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No More Google

nomoregoogle.com

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Re: No More Google

#151

Post by abeppu »

Some time ago, I switched to google fi. The experience has been pretty positive (monthly bills are low, speeds are decent, the idea of seamlessly switching between networks is appealing).

But when I read horror stories of people getting their google accounts terminated, I realize that losing my google account would also remove my ability to receive SMS 2FA codes, and recovering all my accounts would be even more difficult than for a person who is merely dependent on gmail.

This would be less of a concern if google had a way to associate separate accounts with each service, users could have confidence that google would actually treat them as distinct, even if they're continually used from the same devices, etc.

Re: No More Google

#152

Post by at_a_remove »

I never -- personally -- used much of Google aside from the search engine. Never GMail. I watched them buy and kill things I was interested in well over a decade ago. At work, I noticed how hard it was to get Chrome off of a machine when first installed and decided against that. Then they rather unceremoniously discontinued their search appliance without giving us much of a transition path, on very short notice, and that was something of a bummer.

I used to attend search engine conferences, with special talks given by someone who spent a lot of time analyzing Google's "special sauce." It became increasingly clear to me that search serves the ads, and everything else is a either a distraction or a temporary step in improving search and/or ads.

Re: No More Google

#153

Post by ardit33 »

jagged-chisel wrote: post #131
jason0597 wrote: post #34

These anti-Google discussions come and go on the front page of Hacker News, but I'd be curious to know how many people actually degoogle their lives drastically after reading such discussions and articles. I believe it's more of a case of "Oh my god, Google is so disgusting! Shame on Google!", and then people open up a new tab in Chrome to search on Google about their next restaurant destination as if nothing happene…

Personal anecdote, software engineer/techie for 25+yrs: I never react immediately. Unless directly affected by an event, I accumulate information over time and it will influence my decision making. Reacting is too disruptive to my own life, and those of the people I support (e.g. family.) Would an article like this make my family change? No. Many don't care; most don't understand the impact on themselves. My De-Googl…

Yup... I still keep my old hotmail and yahoo accounts around, just in case google ends up disabling mine for some reason

Re: No More Google

#155

Post by dangero »

gerash wrote: post #86

The title says "Privacy friendly alternatives that don't track you": Then there are entries for Google authenticator -> Authy, Google weather -> DarkSky (whose Android app was killed), Google Scholar -> Arxiv, etc. I can't take these posts seriously no matter how loud their proponents have become

a lot of the companies listed use google analytics on the exact page being linked

Re: No More Google

#156

Post by fdiskl »

I try to remove Google where I can, but for search... let's be honest, ddg and qwant just had inferior results. I try to use one of those, but find myself having to type !g or &g on a disturbing number of searches

Re: No More Google

#157

Post by [deleted] »

pb7 wrote: post #84

Hacker News is incredibly biased against Google. There was recently an informal survey[0] in "Tech Twitter" (i.e. other technical people) regarding opinions about the top tech companies and Google scored second highest overall behind Apple, with something like 85-90% positivity overall across different questions. Facebook, for reference, was something like 35-40%. [0] https://coda.io/@sriram-krishnan/2020-state-of-th…

[deleted]

Re: No More Google

#158

Post by redvenom »

cortesoft wrote: post #72
redvenom wrote: post #40

Another option that can replace a lot of Google services is getting your own domain. You can get email with that, and install a bunch of applications to replace a lot of the services like photo sharing. Of course the downside is you have to maintain some of it yourself (but you can get an auto-updating Wordpress installation for sharing photos), and you don't get as much connectivity because you have to promote it yo…

You also have to make sure you stay up to date on security patches.

Honestly, I think a shared server is enough for most people. And with that, the server is patched automatically. Wordpress on cPanel can autoupdate too...so really you don't have to worry much about that.

Re: No More Google

#160

Post by brummm »

antegamisou wrote: post #32

arXiv as an alternative to Google Scholar is a bit misleading, since 1. arXiv does not feature any sort of metrics (h-index, citations count) for the author(s) and 2. Probably no author's complete list of non-informal publications would be available on arXiv, which is why it may not be the place to look for some obscure paper of said author(s).

Yeah, it's kind of silly really. Google scholar feeds off the arxiv.
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