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You Can’t Quit, I Dare You

brooksreview.net

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Re: You Can’t Quit, I Dare You

#31

Post by weixiyen »

simonsarris wrote: post #5

> It’s not an easy thing to do, mostly because old habits die hard, but it is actually very possible. That's a different premise than most people are using. I wouldn't quit Google services because its possible. I would quit Google services if it was personally worth it. And it simply isn't. Not for me and not for the overwhelming majority of internet users. Oddly, he confuses why it might be worth it too. He says at…

I searched NBA Standings in Google and it gave me 5 teams in one division. How is that better?

Re: You Can’t Quit, I Dare You

#32

Post by Cushman »

nilkn wrote: post #14
simonsarris wrote: post #5

> It’s not an easy thing to do, mostly because old habits die hard, but it is actually very possible. That's a different premise than most people are using. I wouldn't quit Google services because its possible. I would quit Google services if it was personally worth it. And it simply isn't. Not for me and not for the overwhelming majority of internet users. Oddly, he confuses why it might be worth it too. He says at…

To be fair to DuckDuckGo, I tried your searches and did get useful results. "movies near me" took me to Yahoo! Movies, which showed me theaters near me. I could also search for something like "movies [zip code]". I tried it for a few different zip codes and it always got me the results I wanted, but not always through the same site. For one zip code, it brought up the Fandango page for that area, which had exactly wh…

> The only difference that I can tell is that Google puts some of the standings in a table on the search results page, which doesn't seem like a huge deal to me.

It depends what you mean by a huge deal, I guess. Going from information on the next page to information on this page is a big difference; it's one less click, which is 100% less clicks. And it's not just the click, the page has to load, then you have to find the information you want, if it even exists. You could wind up talking fifteen, twenty seconds to do what Google has done instantly.

Fifteen seconds isn't a lot, but multiplied by every search you do in your life it starts to add up. Multiplied across the Internet, you start talking about whole lifetimes being wasted-- and multiplying miniscule efficiencies into lifetimes is Google's bread and butter.

> It sounds like you're judging a search engine based solely on the information it takes out of links and puts in its own format on the results page, not by the links it provides. While I agree that bells and whistles like extracting certain results into a table on the results page are cool, that hardly seems to me like the ultimate test of a search engine.

I'd quibble with this too. It seems to me that extracting the semantic content you're looking for directly is the ultimate destination of search engines. Certainly it is a much more difficult problem than text search. Google isn't that far down that road yet, but they're further along than anyone else.

Re: You Can’t Quit, I Dare You

#33

Post by score »

I'm almost completely off Google (started my exodus late last year) and it wasn't nearly as difficult as I thought it'd be.

I moved into the Microsoft ecosystem.

It's all there. Bing is surprisingly good, SkyDrive surpasses even Dropbox and Office 365 w/ OneNote is the best office suite available. I even got a Windows Phone 8 (yeah, I can get carried away sometimes).

The point is, there's a whole new world out there that's sans Google, and it's probably better than you imagine it to be.

Re: You Can’t Quit, I Dare You

#34

Post by mnutt »

kennu wrote: post #12
brianwillis wrote: post #4

I like to run my email on my server, but it’s a significant undertaking and I don’t recommend you do that. I agree with Ben on this point, but don't really understand why things are this way. In looking for a replacement for Google Reader I found a bunch of high quality self hosted options. Similarly, hosting a website on your own server (or one you rent from someone else) is a pretty trivial exercise for anyone that…

Would you mind listing the high quality self hosted alternatives to Google Reader? I host my own email (Postfix+Dovecot on Ubuntu is pretty simple), and I might like to do it for RSS feeds, too.

Newsblur is also open source:

https://github.com/samuelclay/NewsBlur

Re: You Can’t Quit, I Dare You

#35

Post by nilkn »

JoshTriplett wrote: post #28
nilkn wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair to DuckDuckGo, I tried your searches and did get useful results. "movies near me" took me to Yahoo! Movies, which showed me theaters near me. I could also search for something like "movies [zip code]". I tried it for a few different zip codes and it always got me the results I wanted, but not always through the same site. For one zip code, it brought up the Fandango page for that area, which had exactly wh…

> What I would miss from Google, though, is stuff like "5 feet to meters." Google does the calculation. DuckDuckGo, like a pure search engine, just gives me a link which will do the calculation. For that search, DuckDuckGo shows an inline calculation: "Conversion result: 1.524 meters". It also includes a link to Wolfram Alpha, but it shows the result inline.

