22 ms·

De-Googleify Internet

391 points by vinceleo 10y ago

earthly10x 10y ago
Once again showing that Google is many orders of magnitude above companies like twitter, aol and facebook in terms of reach, revenue, influence, data and more importantly, algorithmic AI. Just take a look at the top 10 sites and apps on the net, most are controlled by Google, not twitter, aol or the next aol, facebook.
- cromwellian 10y ago
  Except that people spend more time on Facebook than anything.
nvk 10y ago
Just 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.
- graeme 10y ago
  How did you change?
  - daveloyall 10y ago
    I used altavista first, so I was used to navigating directly to what I wanted by using word combinations that would be present in my target document but explicitly NOT present elsewhere. It was great!
- ebbv 10y ago
  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.
  - LeoPanthera 10y ago
    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.
    - bobajeff 10y ago
      So what you're saying is that instead of Bing they could be using Yandex, Baidu or Google?
      - LeoPanthera 10y ago
        In fact I think they do use Yandex as well as Bing, at least they did the last time I looked.
    - ebbv 10y ago
      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.
    - setq 10y ago
      This. I find DDG is the vim of search engines. Small learning curve but immensely powerful.
  - jamestanderson 10y ago
    They get their results from 400+ sources [1] [2]. Bing does happen to be one of them, though. [1] https://duck.co/help/results/sources https://duck.co/help/results/sources [2] https://duck.co/ia https://duck.co/ia
  - bradyo 10y ago
    There's always Gigablast (gigablast.com)! And it'd be sweet if YaCy (yacy.net) took off.
- eterm 10y ago
  Except google didn't need learning, in fact that's part of what made it so much more powerful, they early on dropped support for AND and OR and other boolean keywords which other search engines required to get good results. In fact one of google's early "hidden" successful features was using implicit AND not implicit OR, which had been the de-facto on other search engines, so searching for "gold plates" on other search engines would return results for "gold" and results for "plates", that seems crazy now but that's just how it was back then. "learning" how to search is precisely what google didn't require, they used data and some key insights to do a lot of "magic" behind the scenes to match the way people actually used search engines into results, and without needing to advertise being a "human" search engine like Ask Jeeves.
  - kazagistar 10y ago
    You certainly did have to learn to use google, you just don't remember it, or remember it selectively. I frequently come across people who ask questions which seem simple to google for, but when they try ask google, they do so incompetently and get bad answers or no answers, because they fundamentally don't get keywords, how other uses of words can override your intended meaning, or how to clarify by adding further phrases, or removing extraneous detail.
    - glimajr 10y ago
      I feel like nowadays you can just Google "how do I change my oil" or "why do spiders make webs" and I pretty much always get something good. It seems to me as if you can just ask Google the way you would a normal person. I know that wasn't always the case, but I'm curious what specifically you feel like you need to learn about using Google today.
      - zeven7 10y ago
        My wife does this. It drives me crazy; I'm thinking "That's not how you search! You should just type 'changing oil'." But she gets the results she's looking for anyway so she doesn't listen.
- JoshTriplett 10y ago
  I didn't feel that I had to adapt "how to search" at all; I just had to get used to how the results looked. It took me a while to realize how much I'd associated "good search results" with the visual style of Google search results. I ended up temporarily switching to a DDG theme that mimicked the Google search result style, and I realized that doing that alone made the search results seem better.
- stuckagain 10y ago
  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.
  - fooker 10y ago
    Meh result from Google for me. Sitting in Mumbai, India and the first result is : https://www.tripadvisor.in/Restaurant_Review-g45399-d2219937-Reviews-Espresso_West-West_Yellowstone_Montana.html https://www.tripadvisor.in/Restaurant_Review-g45399-d2219937...
  - anthony_romeo 10y ago
    Generally yes. I default to DDG, but I when I don't find what I want I often just add the '!g' to the search. The only issue I have with Google search (aside from privacy concerns and the like) is the frequency to which the results don't actually contain any of the search terms I use. This functionality is fine for general use, but when I'm actually looking for something very specific the guesses Google makes often makes the search results less helpful than nothing at all.
