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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

#541

Post by SquareWheel »

RonanTheGrey wrote: post #455
nickelpro wrote: post #358

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do, and think people who don't are morons. COVID represents a clear and present danger, what's the clear and present danger of Google is the nature of my question.

So you already accept the premise that caring about more than yourself is an appropriate goal, based on information you trust from others who you take to know better than you. And yet here we are in a different industry, and simply for the sake of your convenience you decide you want to ignore people who know more than you, who are telling you that what Google is doing can be abused and because it can be, eventually…

> So you already accept the premise that caring about more than yourself is an appropriate goal

By wearing a mask, they are directly benefiting others. It offers only small amounts of protection for the wearer.

Your argument seems hostile and misguided.

Re: Degoogle: Cutting Google out of your life

#542

Post by chongli »

wizzwizz4 wrote: post #503
jeffbee wrote: post #351

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> selfhosting surely is the superior solution. You go on to partly refute this, but not strongly enough. Self-hosting is clearly inferior in major objective measures: availability, durability, and security. Unless you spend all of your time managing your personal storage solution, self-hosting will be far inferior in these respects, and probably also in cost if a true accounting of time is included.

Not so. Availability: Raspberry Pi plus USB battery pack is more available than the Internet, since when my home power's down my Internet connection goes. Durability: Have you ever heard of a Raspberry Pi dying? Security: sudo apt install unattended-upgrades echo "0 4 * * * reboot" | sudo tee -a /etc/crontab And all the functionality's available through Nextcloud. It's easier to set up than a Facebook account, and ea…

This is assuming you don’t leave home. If you travel a lot, self-hosting on your residential internet connection is not going to be a very good experience.

Re: Degoogle: Cutting Google out of your life

#544

Post by nuker »

wintorez wrote: post #262
nuker wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Google is like Gravity. Great comment :) What beats one body gravity is bigger body's gravity. I escaped to Apple few years ago, except search. Safari should have custom search engine setting, though. Is it missing because of the deal with Google for default engine?

My solution is to put my eggs in different baskets as much as possible. Using Chrome on iPhone, backups on Dropbox, etc. Although to be fair, not a lot of baskets has remained these days.

You think that all baskets are equally bad, hence the approach to separate data. I say follow the money. Apple gets its money from consumers buying devices, Google from businesses buying ads, MS from businesses, buying MS because, well...

Now, who has the best incentive to protect consumer's data?

Re: Degoogle: Cutting Google out of your life

#545

Post by ojosilva »

rorykoehler wrote: post #511
ekianjo wrote: post #400

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Agree with you on this -> The only google service that is really relevant and hard to replace is YouTube. Agree. It would become a little easier if all major broadcasters would at least mirror their youtube content on other networks like Peertube. That would not solve the recommendation problem to discover new videos, but at least the hosting itself would be taken care off this way.

YouTube recommendations are really annoying. I don’t want to see 50 million variations of the same video. Impossible to discover new concepts etc

In the 3-dot menu for each recommended video there's an option called Not interested. Select that to train YouTube's algorithm on what you're not interested on. The menu is not available on every interface, usually it's found on the desktop one. It has worked really well for me so far.

Re: Degoogle: Cutting Google out of your life

#546

Post by GlenTheMachine »

Still no replacement for Google Voice. That’s my one indispensible service. Having a single phone number not connected to my carrier that a) can ring all my numbers and b) transcribe voice mail is incredibly convenient. I would pay a monthly fee for that service and do it gladly. But nobody offers it.

Re: Degoogle: Cutting Google out of your life

#547

Post by Maximus9000 »

bb88 wrote: post #268
kevingrahl wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here’s an analogy I like to use for people who don’t care about privacy; Its similar to not caring about free speech just because you have nothing to say. It’s not just about you the regular joe who is of no particular interest to companies/governments but about those people who absolutely need it. You not caring about what they do with your data is totally fine but in my opinion you should care that they (in this ca…

> You can influence groups of people like never before. Swing Elections & change governments. Influence public opinion about literally everything to no small degree. Right, so, has Google done this? Asking because from what I remember the answer has been largely no, but I remember FB selling data to Cambridge Analytica in 2016.

> Right, so, has Google done this?

Business is booming for Google right now. Imagine Google still have all of that data but are slowly going bankrupt and desperate for new business ideas.... and then Google is approached by a company with ethics and practices like Cambridge Analytica?

Re: Degoogle: Cutting Google out of your life

#548

Post by Maximus9000 »

strangescript wrote: post #129
nickelpro wrote: post #61

Genuinely, why should I care? What harm is likely to happen to my life by sticking with Google, a service provider I find convenient? EDIT: I don't want to be accused of fan-boying or astro-turfing. I just see "Avoid Big Company X because they collect your data" a lot and I just can't give a damn about companies collecting my data. Be my guest, if it means I get free stuff. My data is boring tech nerd data, use it to…

People have been raising flags about this for literally decades now and the other shoe has yet to drop in any kind of meaningful way. Everyone is tracking you online, but for some reason we only care about it when its companies that make good products that we like to use. Would you rather they not target you with ads and sell google searches for a nickel each? Meanwhile, I had an ad in my gmail yesterday for Google F…

> People have been raising flags about this for literally decades now and the other shoe has yet to drop in any kind of meaningful way.

Cambridge Analytica?

Re: Degoogle: Cutting Google out of your life

#549

Post by chris_f »

chalst wrote: post #493
fiatjaf wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

Not necessarily better data sources, but different data sources and a slightly different approach.

For organic results, the biggest different is that Runnaroo uses Google as the base for web results (similar to Startpage) where DDG uses Bing.

Outside of the organic results, Runnaroo's strategy is to integrate results from different vertical specific search engines who specialize in a niche topic. I call these 'Deep Searches' because they are essentially pulled from the database of the vertical source. It's the difference between getting an link to a website's home page vs. landing on the page and using their own search function to see the results.

For many queries, I believe this can provide higher quality SERP. For example, see the below results for "parkinson research" [0] or "react.js" [1]. The results are a lot more informationally dense than other search engines. Again, not necessarily better, but different.

DDG is still better for many queries(currency conversions, weather, etc), and definitely more polished, but I only launched Runnaroo a few months ago and new features and Deep Search sources are being added almost daily.

So TL;DR, Google results (with privacy) plus additional search results from relevant niche and authoritative sources.

[0] https://www.runnaroo.com/search?term=parkinson+research

[1] https://www.runnaroo.com/search?term=react.js

Re: Degoogle: Cutting Google out of your life

#550

Post by lkois »

mths wrote: post #389
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…

> On a lot of sites changing email is impossible. I have this problem on Steam of all places. Way back when, I guess you had to sign up with your email as your username. I've long long since left that email behind, but it's still my username for logging onto Steam.

Same here. I got steam when a friend bought HL2 waaay back, finished it, then gave me the game by giving me his account. All these years later, I've changed the email and built up the library, but the username is still my friends real name.
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