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Become Ungoogleable

joeyh.name

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Re: Become Ungoogleable

#61

Post by mrguyorama »

wittyusername wrote: post #22

The process is somewhat straightforward: - Search your full name, your username, your phone number, pieces of your last 3 addresses. - Check image search in particular For each result: - Google their remove me process and execute it, if they have one. - If not, find an email contact and ask nicely. Make up some excuse - If that doesn’t work, email a more formal GDPR right to be forgotten note if you are in EU. - If t…

There are several businesses that claim to help with this process, including providing convenient links to those removal processes for many big entities. I cannot advise whether they are grabbing all your info too.

Re: Become Ungoogleable

#62

Post by reaperducer »

OO000oo wrote: post #50
Eddy_Viscosity2 wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everyone on HN isn't enough to have an impact. And telling friends and family isn't good enough because changing default behaviors is very difficult in practice and they would listen do you, but ultimately keep doing what they're doing.

I agree, but when my 70 yo mother was visiting last month I watched her look something up on her ipad and she typed in "duckduckgo.com" to do it! I was amazed and asked how she learned to do that. Apparently, she learned it from me! She said she thinks it gives better results. Then I set it to her default search engine so she wouldn't have to type it.

70 yo mother was visiting last month I watched her look something up on her ipad and she typed in "duckduckgo.com"

If you want your mother to bake you cookies, tell her she only needs to type "duck.com," not "duckduckgo.com."

At least until today. Now I get: Application error: a client-side exception has occurred (see the browser console for more information).

Re: Become Ungoogleable

#63

Post by Aurornis »

codetrotter wrote: post #21
Aurornis wrote: post #8

> Nobody really expects to be able to find anything of value in a Google search now This is a categorically false premise. The kind of statement that only makes sense when you're in a deep bubble and entirely removed from the average person's use of the internet. Deliberately removing yourself from Google is fine for the author who is more concerned about taking an ideological stance than they are about being discove…

If everyone on HN stopped using Google and started using DuckDuckGo. And we told all our friends and family to do the same. Would it have an impact?

Google has over 4 billion monthly active users.

HN has about 1/1000th of that. They do not click every link or make decisions in unison, so the number of people who would interested in such a boycott is probably 1/100th of that. Maybe less.

So, no.

Re: Become Ungoogleable

#64

Post by scottLobster »

That might work for this guy, but it's a big stretch from "this works for my niche use case" to "everybody should do this".

You can dislike the game, but being a martyr and refusing to play it is just giving up potential benefit for virtue signalling, and if he's trying to start a "de-Google" revolution, I would expect a more serious effort than this lone page that many normies would mistake for an error message at first glance.

Re: Become Ungoogleable

#65

Post by Aurornis »

deltarholamda wrote: post #33
Aurornis wrote: post #8

> Nobody really expects to be able to find anything of value in a Google search now This is a categorically false premise. The kind of statement that only makes sense when you're in a deep bubble and entirely removed from the average person's use of the internet. Deliberately removing yourself from Google is fine for the author who is more concerned about taking an ideological stance than they are about being discove…

>This is a categorically false premise This is accurate, somewhat. A lot of people do expect to find things of value when the use Google to search. But people who are more technical know it's a bit of a faff and bother to get Google to spit out what you're actually looking for, outside of "who is Chloe Grace Moretz" or something equally banal. And Google-the-Company does treat the Internet like it is their corporate…

> But people who are more technical know it's a bit of a faff and bother to get Google to spit out what you're actually looking for, outside of "who is Chloe Grace Moretz" or something equally banal.

I typed "Joey Hess" into Google.

The author's blog pops up as the first result, presumably because it hasn't been deindexed yet. The first page of results also includes his GitHub and an HN comment talking about him that links me to his Patreon. The search results are, I would say, very relevant and very good.

I think these claims that Google is useless are coming from people who aren't even trying to use it.

Re: Become Ungoogleable

#67

Post by mikem170 »

rotexo wrote: post #38
picometer wrote: post #28

I think this could be a bad idea for some prople, and here’s why. I was just searching an old teacher of mine to see how she was doing. I knew she was super old-school (doesn’t even have a smartphone, let alone social media profiles) but I thought, I’ll just see what comes up - it’s a little lower friction than calling her. She still doesn’t have any online presence except for one thing. The top search result for her…

Yes it is an interesting set of trade offs. I have first-hand experience. Six years ago, people on one end of the political spectrum mistook me for someone on the opposite end, and doxxed me. My name is similar to theirs, but I have an additional part of my name that makes it more specific. Now, my google results are polluted with the residue of that doxxing event. For a while, I actively tried to remove my google re…

Is this a situation where a legal name change might help, changing your last name like someone does getting married or divorced?

Re: Become Ungoogleable

#68

Post by distortedsignal »

WirelessGigabit wrote: post #58
distortedsignal wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure that I agree. My brother tried to set me up with a girl last week. She has a pretty uncommon name. Googled her. Found... a lot of stuff. I have a VERY common name. Think multiple (relatively) famous people (photographers, US Medal of Honor winner, enough lawyers to choke a court system for DECADES), but if you google my name and the city I live in (1,000,000+ people), my LinkedIn is like the second resul…

And did you Google yourself on a clean computer?

Tried this test three ways - from my wifi, on my phone's LTE connection, and via a VPN that my family uses, all in private windows to prevent Google using my local cache.

All found my LinkedIn in the top 2 slots.

It seems pretty stable to me? How could I make this cleaner?

Re: Become Ungoogleable

#69

Post by code_duck »

dewey wrote: post #29
codetrotter wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If everyone on HN stopped using Google and started using DuckDuckGo. And we told all our friends and family to do the same. Would it have an impact?

Not even on HN people are united in preferring Google. Personally I tried to switch many times and always made my way back, and I'm not even really in the Google ecosystem unlike others.

I have been using DDG as the default on all of my browsers for several years. However, there are still searches where I am not finding exactly what I want, and using the !g to perform the same search on Google comes up with better results. I don’t use Google unless I have to, and agree it has been degraded, but the idea that it’s now useless is unrealistic.

Re: Become Ungoogleable

#70

Post by JohnFen »

Aurornis wrote: post #8

> Nobody really expects to be able to find anything of value in a Google search now This is a categorically false premise. The kind of statement that only makes sense when you're in a deep bubble and entirely removed from the average person's use of the internet. Deliberately removing yourself from Google is fine for the author who is more concerned about taking an ideological stance than they are about being discove…

It may depend on the audience you want to reach.

I've blocked webcrawlers from my websites for years now, so you can't find them on Google (or most other search engines). But plenty of people find them anyway because my audience shares links with each other, puts links on sites that are indexed by search engines, etc.

If I were addressing a more general audience, this might not work as well.

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