    - tyleraldrich 10y ago
      Do you have any examples of queries which google doesn't return any results with the search terms used? I can't even remember the last time this has happened to me so I'm curious.
      - anthony_romeo 10y ago
        I mean, it's usually very very specific things. Yesterday I was looking at a summary query of earning records for a client by the IRS. The form had tons of abbreviations for columns with no explanation as to what they mean. I basically searched for multiple variations of the column names, and I eventually found what I needed, but often I'd open a result on the first page, ctrl-f one of my search terms, and find no results.
- keeganjw 10y ago
  I switched at about the same time and now I'm hooked. Using the ! syntax to search any major site from my address bar is so damn useful I don't want to go back.
- Bombthecat 10y ago
  Until Google pulls the plug because they are too famous. They don't have own infrastructure and own algorithms.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
- Bombthecat 10y ago
  Until Google pulls the plug because they are too famous. They don't have own infrastructure and own algorithms.
- pfranz 10y ago
  I've used DDG for awhile and been using it as my default for at least a year. However, my pattern, still, is almost always "ddg.gg foo", skim, "ddg.gg foo !g" I'll high-five other techies who I see using it, but I just can't recommend it for the average person without first warning them you'll give up accuracy and time for privacy. Maybe I haven't relearned how to search?
  - brightsize 10y ago
    As much as I want to love DDG my experience is similar to yours. It's my default search engine too but I'm constantly having to !sp my way to good results.
- darrmit 10y ago
  I've been using DuckDuckGo for about the same time frame and have had a similar experience. At first it was painful, but at this point it's extremely rare that I can't find what I'm looking for in one search with DDG.
- jbmorgado 10y ago
  My biggest issue with DuckDuck go is that it has very limited time search. When programming I restrict most of my searches to 1 year since in most cases it makes sense. DuckDuck go doesn't allow this.
- anigbrowl 10y ago
  The same way you "changed yourself" initially for google. But I didn't. The whole reason Google was an overnight success was that it usually gave me what I wanted first time, instead of me needing to jump around between Yahoo, altaVista, and Lycos and use regex-type thinking all the time. I love DDG and use it regularly, but my almost 20 years of experience with Google is that 99% of the time It Just Works, and I rather appreciate that it learns from me, because often now I just give it natural language queries the way I would with a person and It Still Works. Frankly the biggest issue I have with Google is that it doesn't display sufficient self-awareness for me to have metalearning conversations with it so I can teach it specific things that I know and it doesn't, and which would be very time-consuming to teach a human.
- thomasfoster96 10y ago
  Have you compared DuckDuckGo and Google lately? I ask because I used DuckDuckGo almost exclusively for about three years (had it as my search engine on desktop and iOS Safari) until a few months ago. A few months ago I noticed that DuckDuckGo's results began becoming very spammy and that I was having to use Google for anything more than a trivial single keyword search. So I switched back over to Google for a few days and never went back - Instant Answers actually turned out to be not that useful, Google's result quality is miles ahead, and the !bang feature is almost redundant because browsers support search-by-site natively. I know DDG has privacy as a selling point - but it's just not important enough for me to not use an overall better search engine, as much as I root for the underdog.
drivingmenuts 10y ago
Ironically, many of their pages are in French, which Chrome then calls on a Google service to translate to English.
- mi100hael 10y ago
  That's not ironic at all considering you're browsing the page with Google's own custom browser.
  - drivingmenuts 10y ago
    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.
nojvek 10y ago
Well Google made a lot of money from ads. They invested heavily in infrastructure, engineers and buying whatever could enhance their reach. Android, Google docs, YouTube, Adclick. All insanely valuable acquisitions. Can't say the same about other big tech companies. It's a great time to be Google
PascLeRasc 10y ago
Why? 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 nice to use. It seems obtuse to just refuse to use a web service just because it happens to be made by Google.
- komali2 10y ago
  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.
  - rmxt 10y ago
    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.
- kazagistar 10y ago
  This article is not specifically about google, only the title is...
