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Degoogle: Cutting Google out of your life

degoogle.jmoore.dev

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Re: Degoogle: Cutting Google out of your life

#491

Post by chalst »

fakedang wrote: post #489
switch11 wrote: post #352

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Kudos absolutely great to see you do this I moved off Google after they started doing some strange things with our adwords accounts Anyways Agree with you on this -> The only google service that is really relevant and hard to replace is YouTube. Google's earnings from ads went down last quarter. First quarter that has ever happened They are definitely at risk of becoming Yahoo 2.0. The only thing is the immense amoun…

I can agree with Bing but DDG is plain horrible for searches. It's basically just Google page 2+ results on Page 1. Outlook decided it would be a nice idea to change my "Thank you" signature to an emoji in a business casual email. For mobile, I use an Android for all the apps I can't avoid not having, but otherwise I resort to Blackberry like the old coot I am. My Q10 is still reliable af.

I made the switch to DDG as my first search engine of choice a couple of years ago and when I am dissatisfied with my DDG searches, I usually compare them to !g and !b searches and find they are only infrequently much better.

I think it takes time to learn how best to query DDG. I originally started to use DDG when Google buried Google Scholar queries and I found using the !gsc query more convenient than working with bookmarks or navigating Google. Getting familiar with bang queries I think makes you have a much less siloed view of search.

Re: Degoogle: Cutting Google out of your life

#492

Post by stiray »

switch11 wrote: post #352
gonehome wrote: post #17

I 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…

Kudos absolutely great to see you do this I moved off Google after they started doing some strange things with our adwords accounts Anyways Agree with you on this -> The only google service that is really relevant and hard to replace is YouTube. Google's earnings from ads went down last quarter. First quarter that has ever happened They are definitely at risk of becoming Yahoo 2.0. The only thing is the immense amoun…

There is also another alternative for search... Use search agregator (https://asciimoo.github.io/searx/) and do the search on all those sites (and more) at once. I am self hosting it and it works great.

One more search engine to try is qwant.com.

For phone just use microg lineage (https://lineage.microg.org/) and use aurora store instead of play store (https://f-droid.org/en/packages/com.aurora.store/) for apps.

Re: Degoogle: Cutting Google out of your life

#493

Post by chalst »

fiatjaf wrote: post #312
djeiasbsbo wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use searx and it's great. There are a lot of instances as well, this site has a list: https://searx.space/ There even are some which are accessible over Tor.

I've been using https://www.runnaroo.com/ and it's very good, better than DuckDuckGo in almost everything. Sometimes I still fall back to Google but if that was becoming the norm on DDG, not anymore. Another thing that helps is configuring custom search engines on Firefox. For example, for me typing `gh something` in the address bar does a GitHub search directly and so on.

Any idea why Runnaroo gives you better results than DDG? It doesn't seem to have better data sources.

Re: Degoogle: Cutting Google out of your life

#494

Post by chalst »

mastazi wrote: post #273
submeta wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same here: Migrated all my gmail accounts to Fastmail. Took me two days. Migrated Google Docs to Dropbox. And replaced Google Sheets and Doc with a Microsoft subscription (MS Word and MS Excel). Then there‘s the search engine. I tried hard to replace Google Search with DDG, but I have to admit that Google gives me better search results. Still I would love to leave this also behind. Finally there is youtube for me. Ai…

> I tried hard to replace Google Search with DDG, but I have to admit that Google gives me better search results. In those cases where DuckDuckGo is not enough, just append !sp to your search, this will tell DDG to redirect your search to StartPage which is essentially a proxied Google search (the results come from Google but you as a user don't get in direct contact with Google itself).

I think Google's invasion of privacy can be regarded as a kind of "symbiotic parasitism" - they are able to leverage the information they harvest from you to improve search quality. A proxy won't give as good results as letting Google spy on you.

Re: Degoogle: Cutting Google out of your life

#497

Post by tomcam »

gonehome wrote: post #201
RealStickman_ wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple's privacy protecting actions only apply in countries where they can go through with it. Here's one example where they can't protect your privacy. [1] [1] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-apple-icloud-insigh...

Yeah I'm with you there, I find western companies making exceptions for China pretty unethical and upsetting: https://zalberico.com/essay/2020/06/13/zoom-in-china.html I think it's wrong and something they shouldn't do.

That would require actual patriotism from these companies. They have repeatedly demonstrate by playing (legal) games with taxes and by having Chinese slave kids create their products that it is simply not of interest to them. QED

Re: Degoogle: Cutting Google out of your life

#498

Post by genghizkhan »

stiray wrote: post #492
switch11 wrote: post #352

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Kudos absolutely great to see you do this I moved off Google after they started doing some strange things with our adwords accounts Anyways Agree with you on this -> The only google service that is really relevant and hard to replace is YouTube. Google's earnings from ads went down last quarter. First quarter that has ever happened They are definitely at risk of becoming Yahoo 2.0. The only thing is the immense amoun…

There is also another alternative for search... Use search agregator ( https://asciimoo.github.io/searx/ ) and do the search on all those sites (and more) at once. I am self hosting it and it works great. One more search engine to try is qwant.com. For phone just use microg lineage ( https://lineage.microg.org/ ) and use aurora store instead of play store ( https://f-droid.org/en/packages/com.aurora.store/ ) for apps…

LineageOS tends to disable a lot of security baked into android, so itmight not be a good recommendation. According to Daniel Micay: "It significantly weakens the SELinux policies, rolls back mitigations for device porting / compatibility, disables verified boot, lacks proper update security including rollback protection, adds substantial attack surface like FFmpeg alongside libstagefright, etc. They merge in huge amounts of questionable, alpha quality code from the Code Aurora Forum repositories too. Many devices (including Nexus and Pixel phones) also don't get their full firmware updates shipped by LineageOS. It's unrealistically expected that users will flash the firmware and vendor partitions on their own each month and of course that's another incompatibility with verified boot and a locked bootloader." [0]

[0]: https://www.reddit.com/r/CopperheadOS/comments/917yab/can_an...

Re: Degoogle: Cutting Google out of your life

#499

Post by torgian »

throwaway936482 wrote: post #415
ekianjo wrote: post #401

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can say the same thing for anything based outside of the US. You think China-based services don't have the CCP spy on their users, like TikTok?

Yeah but if you're an American you probably have more to worry about if American intelligence agencies and law enforcement are spying on you than if it's the Chinese and vice versa

I’d argue the opposite. I’m China they can just kidnap you. In America, at least there are rules.

Re: Degoogle: Cutting Google out of your life

#500

Post by pineaux »

switch11 wrote: post #352
gonehome wrote: post #17

I 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…

Kudos absolutely great to see you do this I moved off Google after they started doing some strange things with our adwords accounts Anyways Agree with you on this -> The only google service that is really relevant and hard to replace is YouTube. Google's earnings from ads went down last quarter. First quarter that has ever happened They are definitely at risk of becoming Yahoo 2.0. The only thing is the immense amoun…

Why use epic and edge when you can haves Firefox? My experience with Mozilla has always been great. It might be marginally slower than chrome, but I don't notice and they have great features and it's open source
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