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Leaving Google has actively improved my life

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Re: Leaving Google has actively improved my life

#231

Post by teeray »

WarmWash wrote: post #37

The problem isn't Google. The problem is that people want a "free internet" without ads, and without any form of data harvesting. But they also don't want to pay any money, because the internet, as we all know, "is free". In 30 years, no one has figured this out. So I feel pretty confident in stating that it's either gonna be ads or payments. And if we switch to a payment model, then the internet becomes another syst…

> either gonna be ads or payments

MBAs would prefer your “either-or” to be a “both-and”

Re: Leaving Google has actively improved my life

#232

Post by bmitc »

WarmWash wrote: post #37

The problem isn't Google. The problem is that people want a "free internet" without ads, and without any form of data harvesting. But they also don't want to pay any money, because the internet, as we all know, "is free". In 30 years, no one has figured this out. So I feel pretty confident in stating that it's either gonna be ads or payments. And if we switch to a payment model, then the internet becomes another syst…

> The problem is that people want a "free internet" without ads, and without any form of data harvesting. But they also don't want to pay any money, because the internet, as we all know, "is free".

I actually don't. I very much want to pay for something. But Google has wedged itself throughout the entire Internet.

I've been looking into paid options, but it is not easy to move from Google because they have stacked the web in their favor.

Re: Leaving Google has actively improved my life

#233

Post by robin_reala »

memset wrote: post #8
robin_reala wrote: post #2

I degoogled back when they announced AMP email, and am in broad agreement with the author here. The only things I’ve found it hard to replace are YouTube, Arts & Culture, Google Books, and Books ngrams. Everything else has great alternatives to move to 100%, and Books is just a backup alongside archive.org and Hathi. Even if you just stop using one piece of Google you’ll find yourself in a better place.

What have you done for email?

I ended up at Soverin. Luckily I was already using Gmail with my own domain, so I could switch without having to change addresses.

https://soverin.com/

Re: Leaving Google has actively improved my life

#234

Post by robin_reala »

magarnicle wrote: post #226
robin_reala wrote: post #2

I degoogled back when they announced AMP email, and am in broad agreement with the author here. The only things I’ve found it hard to replace are YouTube, Arts & Culture, Google Books, and Books ngrams. Everything else has great alternatives to move to 100%, and Books is just a backup alongside archive.org and Hathi. Even if you just stop using one piece of Google you’ll find yourself in a better place.

What do you look for in Arts & Culture? I find https://www.getdailyart.com/ pretty great if you are mostly just interested in painting.

I produce book for Standard Ebooks, and they need cover art.[1] Arts & Culture is a good source, but I also use Wikimedia Commons and some museum sites directly.

[1] https://standardebooks.org/artworks

Re: Leaving Google has actively improved my life

#238

Post by stephantul »

zeusly wrote: post #191
stephantul wrote: post #84

Ecosia is not just Bing, we offer a bunch of indexes, including bing and Google. We’re moving to our own index, which we are building in collaboration with Qwant, under the name European Search Perspective. I do see the point of the article however.

Will I ever be able to pay for ecosia?

Genuinely curious: what would you like to pay for? Not seeing ads? Unlocking new features? Or just supporting us?

Re: Leaving Google has actively improved my life

#239

Post by stephantul »

NittLion78 wrote: post #160
stephantul wrote: post #84

Ecosia is not just Bing, we offer a bunch of indexes, including bing and Google. We’re moving to our own index, which we are building in collaboration with Qwant, under the name European Search Perspective. I do see the point of the article however.

I can testify that Qwant, if nothing else, is a superior image search engine (basically does what GIS used to do 10-15 years ago) and it's better for just getting to a quick answer without your first 4 results being ad-driven. Unfortunately, when needing to do deeper dives on things, Google is still more or less the best for results past the first page in my experience, though it's rare I need to dig that deep these…

Qwant is somewhat focused on France, so coverage really depends on whether that is the market you’re looking for.

Re: Leaving Google has actively improved my life

#240

Post by PacificSpecific »

Aurornis wrote: post #7

> After giving them a fair shot, I think I can now honestly say that Brave and DuckDuckGo are better than Google for >90% of searches I've had DuckDuckGo as my primary search engine for years and I couldn't disagree with this more. DuckDuckGo is fine for quickly getting to well known sites where I can't remember the URL, but it's objectively worse for trying to find everything from Reddit threads to Recipes. Their de…

Yeah I still use Google for local restaurant info and geospatial stuff because it's just plain better.

I'm not sure if this is true anymore but years ago I heard from some business owners in my area that Google would call them to keep business information up to date. I imagine there's some form of automation these days (robocalls maybe?) but if that is the case it's kind of funny to think they are superior because they still do some stuff somewhat manually.

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