- techsupporter 10y ago
  > To completely remove anything from your life that happens to have Google as a part of it would be so inconvenient. How so? I don't use any Google services (even search) and don't feel the least bit inconvenienced. Microsoft's suite has those same things (Excel, Word, and OneNote are all available through a web page if that's your thing), translations are widely available (Bing and Dictionary.com), alternative maps (I like Here Maps, it even lets me download entire countries or regions for offline use), and so on. I must be the only person on the planet who doesn't like Gmail, so I'll just leave that one alone.
  - 10y ago
mi100hael 10y ago
I 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 this page, but I really wish in general there was a better way to convey the point of free software than the word "free." If every single person immediately misunderstands what you mean, you've already lost.
- mwfunk 10y ago
  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.
  - ma2rten 10y ago
    By RMS? Why would he make his message intentionally less clear?
    - woah 10y ago
      Arrogance
    - mwfunk 10y ago
      He does this stuff all the time, he's always used language in a very Orwellian manner. It's much easier to promote "freedom" (which means all sorts of things to different people, all of them positive) than it is to promote copyleft and all that it entails. Everybody loves freedom right? But it is obfuscating, hence the neverending confusion about exactly what he means when he uses terms like "free", "freedom", and "free software". In general, he seems to be almost obsessively sensitive to how the words used to frame ideas can influence someone's feelings towards those ideas ("GNU/Linux"...). Which of course is true, words are very important. However, he channels this obsession with words towards obfuscation rather than clarity. He's very fond of always using derogatory puns for things he doesn't like in his essays, or incorrect acronym expansion. For example, always referring to DRM as "Digital Restrictions Management"- apropos and humorous as it may be, for me it's hard to not feel like he's treating his audience like children and thinks they can be influenced by wordplay. He has expended an utterly tremendous amount of energy over the past 3 decades scolding people for using incorrect terminology, when in fact the confusion over terminology almost entirely comes from him trying to redefine common terms, or him trying to change the term people commonly use to refer to something to another term that carries some sort of loaded meaning. It's a rhetorical technique, but it's a particular type of rhetorical technique that has always raised massive red flags for me, regardless of who is using it or for what purpose.
daveloyall 10y ago
Their alternative services appear to mostly be existing FOSS projects, re-branded... Normally that would trouble me, but in this context... maybe a great idea! The uninitiated might have less trouble adopting "the frama suite" vs a dozen separate apps... Granted, the GNU ecosystem should already provide that, but of course there are lots of good FOSS apps that don't and won't fly the GNU banner...
- majewsky 10y ago
  I haven't seen the GNU ecosystem provide anything at all in the web service space. GNU is, for the most part, the same set of applications that it was, say, 10 years ago. (Or at least I perceive it as such.)
LoSboccacc 10y ago
This is just a lame advertisement attempt, and it's not even decentralized, the advertiser controls all the published alternatives and links thereof I'll stick linking people to http://alternativeto.net http://alternativeto.net - thank you very much
- progval 10y ago
  alternativeto is great if you are looking for a software. degooglisons-internet.org is a non-profit that aims at hosting software for people who do not have the skill to host it themselves.
  - LoSboccacc 10y ago
    which completely defies the points they're making against google. all the cloud business runs on trust, and giving all data to newcomers doesn't sound a good plan. I can reliably find my emails from ten years ago in Google and there is no end in sight. this other service runs on donations and expects me to believe they'll have comparable lifetime?
    - tikl1 10y ago
      Not sure about them in particular but usually those initiatives also glorify open standards and the fact that even if the company disapear in 10 years, they will allow you to walk away with all your data in standard formats allowing you to continue your journey with another provider that uses this standard. Which is not obvious with some major companies using their own data models. (although I've heard of some bankrupting companies that made efforts to let users backup their datas before the end).
    - dublinben 10y ago
      Every single recommendation on their list can be self-hosted. They are providing you the tools to take control of your online experience exactly so you don't have to rely on a single service provider.
      - 10y ago
inlined 10y ago
The arguments feel disingenuous. A start-up is much less likely able to fight a subpoena for user data. A start-up is much more likely to disappear. The only real case I see is an argument against ads, though I don't see any disclaimer that the service will then need to be a paid service. Disclaimer: I work at a big company. I also worked at a small start-up in the past.
