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Google Alternatives

justprivacy.org

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Re: Google Alternatives

#231

Post by kennywinker »

BeetleB wrote: post #89
kennywinker wrote: post #22

Currently shopping for an email host. For 2-3 accounts, Protonmail is pretty pricey, compared with tutanota... I've heard good things about protonmail, but does anybody have experience with tutanota or any of the other alternatives listed?

Curious: Why not sign up for a web hosting provider that provides email as well? Dreamhost right now has a discount for $4/mo if you sign up for one year. Otherwise it's $9/mo in general. You get unlimited user email accounts. And you get web hosting should you ever want it. Their email interface may not be great, but I download using IMAP anyway. And you could install your own preferred web interface on the shared h…

I guess my feeling was that an email-only provider would have better service than a web hosting provider where email is more of an afterthought. Also, while a shared host is comparable in price with fastmail or protonmail - if I went with tutanota or a similarly priced offering, it's about 1/3 the price (for 3 accounts).

Re: Google Alternatives

#232

Post by nlitened »

aembleton wrote: post #173
nlitened wrote: post #154

I tend to imagine that year-2005 Google search is a tutorial-level web app today. Was Google search 15 years ago really bad by today's standards? With my biases, I remember that Google search was pretty good by 2005 (and much more predictable and configurable than nowadays). Why is there almost no competition and innovation in this space, apart from rebranding Bing search as Duck Duck Go?

Because it is very hard to build an index with the size of the web.

I don’t think so. If there are 5 billion pages on the internet, one could have a compressed 1KB-per-page index of the entire internet on a single consumer-grade computer in their bedroom in 2020. Size of the web should not be an issue, in my opinion :(

Re: Google Alternatives

#233

Post by kennywinker »

Buetol wrote: post #40
kennywinker wrote: post #22

Currently shopping for an email host. For 2-3 accounts, Protonmail is pretty pricey, compared with tutanota... I've heard good things about protonmail, but does anybody have experience with tutanota or any of the other alternatives listed?

If you use your own domain for email, you can change host anytime you want, pretty nice.

I wouldn't dream of using the provider's domain - but it's still a hassle to switch email providers (especially if you want your old mail ported over)

Re: Google Alternatives

#234

Post by BeetleB »

kennywinker wrote: post #231
BeetleB wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Curious: Why not sign up for a web hosting provider that provides email as well? Dreamhost right now has a discount for $4/mo if you sign up for one year. Otherwise it's $9/mo in general. You get unlimited user email accounts. And you get web hosting should you ever want it. Their email interface may not be great, but I download using IMAP anyway. And you could install your own preferred web interface on the shared h…

I guess my feeling was that an email-only provider would have better service than a web hosting provider where email is more of an afterthought. Also, while a shared host is comparable in price with fastmail or protonmail - if I went with tutanota or a similarly priced offering, it's about 1/3 the price (for 3 accounts).

It is likely true that an email only provider may have more features. In my experience, the support Dreamhost has provided me whenever I needed it has been exemplary. However, yes, mail is a low priority for them, and I think they focus on just providing the basics (secure, no frills email). They do have a spam filter, but I don't use it.

If you just need the basics: Email addresses, with stuff like SMTP and IMAP support, Dreamhost is more than adequate.

Re: Google Alternatives

#235

Post by pwinnski »

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…

This is so weird to me to read. I've DDG for years, and I'm not sure whether their results have gotten much better, or I've trained myself to "search the DDG way," or both, but I find what I want in almost all cases. When I (rarely) don't, I try a !g search, and have never gotten better results. Not in years.

I believe you, I'm just saying that's not my experience at all.

Meanwhile, I struggle to give up GDocs and remind myself to use Zoho instead.

Re: Google Alternatives

#236

Post by thewebcount »

MacsHeadroom wrote: post #77
thewebcount wrote: post #74

> There are other alternatives to Google Chrome like Apple’s Safari and Microsoft’s Edge but many of these have serious privacy issues. Really? I don't anything about Edge, but what serious privacy issues does Safari have? It doesn't send data back to Apple as far as I can tell. I can use ad blockers and tracker blockers with it. Or when they say "some of these" do they mean "one of these two?"

Does Safari sync your data to icloud? If so, it can be secretly subpoenaed.

I do not sync any of my data to iCloud beyond Contacts and Calendar, so I would presume my browsing history is safe. Plus I always browse in Private mode, so it doesn't keep a history anyway. But I guess most people probably don't take those precautions so for them it could be a method of leaking data. Thanks for the insight!

Re: Google Alternatives

#238

Post by shuckles »

Nextgrid wrote: post #178
jiqiren wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is false: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202303 End-to-End encrypted data section: Safari History and iCloud Tabs (requires iOS 13 or later)

How is the E2E key exchange done? As far as I know the key exchange is mediated by Apple, which means they could decrypt the data if they wanted to.

Details are available on Apple's Platform Security guide: https://support.apple.com/guide/security/cloudkit-end-to-end...
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