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De-Googling: My Progress

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Re: De-Googling: My Progress

#131

Post by hgal »

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…

DDG is good for mainstream. But once I search something in Hungarian I have to revert back to google.

Re: De-Googling: My Progress

#132

Post by openfuture »

niemenmaa wrote: post #104

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)…

My list is: DuckDuckGo, Protonmail (tutanota also an option but want to self-host eventually, rather than switch to another provider), LineageOS (want to get to Linux phone asap, preferably NixOS), OSM, Youtube-dl and container tabs in ff, git, org-mode, qutebrowser and firefox.

Re: De-Googling: My Progress

#134

Post by vikramkr »

AlwaysForward wrote: post #94
asdff wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

Unabomber not Unibomber, not that it matters. Ted Kaczynski, the man you are referring to is a fascinating man, try to ignore all of the recent hype and delusion following that Netflix series. I encourage everyone to read his book "Industrial Society and Its Future", he is without a doubt a luddite but presents some very compelling reasons in the book, if nothing else it will give you some insight into a rather notor…

The dude killed three people and injured dozens others and nearly brought down an entire plane. Hes not unfairly represented, he's a terrorist.

Re: De-Googling: My Progress

#135

Post by enobrev »

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…

I'm sad to have to agree. I tried ddg as my primary search engine for about 3 months. By the third month I was just adding !g by default because I just wanted results without testing quality first. Then I realized how silly it was to use it for almost every search, which I'd been doing for about a week, and switched back.

Re: De-Googling: My Progress

#136

Post by severine »

kmarc wrote: post #125
niemenmaa wrote: post #104

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)…

Can you elaborate on the Nextcloud&Syncthing part? It would be awesome to have LAN local syncing (as Syntching does), while being able to share doc to the outside world (NextCloud's functionality). Did you figure this out? Anther topic: yeah, youtube is not something you can replace, but you can still use other frontends, thus the rabbithole recommendation engine doesn't affect you, nor the advertisements. On Android…

Not OP and not a NextCloud or Syncthing user, but maybe this helps:

https://help.nextcloud.com/t/syncthing-nextcloud-how-to/5459...

Re: De-Googling: My Progress

#137

Post by niyaven »

dao- wrote: post #97
crashbunny wrote: post #95

I've done a similar thing, qwant, protonmail, firefox (4 different profiles and scores of containers), privacy badger, ublock origin, decentral eyes, but I'm convinced it's not possible to stop tracking. My browser finger print is unique and it doesn't seem possible to change that. Also I have an android phone with google apps, facebook, twitter, scores of other apps tracking me. There's not much I can do about givin…

Have you checked what factors make your browser fingerprint unique?

If you're using firefox, you're already in a bucket of only 4.42% [0]. But even without that, just take your screen resolution, browser + os version, font list, your time zone, and you're almost already unique.

[0] https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share/

Re: De-Googling: My Progress

#139

Post by cyrialize »

I have mostly de-googled myself. For search I mainly rely on DuckDuckGo, but as many people have pointed out sometimes DuckDuckGo doesn't cut it. When that happens I either use Google or Startpage.

I usually use Google when I want information about a business near me. I haven't tested this thoroughly but I think Google does a better job of getting and presenting phone numbers, accurate store hours, etc.

For email I'm a big fan of Fastmail. The service is great and the web UI is fast and easy to use. For storage I also rely on Fastmail - their standard plan comes with 30 GB of storage. They also provide calendars, notes, and contacts.

My personal phone is an iPhone. I didn't intentionally switch a while back - my android phone broke and my family had an iPhone I could use. I've stuck with it since then, I like the overall experience. I don't currently use any of the Apple Cloud services. It's been rough connecting my phone to my Linux laptop, but I've found the best way to handle it is to just have a Windows VM for uploading music to and downloading photos from my iPhone. I know there's https://www.libimobiledevice.org/ but it looks like it only works for images.

For music I either use Spotify, Bandcamp, or ripping CDs. I never tried out Google Music.

The one thing I haven't found a good replacement for has been YouTube. I'm definitely going to check out some of the suggestions people have made in this thread regarding that.

Re: De-Googling: My Progress

#140

Post by rypskar »

KozmoNau7 wrote: post #67
harha wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually that’s better too, I like how it’s possible to switch countries easily to get local results or choose global results. Some non technical searches are more difficult though.

DDG returns mostly Norwegian results when I set the region to Denmark. I get that our languages are very closely related and thus hard to tell apart, but it does get annoying.

That is funny. The thing that annoy me most when writing in Norwegian on DDG is that most results are from Denmark, often including did you mean "Danish spelling for the same word"
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