- bondant 10y ago
  This is not a start-up, this is a non-profit association. They do not want to have hundred of thousands of users. They are only trying to show that alternatives exist. They let you try them for free. And if you want and have the aptitudes, you can host the application on your own server.
Ajedi32 10y ago
> 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 companies; a difficult task to say the least.
- ksk 10y ago
  I agree with your larger point, but should user privacy be part of the user experience?
  - Ajedi32 10y ago
    Privacy _is_ part of the user experience, but only insofar as users actually care about that particular feature. Most users I believe do consider privacy a positive, but often it's a low priority compared to other "more important" features like convenience and usability.
- cookiecaper 10y ago
  The most crucial thing for the future of information freedom is to fix American intellectual property and network access laws. "Walled gardens" exist because anyone who effectively frees a user's data on the user's terms is at least sued, if not jailed, under statutes like the Soviet-era, pre-Internet Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, and luddite interpretations of the Copyright Act that consider a RAM copy that exists for milliseconds an infringement. Allow coders to make it easy to cart your data around and suddenly the major tech incumbents will have to compete on merit instead of merely holding your data hostage, which is exactly what they don't want. The powerful make laws to prevent others from challenging their power. If we update copyright and the CFAA to address conventional internet use (from the user's perspective, not the corporate giants who were quick to legislate themselves a safe harbor with the DMCA) and constrain the scope of browsewrap and clickwrap agreements to reasonable liability disclaimers, we'll have no problem maintaining a vibrant and accessible marketplace for user-facing services.
danielpatrick 10y ago
Why doesn't google offer a paid version which encrypts your data and takes all manors of privacy measures? I would go for that
- awqrre 10y ago
  Google gets some special perks from the Government if they don't...
  - dredmorbius 10y ago
    Citation requested.
    - awqrre 10y ago
      not being sued for monopolistic practices could be one
- mjevans 10y ago
  It would be nice if Google offered a paid set of services that: 1) Would use a public cryptography key to encrypt for storage any messages sent to you in the clear. 2) Not index or advertise to you (since you're now a customer). 3) Provide some reasonable support. 4) Have 'opt out' for ads elsewhere in their networks too. 5) Provide access to a fully anonymous (globally shared profile, no search/user matching logs of any kind) search system.
  - linkregister 10y ago
    G-Suite (their $5/mo/user Google Apps offering) fulfills some of these. 2. Email isn't scanned and ads aren't presented within Gmail (Search still has them) 3. Limited support The rest can be self-fulfilled by running an ad blocker, and using Incognito/Privacy mode for searches. Granted, these are annoying . All Google accounts can disable indexing for advertisement, and can opt out of using web history to "improve" ad placement.
- ocdtrekkie 10y ago
oliv__ 10y ago
It's unfortunate that it comes down to this but... maybe people will use an alternative to Google when it stops looking like this: https://framadate.org/images/date.png https://framadate.org/images/date.png Unfortunately for these projects, user experience is pretty much everything. Yes people care about privacy, but obviously not enough to have to use lesser products.
- a3_nm 10y ago
  I'm surprised because I wouldn't have said that Framadate's interface for voting is particularly ugly or unintuitive, compared (e.g.) to Doodle. The mobile version of the interface is crappy, but so is Doodle's. However I have to say that Framadate's interface to set up the poll (in particular, choosing voting options) is quite unintuitive and unpleasant to use.
dao- 10y ago
> The increasingly centralized online services provided by sprawling giants like Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple, or Microsoft (GAFAM) pose a threat to our digital lives. Curious that they don't talk about browsers. Your browser sees everything and knows everything it wants to know about your online life, it's arguably the most sensitive piece of the puzzle. All major browsers except Firefox are owned by "GAFAM."
- JBiserkov 10y ago
  An important point. I've switched to Firefox (with uMatrix) for this very reason. I can't yet bring myself to stop using Google. But I make a deliberate effort to not use their search when I don't have to: - when I know exactly when I'm going, I rely on bookmarks and the browsers history or just type the URL in full. - when my destination is a deep URL I use the method above to navigate to the website's homepage, and search using the builtin search (Wikipedia, IMdB). - when all else fails, I Google. The small decrease in productivity is more than made up by the warm feeling I get inside.
