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What can you use instead of Google and Facebook?

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Re: What can you use instead of Google and Facebook?

#301

Post by stiray »

DavideNL wrote: post #300
stiray wrote: post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You got point in your scenario it is just convinient (it still prevents fingerprinting) In mine it mixes 5 people search, is using proxy that goes over vpn to shared ip on other side of europe. And it agregates results, sorts them by results on multiple search engines not just one.

> it still prevents fingerprinting I seriously doubt that, because the % of people using Searx is very small compared to for example Chrome. This should make you very unique in terms of fingerprinting. Also note that simply changing the User Agent is possible in a browser as well, you don't need a self hosted Searx for that.

The search engine has no way of executing any script on you side, 5 people times 2 for two devices per person on my instance means you cant distinct them. Tens of users on other side of vpn, doesnt allow you to distinct on ip and none of useragents pass the proxy (actually squid randomizes them). And generation of random search queries prevents fingerprinting based on search terms. It doesnt allow fingerprinting.

(And no, in my house nobody uses chrome or any google account. They dont need to, they have all the infrastructure, but one of members is complaining from time to time why he doesnt have google play on his phone... :D)

Re: What can you use instead of Google and Facebook?

#302

Post by ohthehugemanate »

enumjorge wrote: post #65
annadane wrote: post #36

It's not fair to the public that FB bought up Insta/Whatsapp. That is a true lack of choice. If it were just FB, fine, ignore it, don't use it, use Whatsapp. But no, they get to buy up competition whilst telling us how much our privacy and integrity is taken seriously

It’s interesting because capitalism is all about choice and competition. But what if a player is so successful that it can pay to absorb any competitor that poses a serious threat? I don’t know how capitalism self heals from that.

It doesn't, that's one of the classic examples of when a natural market is not a free market. Even in its original definition, Adam Smith antipicipated a role for government to intervene to prevent just such situations.

Re: What can you use instead of Google and Facebook?

#303

Post by Crash0v3rid3 »

s_dev wrote: post #141
TheRealDunkirk wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm consistently surprised that this comment comes up here so often. I've tried DDG at length, many times, and I always go back to Google because I find it SO much better for programming-related questions. Maybe the denizens of HN are accustomed to using SO's built-in search? But that's still only a piece of the larger puzzle. I get a lot of mileage from blog posts as well.

You're not missing anything. Google is far better than DDG and I'm shocked people claim otherwise because it's so fairly self evident. That said I try to use DDG when I can but I don't lie to myself that I'm using it because it has better results -- it doesn't. It has better approach to privacy and thats why I use it. The fact that they know less about the searcher intrinsitcally means the results of searches will be…

I sometimes feel that we are in this echo chamber.

These threads always follow the same patterns, someone asks if they know of an alternative search engine and a HNer quickly mentions they have gone to DDG and haven't looked back.

DDG is decent but not even close to the search quality of Google. I know the folks here want to see Google dethroned but DDG won't do it.

Re: What can you use instead of Google and Facebook?

#304

Post by acd »

Alternative to social media. See real people in the real world. The social interaction will make you and others happier. Call people via voice instead of texting them its more personal.

Alternative to Google: Use Duckduckgo and a VPN+privacy extensions.

Re: What can you use instead of Google and Facebook?

#305

Post by Crash0v3rid3 »

jredwards wrote: post #187
monsieurgaufre wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

DDG is bad as soon as you're not in the US of A and/or speak any language that is not english.

It's not very good for english speakers in the US, either. The bang syntax is fantastic, but the search results are crap. Didn't someone demonstrate pretty conclusively that underneath all of the specialization it was just bing?

It's Bing and a few other sources.

They also claim to have their own web crawler but I've never seen it crawl any of my pages before.

Re: What can you use instead of Google and Facebook?

#306

Post by balladeer »

aledalgrande wrote: post #269
skyyler wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Facebook: Does this even need a replacement? Do you go to parties? Serious question. It's hard to discover events without Facebook these days. It's the only place some promoters advertise.

Word of mouth. Spotify. Eventbrite. Meetup.

Spotify for parties?

Re: What can you use instead of Google and Facebook?

#307

Post by codebook »

anderspitman wrote: post #42
iamdamian wrote: post #18

Here’s a question: How do we adopt a replacement and avoid creating an identical situation in 10 years? I wonder how many people donate to/pay for/enable ads on DuckDuckGo, for example.

Incentives have to be aligned. Open protocols at a minimum.

This. Why ppl can move to another email provider? Because email protocol is public! (even some tricky protocols are added such as DKIM)

So, I hope any new social platform or communication platform has a public interface.to communicate with its replica. Mastodon can be an example but it is not widely spread yet .

Re: What can you use instead of Google and Facebook?

#308

Post by claudiawerner »

arexxbifs wrote: post #260
skyyler wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Facebook: Does this even need a replacement? Do you go to parties? Serious question. It's hard to discover events without Facebook these days. It's the only place some promoters advertise.

I'm in a demographic that's very heavily invested in Facebook. FOMO was real when quitting, and I'm sure I've missed some event, someplace, sometime. But the neat thing is, people actually use other means of contacting me if they really want to hang out. I mean, it's not even hard: a text, a mail, whatever. What I've noticed is that I actually meet people IRL more often now, because the events I get information about…

>But the neat thing is, people actually use other means of contacting me if they really want to hang out. I mean, it's not even hard: a text, a mail, whatever.

Maybe I just have friends who don't care too much, but I wouldn't expect any of my friends to notify me if they're going to a run of the mill event without me, but they would suggest it/notify on Facebook about it. It's a lot less personal, I feel, to notify someone on Facebook than to message someone personally and invite them. Chances are, they'd see I'm no longer on Facebook and think I've gone into some kind of social seclusion.

It also doesn't help solve the problem of me finding something I want to go to (that my friends might be interested in) but they didn't see themselves. There was recently a Studio Ghibli film showing in my city, and after I found it on FB, I suggested it to two friends and we went. I wouldn't have found that event without FB, and even if I did, it would feel awkward (for an equally introverted person like me) to specifically message the two people and ask - now they have some kind of obligation, and they can't claim they just haven't checked Facebook in a while if I sent them a text/Telegram/whatever.

Re: What can you use instead of Google and Facebook?

#310

Post by dredmorbius »

jmiskovic wrote: post #298
clubm8 wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Search: DDG is the obvious answer. But also reducing usage of general search is a major life improvement. Wikipedia and Stack Overflow have reasonable built-in searches One upside of DDG is the bangs. If I know what I want is on wikipedia, just prepend !w. I think folks need to learn how people searched pre-pagerank. People treat google queries like a venn diagram with their top result being at the intersection, rat…

Why search wikipedia through DDG? Use address bar search shortcuts. In firefox any website search bar can be assigned a shortcut by right-clicking it. These shortcuts for wikipedia, HN, maps, powerthesaurus, reddit and others makes for ~80% of my searches.

Not all browsers have address-bar shortcuts.

Bangs are a common term across DDG users, and can be shared references, personal shortcuts not so much. It's a bit like language as a common understanding rather than individual headspaces. In a sense, bangs are social.

How useful that is or isn't I don't know entirely, but bang-based search seems to be a distinctive class of activity, and gives rise to its own forms of communication and discovery. I've learned (and shared) new sites/services through bangs.

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