Cutting Google out of your life (2019) • Hacker News Board

Re: Cutting Google out of your life (2019)

#61

Post by lucb1e » Sun, Jan 05, 2020, 11:29 PM UTC

ugotjelly wrote: post #57

Question. Why?

I think that's a bit out of scope for the discussion about this list. A very short summary might be that a lot of people see Alphabet/Google as having gotten too big (various monopoly issues) and their business is largely based on advertisement that involves lots of tracking. Especially the combination of the two makes it bad. (You probably already knew this and I'm not actually sure if I should be spending time giving a serious answer to a two-word comment.) Anyway, I think this thread should be about the list and not about the mystery of why anyone would not want to use Google products.

Re: Cutting Google out of your life (2019)

#62

Post by judge2020 » Sun, Jan 05, 2020, 11:31 PM UTC

ignoramous wrote: post #42

dehrmann wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Google Captcha This one's scary from an infrastructure perspective. Way too many websites depend on Recaptcha, and an outage would be somewhat painful. There aren't tons of competitors, so with Google's penchant for killing services, it puts things at risk.

> There aren't tons of competitors, Cloudflare, being the Internet security company that it is, I believe, should roll out its own captcha or equivalent solution, even if only for the traffic it fronts. They kind of have got all the tools in the bag to make a splash with such an offering.

Cloudflare's "bot management" is effectively their own solution but doesn't provide a way to affirm you're not a bot like other solutions do; think of it like a fraud detection service and not a captcha service.

I also find it unlikely that they move away from Google's recaptcha since they seem to have an unlimited, unrestricted (can be used for any domain) recaptcha API key that they heavily rely on for the "captcha" challenge website owners like to use.

Re: Cutting Google out of your life (2019)

#63

Post by tksb » Sun, Jan 05, 2020, 11:31 PM UTC

doctor_eval wrote: post #58

jeena wrote: post #16

I almost successfully cut Google out with one exception, YouTube, I don't seem to be able to find what I get there anywhere else. Fun anecdote: Google is very smart, because I've been a paying customer of YouTube for a long time they gave me a Google Nest Mini for Christmas free of charge. And it fills another niche which I can't really find a meaningful alternative for: Speech to text hardware/software which can be…

Siri can control your smart home and doesn’t phone home (any more). You can hook it up with a raspberry pi to control just about anything, including generic zigbee devices.

Just made this jump recently and have been pleasantly surprised that all stated is true and it's delightful to use. More importantly, I feel as if _we_ use Siri, and not the other way around. Fingers crossed…?

Re: Cutting Google out of your life (2019)

#64

Post by shadowgovt » Sun, Jan 05, 2020, 11:33 PM UTC

steelframe wrote: post #51

mikedilger wrote: post #40

ReCaptcha is about the only google product that I still have to use... some 15% of websites I use eventually make me reCaptcha. Everything else is blocked with pihole/uMatrix/pf. Been this way for about six months now. Occasionally I still youtube-dl from a server and scp the file locally.

You don't have to use ReCaptcha. You just elect to do your business in another way or with another company. For example, I was a lifelong member of a regional bicycling club until they started trying to force me to solve ReCaptchas whenever I'd need to log in to their web site, and they stopped accepting membership dues and event registration fees by a check in the mail. That was easy enough: I stopped giving them mo…

The amount of inconvenience will vary heavily from person to person.

Re: Cutting Google out of your life (2019)

#65

Post by lucb1e » Sun, Jan 05, 2020, 11:33 PM UTC

Spearchucker wrote: post #13

There are a whole lot of products and services in that list I haven't heard of so will be checking those out. Notable about the list is the absence of anything from Microsoft. I cannot (will not, truth be told) do without Office and Exchange. Are all the items in that list free? Finally, I hope to see affordable and credible, non - Apple alternatives to Android some time. Still on Windows Phone which to this day has…

No, not all products in this list are free: neither as in beer nor as in freedom. Which is fine by me: moving from something like Google Analytics to any other closed-source paid product is probably an improvement for every visitor.

Re: Cutting Google out of your life (2019)

#66

Post by sprt » Sun, Jan 05, 2020, 11:36 PM UTC

jeena wrote: post #16

I almost successfully cut Google out with one exception, YouTube, I don't seem to be able to find what I get there anywhere else. Fun anecdote: Google is very smart, because I've been a paying customer of YouTube for a long time they gave me a Google Nest Mini for Christmas free of charge. And it fills another niche which I can't really find a meaningful alternative for: Speech to text hardware/software which can be…

What does YouTube have that you can't find elsewhere on the web?

Re: Cutting Google out of your life (2019)

#67

Post by amelius » Sun, Jan 05, 2020, 11:37 PM UTC

Is there a websearch benchmark which actually shows objectively how good all these alternative search engines such as DDG are?

How do we know which one is better, and how much worse we are off by using alternatives?

Re: Cutting Google out of your life (2019)

#68

Post by lucb1e » Sun, Jan 05, 2020, 11:37 PM UTC

cycloptic wrote: post #24

IAmGraydon wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then you may have noticed that you can’t access Google through Tor. They intentionally send you to a captcha you can never solve.

No, I've never noticed that. I don't try to access google or youtube directly through Tor. I just use those programs.

Wait, you can get around IP bans (Google certainly has a CAPTCHA on anyone trying to access Search from a Tor exit node IP address) by using a different client? Like, the check is client-side? That seems odd.

Re: Cutting Google out of your life (2019)

#69

Post by lucb1e » Sun, Jan 05, 2020, 11:39 PM UTC

Daniel_sk wrote: post #9

burgerzzz wrote: post #6

I've stopped using every Google product but Google search, and unfortunately Google Captcha, which I absolutely abhor. I downloaded Google Photos a few days ago to try and export some old photos and it refuses to let you view your old photos until you have give access to your current photos. That really typifies my experience with Google.

Also there is no easy way to export all your photos. I learned this the hard way when I decided to move my photos to iCloud. There used to be an option in Drive to link your Google Photos albums and download them, but they removed it. You can request your data from Google and then download a large ZIP, but I had numerous issues with it and it broke the Live photos from iPhone. In the end I had to manually select ~100…

> there is no easy way to export all your [Google Photos]

If you're in the EU, I'd love to see them try and hold your data hostage as of May 2018. Was this before that time / outside of the EU?

Re: Cutting Google out of your life (2019)

#70

Post by hkai » Sun, Jan 05, 2020, 11:40 PM UTC

Regrettably one worrying trend I'm seeing is people hearing that Google and Facebook do despicable things, and switching to an alternative like Wechat, which is arguably infinitely worse.

Perhaps when discussing Google or Facebook, we should put that in context and mention that they are some of the world's most transparent major tech companies.