  - eh78ssxv2f 10y ago
    Can you explain more. Did you find an example of Google Chrome logging your private information without your consent?
ravenstine 10y ago
Not to get too political, but I find the idea that the internet is better being decentralized and non-corporate to be the new Libertarianism. Sure, these ideas sound nice, just like how "small government" and "free market", but how well do they work in practice on a large scale? Don't get me wrong, I'm not necessarily against such concepts as ideals, but in the end they are hard to implement in their pure form as the entire system gets larger and they aren't without consequence. An internet not dominated by Google, Facebook, Reddit, Amazon, etc., sounds great because, well, screw the man, man! Let's go back to 1999(or better yet, the 80's so we can connect to dial-up BBSes for free by routing through a bunch of local numbers, because, screw the man!). I know I'm hyperbolizing here a little bit, but it seems silly and pointless. The vast majority of users don't want this.
- sedachv 10y ago
  > Sure, these ideas sound nice, just like how "small government" and "free market", but how well do they work in practice on a large scale? Serious question: do you know anything about the history or workings of the Internet or the ARPANET? Or how email or HTTP works? Your understanding seems to be completely opposite to reality. It took a lot of effort for Google, MySpace, Facebook etc. to build centralized systems on a large scale to interoperate with the existing decentralized Internet, and for the amount of time and effort invested into them they do not actually work that well compared to the regular Internet.
blfr 10y ago
Worth an upvote for the Asterix reference alone. For me it's mostly the smartphone which is difficult to unlock. I use Ubuntu on my laptop, run my own web/mail/irc/etc servers, flashed all routers with OpenWRT... and it all made my experience better but Android with a Google Apps account is hard to beat. Say what you will about tracking and spying but it delivers. Using FLOSS tools I can compete with Microsoft or TP-Link, not Google though.
- sweden 10y ago
  I have been using CyanogenMOD without the famous Gapps for year and I have to say that I don't miss anything in them.
rihegher 10y ago
Framatalk is surprisingly quite good and easy to use
throwaway0391 10y ago
I haven't really looked at what this start up is offering, but I want to point out that you can delete your user history, disable personalized advertising and disable tracking by Google by going to myactivity.google.com. I would encourage everyone who cares about this issue to do that. The only disadvantage that I have seen is that the maps app does not autocomplete past queries anymore. I would also recommend you install browser plugins that prevent tracking by other companies. A point I also wanted to make is that contrary to popular opinion Google's business model is not build on collecting user data. Google actually makes most of it's money on search ads. These don't really require a lot of information about the user since advertisers are advertising to a specific query. Disclaimer: I work at Google. Opinions are my own and not that of my employer.
- gvurrdon 10y ago
  Another disadvantage is that turning off "web and app activity" prevents useful features of Android Wear from functioning, e.g. setting reminders or receiving commute time notifications. If it weren't for smartwatches I'd still be using Android with all account activity settings turned off (or "paused"), but instead I am reluctantly using an Apple Watch (and therefore an iPhone, unfortunately) and searching with DDG. By the way, I'd happily pay for software with the ease of use and functionality of Google's location history browser if I could host it on my own server and keep all that location data to myself.
brilliantcode 10y ago
It's unlikely to happen as the vast majority of the public simply does not care. There is a deep technological disconnect. The only way to de-google-ify is to bring about mesh network that runs on our mobile devices or volunteer run nodes. Maybe you need to take the Skytrain to a remote part of the city to access specific information because there are no nodes there yet. The centralized infrastructure created between telecom companies which inevitably under the control of you know who makes it very difficult to be truly decentralized and free ourselves from corporations that provide a better user experience. It's tougher to do on a decentralized platform but I fear that it will do little to sway herd behavior-vast majority of the population are clueless about the underlying technology and can't be bothered. That might change in the future but for now, it's the people who are unwilling to make a change, especially outside of HN and tech circles that is the big challenge. A bigger campaign that really sells the value of de-google-ify is going to take lot of resources and earn the ire of Google who is unlikely to support their own demise.
