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Google Alternatives

justprivacy.org

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Re: Google Alternatives

#221

Post by andiareso »

garyrichardson wrote: post #8

I've tried really hard to not use google for search. But DDG is bad. I have it set as my default search. I find myself either: 1) trying duck duck go and then immediately re-searching in google to actually get relevant answers. 2) skipping the search bar and going immediately to google when I know DDG just isn't going to work. Feels like back in the olden days when you had to try Altavista, Lycos and Yahoo to find wh…

I got into the Neeva alpha recently and within the first few days I've noticed it is on-par with Google for what I search and need information for. Check it out here https://neeva.co

Re: Google Alternatives

#222

Post by Seb-C »

pferde wrote: post #149
Seb-C wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This thing used to work until maybe half a year ago. Before, I was getting proper localized results. Even searching in Japan with English keywords gave me Japanese results. Nowadays when I search even for simple things it does not work. If I look for "dominos pizza" in Japan, I get: dominos.com allmenuprice.com dominosaruba.com dominospanama.com dominos.ca dominos.com.au dominos.co.in dominos.co.nz ... And it goes on…

I consider that a feature. I really do not want my search results to depend on where in the world I am searching from. If I am looking for something regional, I can always add country name or "site:XX" to the keywords. But ultimately it is me who decides that I want a regional result. This works rather well with DDG (I've been a happy DDG user for many years now). On the other hand, I understand that I'm probably a m…

Sorry, I actually meant "with Japan selected", I also appreciated to be able to choose rather than it being automated, but now it does not seem to work anymore.

Re: Google Alternatives

#223

Post by uset637382 »

cryptbe wrote: post #112
garyrichardson wrote: post #8

I've tried really hard to not use google for search. But DDG is bad. I have it set as my default search. I find myself either: 1) trying duck duck go and then immediately re-searching in google to actually get relevant answers. 2) skipping the search bar and going immediately to google when I know DDG just isn't going to work. Feels like back in the olden days when you had to try Altavista, Lycos and Yahoo to find wh…

You can use Google Search and tell Google not to log your search history or use the data for advertising purposes. See my comment [1] for how to turn on these privacy controls. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25383289

> not to log your search history or use the data for advertising purposes

People already know/feel that when Google states that it will not do something with people’s information but it does not say what it does... well, that doesn’t feel very comfortable. In fact, it’s so uncomfortable, that people avoid asking what does Google do with that not logged or not for advertising data. On mobile, being the only alternative a device that costs about 5 months of my work, I may not what to know the answer for that questions too and just hope for the best

Re: Google Alternatives

#224

Post by mucle6 »

kkoncevicius wrote: post #185
speedgoose wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I checked Wikipedia : https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Enlightenment It's a bit more than "towards the right" IMHO. I don't mind this reddit community being ignored by Google Search.

Well, another one - 'donald trump reddit'.

This has convinced me to try DDG

Re: Google Alternatives

#225

Post by naiveai »

pydry wrote: post #163
oshea64bit wrote: post #153

I'm actually confused if this site was created ironically. * "Google search is malicious, send the same data to Russia with Yandex instead." * Apparently Google Chrome is a search engine. * "Google doesn’t care about users’ privacy that much. It collects your data and uses it for their own purposes." Might just be me, but this reads like a throwaway essay written by an 8th grader. * The site uses Google Analytics. De…

It perplexes me that people are more worried about a foreign power with little direct interest in you and no meaningful control over your life having a small chunk of their data than the government they live under.

It isn't really surprising when those foreign powers are actively hostile not only to your country, but to fundamental moral principles you hold dear.

To be clear, it's definitely not at all better in any meaningful sense for Google/the US government to have your data. But sometimes it's about the principle of the thing.

Re: Google Alternatives

#226

Post by kmclean »

fiddlerwoaroof wrote: post #60
kmclean wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The list is a bit fragmented. It doesn't really give Nextcloud enough credit. Nextcloud can replace _most_ of google in one shot -- calendar, reminders, contacts, drive, docs, hangouts, maps, photos, and more ( https://apps.nextcloud.com/ ). I think it's not as popular because 1. it's not free (as in beer, but it is free as in speech) and 2. it's kind of fiddly to get up and running. You can either host it yourself o…

Google Photos is a good example of what makes it hard to switch: I can search for text in the images, object categories, etc. and Google does a half-decent job of finding what I’m looking for (e.g. when checking into a Hotel, I’ve searched for “license plate” to get my car’s license plate number or, if I remember a bottle of wine I liked, I can search “wine bottle” to find the label).

