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De-Googling: My Progress

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Re: De-Googling: My Progress

#51

Post by asdff »

kavalg wrote: post #25
harha wrote: post #8

I actually think the results on DuckDuckGo are better than on google for many topics especially technical: - there’s less ads (you can turn them off completely, but I’ve only seen one ad on the front page at most which is ok for me) - not as SEOed (still not great though) - the box on the side is often more useful, e.g. Wikipedia instead of shopping ads - on mobile Safari I use the bangs [0] which have a sort of Omni…

Don't you guys use an ad blocker? I barely see any ads since I started using uBlock. Occasionally I browse without an ad blocker and the experience is horrible and intimidating. Actually ads and propaganda were the reasons I quit TV around 10 years ago and I have never regretted it. So much time and mental energy is freed up to do constructive and fulfilling things (e.g. reading books, sports, socializing, musing etc…

Been avoiding internet ads and tracking for 15 years now. I feel like the unibomber. Facebook and google probably still have a good fingerprint on me, though, due to iOS not letting you use good ad blockers.

Something uncanny happened recently in terms of the ads I do see that gave me quite a bit of paranoia. My SO recently bought a distinct pair of leggings. How am I seeing ads for that same exact pair of leggings, on my phone? I don't think I've ever typed out the word leggings on the internet before this very comment.

Re: De-Googling: My Progress

#53

Post by searchableguy »

rubatuga wrote: post #48
joering2 wrote: post #21

For photos storage and sharing you may want to check pCloud. They offer lifetime plan at $350 for 2TB. I'm in no way related; just a happy customer. https://www.pcloud.com/cloud-storage-pricing-plans.html

Does that really make any sense considering a 2TB costs around a $100?

If it's lifetime like they say, sure. Hard drives have high failure rate after few years.

Add bandwidth, management and other hardware fee to that. It makes sense.

Re: De-Googling: My Progress

#54

Post by bad_user »

prodave wrote: post #52

Do de-googlers consider Startpage to be acceptable? The results are from google but they claim that your privacy is protected.

Startpage was also bought by an advertising company.

They might claim privacy, but de-googlers forget that Google is a much bigger target for law enforcement than any of its alternatives.

If you don't trust Google to not collect your data, in spite of turning that behavior off in your profile, why would you trust Startpage?

Re: De-Googling: My Progress

#55

Post by galkk »

Naac wrote: post #31
jlarocco wrote: post #23

I'm a little bummed out that I just switched back to Chromium after several months on Firefox, but Firefox has some very annoying bugs that were driving me crazy. On the plus side, it's the only Google software I use on a regular basis.

What bugs specifically have you encountered?

The amount of random crashes on the Youtube pages is crazy

Re: De-Googling: My Progress

#56

Post by scalableUnicon »

catchmilk wrote: post #37

I really tried giving DDG a chance but I always found myself having to go back to Google to find the right information. This would especially pertain to technical matters. The 'average-joe-browsing' (e.g. amazon, movies, songs etc.) worked fine, but when it came down to research papers or solving software problems, I was too often left disappointed. A couple of weeks back I switched to Qwant[1]. Privacy focused, tech…

You could add !s before your search query to get Startpage results(google results without tracking) for that query. See the complete list of bangs here: https://duckduckgo.com/bang_lite.html

Re: De-Googling: My Progress

#57

Post by glogla »

totorovirus wrote: post #2

de-googling: appleling

Yes, there are just two generally usable mobile OSs - ios and android. The only way to not share you every living moment with google while still having a snartphone is to have an iphone.

It's fucked up that's the way world is, but it is the way the world is.

Re: De-Googling: My Progress

#59

Post by brabel »

harha wrote: post #8

I actually think the results on DuckDuckGo are better than on google for many topics especially technical: - there’s less ads (you can turn them off completely, but I’ve only seen one ad on the front page at most which is ok for me) - not as SEOed (still not great though) - the box on the side is often more useful, e.g. Wikipedia instead of shopping ads - on mobile Safari I use the bangs [0] which have a sort of Omni…

As much as I would like to agree, as a user who has DDG as the default search engine, this is not my experience... DDG consistently gives me useless results when I search for less popular languages results (searching Dart, or the search-friendly dartlang, gives me crap every time, while Google finds stuff easily... sure, Dart is by Google, that may be a factor, but if I remember correctly, results for Groovy and very new languages like Unison are a lot better at Google) I unavoidably have to use !g to turn to Google. To the point where when I am at work and cannot afford wasting time, I use Google by default.

Re: De-Googling: My Progress

#60

Post by brabel »

brongondwana wrote: post #33
phinnaeus wrote: post #20

I started a similar journey a couple of years ago. Honestly the biggest challenge was getting people to use my new email address instead of my Gmail. I made mostly the same choices, but swapped in: * Email/Calendar/Contacts: Fastmail * Docs: I don't use a hosted solution for this * Messaging: iMessage/Signal/Discord * Music: local music library While I lived in Seattle I was using Apple Maps, but since moving to Sydn…

Good choice for Email :) Of course the best choice for maximum flexibility is to have your own domain, then you can always move if you want. We want to keep you by being the best, not due to lock-in!

Yep, I use myname@mysurname.com as my email... It costs 10 dollars a year to keep my own domain, and that lets me not only have my own website on my own domain, and my own email address that will never have to change, but also for my whole family! Really good "investment".
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