- superkuh 10y ago
  As more and more ISP implement data caps and prioritize only some traffic mesh nets and other p2p software will soon become infeasible for most users. Already with Comcast putting a 1 TB cap on my data (up+down) I'm feeling the pressure to shut down my Bitcoin full node and I've stopped contributing bandwidth to I2P.
- cortesoft 10y ago
  I think the public doesn't care for a good reason; no one has articulated a realistic, tangible cost to quality of life caused by letting Google track you. Lots of people talk about it being 'creepy' and dreaming up possible scenarios where it WOUDLD be costly, but for most people, the costs simply aren't actually felt. I am trying to think about it for me personally, and I can't come up with a single time that Google tracking me has had a negative impact on my life. I know people have examples for themselves, but none resonate with me as being something I am at risk for. Seriously, though; how is my life negatively impacted (in actuality, not hypothetically), in a way that I can notice the difference, by letting Google track me?
pierre_d528 10y ago
Well, Alan Kay and a couple of friends built an entire system in 2.8MB[1] "Large companies" are overrated. People who think we cannot do better are ignorant and probably overrated. [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BUud1gcbS9k https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BUud1gcbS9k
ianstormtaylor 10y ago
I love the reasons for doing something like this, and I'm personally really glad that people are investing time in trying to solve this problem. That said, I think that one of the big mistakes that these initiatives make is trying to solve all of the problems that Google solves, under one roof. It's impossible. The only way Google is able to manage it is that they are an absolutely huge software organization. No free, or even smaller-but-still-not-open-source, alternative is going to be able to match the sheer number of services. But I also don't think they have to. Instead it should be tackled in a decentralized way, which is much easier—one company or organization focusing on beating Google (or whichever monopoly) at exactly one of their products, by offering a better experience, or an equivalent experience with more freedom. It makes me wonder whether a viable alternative approach as a consumer might be to use "best in class, but not necessarily FOSS" solutions from many different providers. For example, you could use... - DuckDuckGo for search, an easy enough switch. - Fastmail for email, which is very similar and an easy enough switch as well. - Dropbox Paper for documents and notes, which is arguably a better, simple experience for most peoples's simple use cases. - Microsoft Office365 for spreadsheets, since it's very hard for FOSS alternatives to be good and interoperable. - Facebook for social messaging and events. - Spotify for music. - etc. You end up with lots of different closed-source, for-profit companies in the list, but none of your data is concentrated in any one large player. At most you'd have to "rebalance" your portfolio when big acquisitions or shutdowns occur. I'd be curious: If anyone is much more aware of privacy issues , could you weigh in on whether this approach would help? It might not help with government-actor spying, but it might help with lots of the other monopolistic issues?
- drivingmenuts 10y ago
  > You end up with lots of different closed-source, for-profit companies in the list, but none of your data is concentrated in any one large player. But many of these companies are going to offer their services for free, which means advertising and you're right back to square one, except now your data is in the hands of someone completely unknown.
tedunangst 10y ago
What is this map? I tap minecraft, get a menu where I select minecraft again, and now there's a circle on the map. Hurray?
- progval 10y ago
  The map is adapted from the map in Astérix, a well-known comic in French. The Gallic village (called the Librist Village on this map) is surrounded by Romans (proprietary software) -- and on this particular map, Roman cities are taken back by the Gallics.
Mikeb85 10y ago
I wish them good luck. I do use Google services and devices (written on a Pixel XL, and I use all the track my movements and usage options) because their AI suggestions and integrated features do make my life a tad easisr, but alternatives, especially open ones are never a bad thing.
ChuckMcM 10y ago
I like that they took the illustration from Getafix and Asterix :-) [1] http://www.asterix.com/the-a-to-z-of-asterix/characters/getafix.html http://www.asterix.com/the-a-to-z-of-asterix/characters/geta...
mtgx 10y ago
Google is starting to become dangerous not just in terms of how much data it's now collecting while killing privacy principles they used to abide by in their "don't be evil" days, but also because they now have a powerful lobbying machine, and that machine is slowly starting to turn against the "people". When they fought against SOPA, they were an ally of the people, and they were on the right side of history. Now, they were one of the supporters of the TPP, and largely a rival of the people in this fight and on the wrong side of history, and they lost. Google needs to start being on the side of the people, and the right side of history, once again, before it permanently tarnishes its reputation.
