you need to re-learn how to search. The same way you "changed yourself" initially for google.
Re: De-Googleify Internet
#30Why? To completely remove anything from your life that happens to have Google as a part of it would be so inconvenient. Gmail is objectively an amazing email app on both desktop browser and mobile. No search engine can come close to Google. Lots of great apps like Google Docs, Calendar, and Translate exist to make your life easier for free. Google Maps is kinda annoying with Uber ads but its navigation and UI is so n…
I was Mac Mail and Mail on iPhone with 2 Gmail accounts and 1 Exchange/Office365 account. Works great and much better than having to switch between accounts in a browser. I've also always found the Gmail app on iOS awful to use (Inbox is quite good though).
>> No search engine can come close to Google.
DuckDuckGo comes very close in my opinion.
>> Lots of great apps like Google Docs, Calendar, and Translate exist to make your life easier for free.
My Mac/iPhone also come with a free calendar that's much nicer to use. I pay for Word rather than use Google Docs as I find it much nicer to use a desktop app than a web app.
Also - they don't exist to make our lives easier. They exist to collect our information and make Google more money. >> Google Maps is kinda annoying
Agreed. UI has got worse of the years. I use Citymapper multiple times per day along with Apple Maps occasionally.
I still use Google services regularly but they certainly aren't the best at almost anything apart from search. They often come out on top because short term, they are free to the user. Long term maybe not so much.