Yeah, I'm not sure how I missed that. I guess I looked right over it. I amended my post.

Re: You Can’t Quit, I Dare You

#36

Post by RobAtticus »

weixiyen wrote: post #31
simonsarris wrote: post #5

> It’s not an easy thing to do, mostly because old habits die hard, but it is actually very possible. That's a different premise than most people are using. I wouldn't quit Google services because its possible. I would quit Google services if it was personally worth it. And it simply isn't. Not for me and not for the overwhelming majority of internet users. Oddly, he confuses why it might be worth it too. He says at…

I searched NBA Standings in Google and it gave me 5 teams in one division. How is that better?

Because you can expand that list to instantly see the rest of the NBA?

Re: You Can’t Quit, I Dare You

#37

Post by nilkn »

Cushman wrote: post #32
nilkn wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair to DuckDuckGo, I tried your searches and did get useful results. "movies near me" took me to Yahoo! Movies, which showed me theaters near me. I could also search for something like "movies [zip code]". I tried it for a few different zip codes and it always got me the results I wanted, but not always through the same site. For one zip code, it brought up the Fandango page for that area, which had exactly wh…

> The only difference that I can tell is that Google puts some of the standings in a table on the search results page, which doesn't seem like a huge deal to me. It depends what you mean by a huge deal, I guess. Going from information on the next page to information on this page is a big difference; it's one less click, which is 100% less clicks . And it's not just the click, the page has to load, then you have to fi…

> It depends what you mean by a huge deal, I guess. Going from information on the next page to information on this page is a big difference; it's one less click, which is 100% less clicks. And it's not just the click, the page has to load, then you have to find the information you want, if it even exists. You could wind up talking fifteen, twenty seconds to do what Google has done instantly.

That's a fair point, but truth be told I rarely find myself completely satisfied with Google's extracted results anyway. When I look up movies, I almost always end up going to another page in the end anyway for more information.

For instance, if I google "movies near me," it only gives me a list of movies with their running times. It actually doesn't give me any showtimes at all. So I definitely cannot make any decisions based on that list alone.

> I'd quibble with this too. It seems to me that extracting the semantic content you're looking for directly is the ultimate destination of search engines. Certainly it is a much more difficult problem than text search. Google isn't that far down that road yet, but they're further along than anyone else.

I do ultimately agree with you; my main point, though, was that the guy I replied to said DuckDuckGo gave nothing useful, which really doesn't seem to be true at all as far as I can tell.

That said, I just found this:

http://duckduckhack.com

It looks like they're trying to let developers add in their own plugins to the search engine for instant answers, which is a pretty sweet idea IMHO.

Re: You Can’t Quit, I Dare You

#39

Post by robomartin »

stevewilhelm wrote: post #20

Just tried searching "march madness" and "yuba city hotels" in Bing, DuckDuckGo, and Google. I don't think I will be switching. I use Google Apps for Business: 25GB email inbox plus 5GB doc storage, custom domain, Google Docs, admin controls, two-step verification, best spam filtering on the planet, integrated calendars, video chat, mobile support, UI support for multiple accounts (business and personal), 99.9% uptim…

Until you do something they don't approve of and they shut you out of EVERYTHING overnight.

If Google provided a no-shutdown guarantee and service to service shutdown isolation I would consider them for business. Until such time, no friggin way.

There are far better ways to deal with violators than killing off their entire account and every single service they use. Staged restrictions with feedback comes to mind.

Re: You Can’t Quit, I Dare You

#40

Post by piyush_soni »

Contrary to what the author believes and would want us to believe, at this point I really don't see how is Google going to "come and get me" with the data that I choose to give it to them. Yes, I have given my credit card number to its Play Store, but I have given that to like 15 other services on the internet who just charge me when appropriate. They have my personal emails, its machines read them and show me ads, which I block with adblock plus anyway. It is training its natural language processing algorithms by reading my emails, and not giving me a share of them. I'm fine with that. It's giving me a really unmatched email service for that cost, and I understand that. It is acting according to its privacy policy, which it is trying to unify across its products. I believe so far, except one or two occasions they have been pretty fair to it.
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