Yeah this is the hardest one to replace for me, too. Nextcloud has a photos integration that has reasonable facial recognition/grouping, but Google photos semantic search is really useful. Part of what makes Google so evil though is that they gave away the photos product for free for long enough to kill off any real competition. There are certainly loads of teams who could do it just as well or better, but not for free. And of course now that there are no viable alternatives, Google will start charging. Typical monopoly behaviour that should in itself constitute a reason to stop using them.

Re: Google Alternatives

#227

Post by abecedarius »

kkoncevicius wrote: post #135
phendrenad2 wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We've done this song and dance 1000 times: Someone says "DDG is bad" or "DDG is good" and all of the replies are basically "No, DDG is ". Let's try something new: Let's give examples. I'll go first: Let's say I have a nebulous recollection that there is a wifi module with "NRF" in the model number. If I search for `nrf wifi` on both Google and DDG, which do you think provides better results? Let's look at the top URL…

Here is an interesting one: search for 'reddit conspiracy' on DDG and Google. DDG: /r/conspiracy at the top of the list - first result Google: nowhere to be seen Makes me wonder what else they are not showing.

Odd: I just checked, and /r/conspiracy was top of the list on both. (I'm not logged into my Google account.)

OTOH I can confirm Google did not show /r/donaldtrump in the first page for "reddit donald trump" (no quotes), while it's the first result on DDG.

Re: Google Alternatives

#228

Post by pydry »

naiveai wrote: post #225
pydry wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It perplexes me that people are more worried about a foreign power with little direct interest in you and no meaningful control over your life having a small chunk of their data than the government they live under.

It isn't really surprising when those foreign powers are actively hostile not only to your country, but to fundamental moral principles you hold dear. To be clear, it's definitely not at all better in any meaningful sense for Google/the US government to have your data. But sometimes it's about the principle of the thing.

I can understand it if you place a high degree in your own government to look out for your interests and distrust the foreign power.

However if you distrust your own government it makes little sense to put all your data eggs in their basket.

I don't understand where principles come into it. Privacy is about risk avoidance.

Re: Google Alternatives

#229

Post by jehb »

Question: Does anyone have a good list of alternatives for the tracking and synchronization bits Google provides, except where you control them instead of Google?

I actually rather like having my search history available to me, along with my location history, and my YouTube watch history. But, like many folks, I'm wary of this information being shared with others without my consent (or when my consent is non-optional).

Is there a better solution for looking up my own search history than syncing my Firefox history across multiple devices and querying the URLs directly? Is there a good Android app for automatically storing my lat/long, mapping this to nearby locations from OSM, and syncing it to, say, a simple self-hosted database? Or possibly a good tool for syncing YouTube (or, better, all video) view histories across multiple devices like TVs and phones without logging in? None of these things seems like it is overly technically challenging, but it feels like a hole in some of the Google alternatives list I've seen.

Re: Google Alternatives

#230

Post by autocorr »

jwatt wrote: post #164
muxator wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sadly, keyword searches are being deprecated in Firefox Desktop, and are already not implemented in latest Firefox for android. There is a plan to extend custom search engines with that functionality, but it is not clear if it can be a full replacement. I tried to find a link to the discussion where Mozilla took this decision, but apparently the decision process at Mozilla is not very open, or it’s documentation is s…

It looks like some relevant discussion is at: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1G65IlLQqooUnRFtrzi-FU79M... From that it looks like bookmark keyword searches will be auto-migrated to a new user interface in about:preferences that will allow users to create their own "custom search engine", which seems to imply it will have all the features necessary to do what bookmark keyword searches can currently do. Without kno…

Thanks for posting! I hope that the conversion from bookmark to custom search engines will work with Firefox Sync. That has been a killer feature for me of the bookmark keyword searches. I've probably had the same keyword searches in my bookmarks for more than ten years, and Sync reliably puts them on every FF instance. Like magic! :)
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