thanks for the list but we've seen such things from time to time and yet no one to my knowledge ever tried to measure their effectiveness.
Degoogle: Cutting Google out of your life
151–160 of 665 posts
Re: Degoogle: Cutting Google out of your life
#152The list of alternatives just makes me lose hope of cutting out Google. They are lightyears ahead of the alternatives in so many categories.
I use DDG for search full time and I’ve found that I need to use !g less and less often. For the times I do use !g I am finding myself increasingly disappointed in the results. I think Google is losing the war against spamdexing [1] and I think the search industry is ripe for disruptive innovation. I have seen and participated in a number of discussions here on HN about the potential for a new search engine that elim…
DDG has been absolutely awful for me. Google has 15+ years of my search history at this point and the improvement that makes on my search results is incredible.
Re: Degoogle: Cutting Google out of your life
#153Earlier quoted context omitted.
For one, Google could identify you since on Chrome you might have your name, address, and phone number saved for auto-fill, and sell your information to companies. They could sell your information to a certain company if their AI identifies you, for example, as a left-wing elderly male. I think the recent documentary that got deleted off Youtube explains it. Google also censors results a lot compared to Yahoo and Duc…
None of those things affect my life. They may be moral or principle concerns for you, but they're not for me.
You could also argue that global warming probably won't affect you in your lifetime. It's a very egocentric way of looking at things.
Re: Degoogle: Cutting Google out of your life
#154Genuinely, why should I care? What harm is likely to happen to my life by sticking with Google, a service provider I find convenient? EDIT: I don't want to be accused of fan-boying or astro-turfing. I just see "Avoid Big Company X because they collect your data" a lot and I just can't give a damn about companies collecting my data. Be my guest, if it means I get free stuff. My data is boring tech nerd data, use it to…
Accepting this is setting a precedent that you're happy for companies with a lot of power to have efficient systemic influence. This has already (it's barely been 10/20 years) started to influence the outcome of elections. Literally the cornerstone of a functioning democracy. And you're saying you don't care.
Re: Degoogle: Cutting Google out of your life
#155thanks for the list but we've seen such things from time totime yet no one ever tried to measure their effectiveness
Re: Degoogle: Cutting Google out of your life
#156The list of alternatives just makes me lose hope of cutting out Google. They are lightyears ahead of the alternatives in so many categories.
They are mostly just producing office tools. Imagine that 50 years ago people said they couldn't stop using staplers and typewriters. Would a ban on these products really have doomed these people's lives and businesses?
Re: Degoogle: Cutting Google out of your life
#157I dropped all google services and it wasn’t that hard. The most tedious part is moving accounts from your gmail to your new email (I switched to using my own domain backed by fastmail). Even with a password manager and a list of all my accounts this took me an entire day. You also learn how terrible most non-software company account management is. On a lot of sites changing email is impossible. On some it lets you do…
I know it is easy to hate on big companies but how do you leave them when credible alternatives are not even close in productivity/performance. I tried leaving Macbook, but whenever I have tried the alternatives(even Thinkpad with Ubuntu), Macbook still seems to be at the sweet spot of life time ownership cost/performance. I do care about repairability, good keyboards etc. but I do have to look at things in balance.…
> I tried leaving Macbook, but whenever I have tried the alternatives(even Thinkpad with Ubuntu)
Perhaps the change was made more difficult by the fact that you changed two variables at once: the OS (macOS -> Ubuntu) and the hardware (Macbook -> ThinkPad). Something to consider.
Re: Degoogle: Cutting Google out of your life
#158I dropped all google services and it wasn’t that hard. The most tedious part is moving accounts from your gmail to your new email (I switched to using my own domain backed by fastmail). Even with a password manager and a list of all my accounts this took me an entire day. You also learn how terrible most non-software company account management is. On a lot of sites changing email is impossible. On some it lets you do…
Is fastmail the best email service provider these days? I switched my own domain to them a while ago, but then abandoned it when I heard about the new laws in Australia.
I use a combination of Mailo, Mailbox.org, and Runbox with my domains. They have their varying quirks but I am happy with my choice esp. wrt. their host countries.
Re: Degoogle: Cutting Google out of your life
#159The list of alternatives just makes me lose hope of cutting out Google. They are lightyears ahead of the alternatives in so many categories.
I use DDG for search full time and I’ve found that I need to use !g less and less often. For the times I do use !g I am finding myself increasingly disappointed in the results. I think Google is losing the war against spamdexing [1] and I think the search industry is ripe for disruptive innovation. I have seen and participated in a number of discussions here on HN about the potential for a new search engine that elim…
I agree that spamdexing is a huge problem, but could the rise of rel="nofollow" contribute just as much? The vast majority of user-generated content is marked as nofollow, but this is largely the same type of content that made early Google good. I often get better results doing a reddit search than using a search engine. It seems that by ignoring user-created links, search engines are ignoring 90-99% of the signal. The rest of the signal is mostly from commercial and promotional sites, so it's not surprising that these make up nearly all of the top search results.
I often do want results from commercial sites such as nginx.com, but I want results that real people have found valuable and not results that some paid blog post linked to.
Re: Degoogle: Cutting Google out of your life
#160I dropped all google services and it wasn’t that hard. The most tedious part is moving accounts from your gmail to your new email (I switched to using my own domain backed by fastmail). Even with a password manager and a list of all my accounts this took me an entire day. You also learn how terrible most non-software company account management is. On a lot of sites changing email is impossible. On some it lets you do…
Is fastmail the best email service provider these days? I switched my own domain to them a while ago, but then abandoned it when I heard about the new laws in Australia.
What new laws in Australia are you referring to? I did a quick search and I saw a lot about anti-spam laws (which is great), but how does that affect switching your own domain to fastmail?