jordigh 10y ago
In the unlikely case anyone is wondering, "publicity" is an incorrect calque from French where it means "advertising". So they are not saying that Google gets a lot of publicity, but that it pushes advertising.
charred_toast 10y ago
We're all economic and spiritual slaves now. Nothing will make a difference. All lights of hope will be stamped out when we get our one-world government. Have a great day!
ourcat 10y ago
Nice Google+ link in the footer ;)
tannhaeuser 10y ago
I used to think of Google as the nemesis of the open web, out of an instinct against monopolies and for the little guy. Now I'm thinking Facebook and others are much worse monopolies (though I always wonder who's using Facebook? Certainly not anyone I know below the age of 30). Fb hasn't a reciprocal relationship with the web in the sense that it takes content from the web but doesn't give back. Best thing about Fb is that it's a good filter for people I choose not to care about, was what I was thinking. But now I believe the kind of communication going on in Fb is extremely detrimental, dangerous even, to an open society/democracy, because people with opposing views don't talk to each other but rather prefer to talk themselves into rage with like-minded people, and get fueled with fake news. Needless to say, worse things happen in autocratic states. It's only in Google's best interest the web doesn't become a scripted ghost town anymore than it already is. Therefore I don't understand what they want to accomplish with AMP. I used to think that p2p is the future of the web, but eg. zeronet/ipfs don't help one bit with the above problems. Also, I don't want to cede the web; it was created by a whole generation of liberal-minded people. Google should leverage their power for something big to counter web balkanization and echo chambers.
anigbrowl 10y ago
Oh dear...when will the left learn? a goal is not a strategy, and as other posters have pointed out, these offerings are Not Very Good. Nor has Frama invested much in making them accessible. For example, I am a big consumer of news, so I clicked on FramaNews...only to be taken to a page entirely in French. Now I happen to know french, and like it, but most people....don't. And there wasn't much on the page anyway other than an exhortation to use RSS. If you can't be bothered to localize in even a few major languages, how am I supposed to be confident about the development of quality services? I agree wholeheartedly with the principle, but restricting myself to only using Free Software means I'm going to incur a major hit to my productivity, which is strategically stupid. I would be better off leveraging the capitalist establishment's tools against them to provoke change than sitting around waiting for for free software tools to catch up. It depresses me that a lot of free software advocates don't seem to get or care how shitty their products are. I know, if you've spent ages working for nothing on a very complex software product it's infuriating to have some jackass like me come along and sneer at it. But a lot of Free software products are, well, broken. I use LibreOffice but I hate it, because of things like selecting a single paragraph for a formatting change only to have the paragraph before or after included in the format change as well. I get that making a WYSIWYG word processor is a truly massive software development undertaking, but what's the point if it doesn't work properly for even the most basic tasks? It's like a bicycle with the world's most incredible carbon-fiber frame where one of the wheels consistently falls off. I don't care how brilliantly engineered the thing is or how much work went into it or how great the sacrifices of the designers were; if the wheels fall off it's a shitty bicycle. I am left-wing. I'm very much in favor of cooperative ventures, Free culture, mutuality, privacy, and all the other things the Frama people care about. I want to live in essentially the same kind of world they want to live in. I want to support this project....but I'm not going to, because my resources are too limited and using (most of) the tools they recommend might make my life better in theory but is definitely going to make it worse in practice. tl;dr ain't nobody got time for that shit if it don't work right.
throw2016 10y ago
I think it will be all fun and games untill someone has to pay a price for all the tracking and then most will wisen up. Untill there is a personal price to pay no one really cares as the risks are theoritical. Anyway since a significantly large number of software folks are actively working on creating and enabling these systems discussion in a software centric environment usually leads to handwaving and normalizing.
