Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

De-Googling: My Progress

geekgonecrazy.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 348 posts

Re: De-Googling: My Progress

#101

Post by GoblinSlayer »

brabel wrote: post #59
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…

What do you search? When I search "string dart" the first link is to api.dart.dev.

PS uh, rather the whole page is related to dart.

Re: De-Googling: My Progress

#102

Post by niemenmaa »

client4 wrote: post #64

I'm actually in the slow process of this as well. Moving to DDG is the easiest starting point; in the beginning it's tempting to type g! with every search until you start trusting the results. Next I changed from my Pixel 2 to a SailfishX on a Sony phone. I'm planning on moving to Owncloud for contacts/storage/docs next. It's surprising how I've paid for Google to deeply invade my life.

I bought an used Xperia and installed Sailfish on it. LOVE IT! The gestures feel so natural way to use phone, ambients make it look badass and the program management is really creative.

Android app support is what allowed me to transition because of banking apps etc. It's not 100% polished (especially the Android app usage) but at its worst works well enough and at it's best, the experience IMO tops any other phone OS that i've used.

Wish it had more native apps though.

Re: De-Googling: My Progress

#103

Post by Doctor_Fegg »

kick wrote: post #44
Doctor_Fegg wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

DDG’s definition of “global” is essentially “American” though. Presenting results exclusively for Worcester, MA, when I search for “Worcester” from a UK IP address (near Worcester, Worcestershire) isn’t being global, it’s being dumb. It comes up every time DDG is discussed on HN and I don’t understand why they don’t fix it. It’s the main thing that keeps me using Bing on my phone.

Worcester has a higher population than England's Worcester, and as such probably has more backlinks to pages related to it. That is global. Expecting global results to be regionalized is silly; just use regionalized results.

That's a very engineer-focused way of looking at it.

I don't care about backlinks or population or whatever weighting DDG uses: I want relevant results. DDG is a user-facing search engine, not a tech demo. Showing a UK visitor three pages of results about Worcester, MA is simply bad UX.

Re: De-Googling: My Progress

#104

Post by niemenmaa »

My De-Googling process:

  *Search(1)   -> DuckDuckGo
  *Gmail(2)    -> Fastmail
  *Android     -> SailfishOS (https://sailfishos.org/)
  *Maps        -> OpenStreetMaps
  *Youtube(3)  -> Youtube-dl, "subscriptions" with rss-feeds
  *Drive       -> Self-hosted Nextloud & Syncthing
  *Calendar    -> At first Fastmail, but nowadays back to paper calendar
  *Chrome      -> Brave & Firefox
(1) When having problems finding I sometimes check Google Search with bangs.

(2) Accounts still exist and forward to fastmail as I'm slowly changing my subscriptions etc.

(3) Youtube I feel is the toughest to get rid of, but nowadays I hardly ever go on the website as I hate all the clickbait that the algorithm tries to stuff into my face.

Re: De-Googling: My Progress

#105

Post by jamil7 »

manigandham wrote: post #17

I have Fastmail and other private email services but I've been unable to really move over because of all the integrations that Gmail has. Automatic email scanning for trip details, calendar integrations, searches from the web also surfacing details from emails, google voice, tons of other apps and extensions. It would be a nice if there was a way to get all this functionality beyond Gmail.

Protonmail is my primary email, I had initially planned to eventually shut down my gmail account after a 2 year grace period but have left it open for various google integrations I still need. It's useful for siging up to things I don't want to give my actual email to as well.

Re: De-Googling: My Progress

#106

Post by b3n »

tombh wrote: post #40

I've been de-googled (and de-facebooked) for over a year now. I wrote about it here https://tombh.co.uk/deleting-facebook-and-google My main motivation is slightly different in that being a software engineer I am actually in a unique position to navigate this tricky path and therefore feel a responsibility to tread the de-googled path, so that it might make it easier for others to follow, should they so wish. At the…

> I opt for Signal now, hardly anyone uses it and the UX isn’t as nice, but it uses state of art in encryption.

Out of curiosity, what don't you like about the UX?

And doesn't it use the same "state of the art" encryption as WhatsApp?

Re: De-Googling: My Progress

#107

Post by NotSammyHagar »

TedDoesntTalk wrote: post #6

> I’ve already pulled down my 2-300GB Google Photos archive How? I've tried several times and can never complete the download. Wired ethernet, not wifi.

you can divide it into pieces and just download them until it works. Did you try chunks, how many, what size?

Re: De-Googling: My Progress

#109

Post by ur-whale »

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…

Not been my experience either. I use DDG as my main search engine and I am obliged to fall back to google almost every time.

Re: De-Googling: My Progress

#110

Post by tombh »

b3n wrote: post #106
tombh wrote: post #40

I've been de-googled (and de-facebooked) for over a year now. I wrote about it here https://tombh.co.uk/deleting-facebook-and-google My main motivation is slightly different in that being a software engineer I am actually in a unique position to navigate this tricky path and therefore feel a responsibility to tread the de-googled path, so that it might make it easier for others to follow, should they so wish. At the…

> I opt for Signal now, hardly anyone uses it and the UX isn’t as nice, but it uses state of art in encryption. Out of curiosity, what don't you like about the UX? And doesn't it use the same "state of the art" encryption as WhatsApp?

At the time Signal didn't have the swipe-right-to-reply behaviour, nor the ability to lock audio message recording so you can record handsfree. But it has both now!

As far as I know yes Whatsapp uses some of Signal's tech but doesn't implement it in exactly the same way.

Post reply on HN