Why doesn't google offer a paid version which encrypts your data and takes all manors of privacy measures? I would go for that
De-Googleify Internet
31–40 of 266 posts
Re: De-Googleify Internet
#32Earlier quoted context omitted.
Isn't DuckDuckGo Bing behind the scenes, though? That doesn't seem that much better to me. It would be nice to have a truly independent, startup search engine but it's a really big task for a fresh company to tackle.
The major advantage DDG has is that it doesn't matter what it is behind the scenes. They can change whenever it suits them and the site will continue to act as an anonymizing front-end, complete with some useful extras.
That's an advantage for them but it doesn't seem like an advantage to me as the user. If they change their sources behind the scenes, what I get as a user would probably change drastically.
Google was great originally because their results were not just different and better but also reliable. If the back end changes without my knowledge that gets rid of the reliability aspect.
Re: De-Googleify Internet
#33Why? To completely remove anything from your life that happens to have Google as a part of it would be so inconvenient. Gmail is objectively an amazing email app on both desktop browser and mobile. No search engine can come close to Google. Lots of great apps like Google Docs, Calendar, and Translate exist to make your life easier for free. Google Maps is kinda annoying with Uber ads but its navigation and UI is so n…
There's uber ads on google maps? Is this a slow rollout or something? I haven't seen this, and it's not like I have adblocker on my phone.
At least on Android and the Google Maps app, when one requests mass transit directions, UberX is often given as a potential route. Gives a fare quote and a trip time, IIRC.
Re: De-Googleify Internet
#34Why? To completely remove anything from your life that happens to have Google as a part of it would be so inconvenient. Gmail is objectively an amazing email app on both desktop browser and mobile. No search engine can come close to Google. Lots of great apps like Google Docs, Calendar, and Translate exist to make your life easier for free. Google Maps is kinda annoying with Uber ads but its navigation and UI is so n…
> Gmail is objectively an amazing email app on both desktop browser and mobile.
Hum. I would not say "objectively".
I can't stand gmail, it does not come close to what I can do with Thunderbird and K-9, and I'm not doing anything complex. A webapp still can't compete with a native client.
> Lots of great apps like Google Docs, Calendar, and Translate exist to make your life easier for free.
Google services are not free, your privacy may be worth an app or two, but mine sure isn't.
I'm giving a talk next week on how to get rid of Google so I would not say I'm being impartial here.
Re: De-Googleify Internet
#35> These services track us everywhere, while claiming to give us a better “user experience”. That's kind of the problem though; they usually _do_ offer a better user experience. If we want users to start using open source software rather than walled garden solutions from large companies, we're going to have to start building open source solutions which offer a comparable user experience to proprietary ones from large…
I agree with your larger point, but should user privacy be part of the user experience?
Re: De-Googleify Internet
#36Ironically, many of their pages are in French, which Chrome then calls on a Google service to translate to English.
That's not ironic at all considering you're browsing the page with Google's own custom browser.
Well, feel free to suggest some alternative that is as easy to use, because I don't read or speak French beyond that which is required to start a fight.
Re: De-Googleify Internet
#37I like the idea of this project, but I have several nits/concerns: - De-Google-ify is a poor way of marketing these ideas. Your average web user loves Google because they are trendy and make everything so convenient. - The site enumerates the pitfalls of cloud-hosted solutions and then proceeds to link to their own cloud-hosted solutions with no explanation of why they're any safer, better, etc. And not limited to th…
I've long felt that RMS/FSF's very specific and nonintuitive usage of "free" was intended to be misleading. If someone says "free" (which has many, many different meanings, all positive) when they really mean "copyleft" (which has one very complicated meaning), they're not trying to clarify anything, rather they're trying to muddy the waters so that people who don't understand copyleft or the FSF's political philosophy might think it's much simpler and much less specifically (and restrictively) defined than it actually is. Even the phrase "free as in freedom" doesn't actually disambiguate it, as it's a very specific type of very atypically defined freedom.
It always felt like a certain type of PR strategy, where the intent is to intentionally mislead people who aren't paying close attention, and that's always rubbed me the wrong way. Source: observing 3 decades of neverending confusion, flamewars, and arguments over this very topic.
Re: De-Googleify Internet
#38Just talking about search alternative; DuckDuckGo is my default search engine for over 2 years. It's incredibly good, the only caveat is you need to re-learn how to search. The same way you "changed yourself" initially for google.
Until Google pulls the plug because they are too famous. They don't have own infrastructure and own algorithms.
Re: De-Googleify Internet
#39Just talking about search alternative; DuckDuckGo is my default search engine for over 2 years. It's incredibly good, the only caveat is you need to re-learn how to search. The same way you "changed yourself" initially for google.
Until Google pulls the plug because they are too famous. They don't have own infrastructure and own algorithms.
Re: De-Googleify Internet
#40Just talking about search alternative; DuckDuckGo is my default search engine for over 2 years. It's incredibly good, the only caveat is you need to re-learn how to search. The same way you "changed yourself" initially for google.
It defies my experience to claim that DDG can have equivalent search quality to Google. For one thing Google search results include my own emails and docs, which DDG doesn't produce. I find that Google's personalization is key to quality, not counter to it. As an example search for "good espresso open now". The DDG results are entirely useless.
Meh result from Google for me.
Sitting in Mumbai, India and the first result is :
https://www.tripadvisor.in/Restaurant_Review-g45399-d2219937...