- anigbrowl 10y ago
  someone has to pay a price for all the tracking and then most will wisen up No they won't. Otherwise dictatorships wouldn't survive for very long. Most people do whatever they're told by whoever has power and think as little as possible.
partycoder 10y ago
I think this is a good initiative. Pretty much like Wikipedia is to Mediawiki. I hope they can implement single sign on so you can reuse your account across the different services.
mikebay 10y ago
Google is bad for your business! They censorship and the source of fake news. Please, avoid this company
9erdelta 10y ago
I'm as much a google/fb/microsoft "hater" as anybody. I waste countless hours trying to get a linux based workflow that doesn't create huge conflicts with getting my real work done (everyone else at work is on Windows). But despite my idealism, the pragmatic truth in my opinion is that commercial companies offer a product that to the completely none technical user, is FAR better than any "free as in freedom" product. Even looking at the link provided here, I clicked on it and immediately my reaction was "oh another freetard website." Until this kind of stuff has state of the art websites and user friendliness, it won't catch on with people who struggle to turn on a computer. And that happens to be the majority of people. Diaspora? My aunts and uncles would probably think they logged into the dark web when visiting that site (except they don't know what the dark web is).
mads 10y ago
I recently reinstalled my system and didn't immediately install any AdBlock software, so for the first time in many years, I actually saw ads (that I noticed). I was surprised how relevant the ads actually were. They very clearly had an idea about what I had been researching the last couple of days. I think this is probably a good thing, if ads are supposed to be a necessary evil.
malkia 10y ago
Well, I'm sorry but it's in french and I don't speak it, and english is not my native either, but it's rather established when comes to open software.
hobarrera 10y ago
Hint: you window needs to be over 1020px for the page to actually work. Otherwise the actual content you get when clicking the map is hidden behind the map (I almost dismissed this, but noticed it by coincidence).
ommunist 10y ago
The question is what I really gave up when signed in to Creative Cloud for example, instead of continuing using GIMP.
ilaksh 10y ago
See http://reddit.com/r/rad_decentralization http://reddit.com/r/rad_decentralization
maxt 10y ago
It's quite possible to break the Internet by blanket-blocking core Google IPs[1]. I tried blocking these in my firewall and my surfing sessions became really slow. I would much prefer things like uBlock which do it at the browser level and it doesn't cause a lag. 74.14.192.0/18 216.58.192.0/19 216.239.32.0/19 64.233.160.0/19 66.249.80.0/20 72.14.192.0/18 209.85.128.0/17 66.102.0.0/20 74.125.0.0/16 64.18.0.0/20 207.126.144.0/20 173.194.0.0/16 This is usually because if you're resolving domains to 0.0.0.0 or 127.0.0.1 in hosts then there is an inbuilt timeout as localhost is typically not running any services. Best to make localhost run a service. A personal thing I use is lighthttpd[2] which ensures such a lag is vanished [1]: https://gist.github.com/int64ago/1d72c80e8082b78777c9 https://gist.github.com/int64ago/1d72c80e8082b78777c9 [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lighttpd https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lighttpd

391 points by vinceleo 10y ago

Once again showing that Google is many orders of magnitude above companies like twitter, aol and facebook in terms of reach, revenue, influence, data and more importantly, algorithmic AI. Just take a look at the top 10 sites and apps on the net, most are controlled by Google, not twitter, aol or the next aol, facebook.

cromwellian 10y ago
Except that people spend more time on Facebook than anything.

nvk 10y ago

Just 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.

graeme 10y ago
How did you change?
- daveloyall 10y ago
  I used altavista first, so I was used to navigating directly to what I wanted by using word combinations that would be present in my target document but explicitly NOT present elsewhere. It was great!
ebbv 10y ago
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.
- LeoPanthera 10y ago
  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.
  - bobajeff 10y ago
    So what you're saying is that instead of Bing they could be using Yandex, Baidu or Google?
    - LeoPanthera 10y ago
      In fact I think they do use Yandex as well as Bing, at least they did the last time I looked.
  - ebbv 10y ago
    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.
  - setq 10y ago
    This. I find DDG is the vim of search engines. Small learning curve but immensely powerful.
- jamestanderson 10y ago
  They get their results from 400+ sources [1] [2]. Bing does happen to be one of them, though. [1] https://duck.co/help/results/sources https://duck.co/help/results/sources [2] https://duck.co/ia https://duck.co/ia
- bradyo 10y ago
  There's always Gigablast (gigablast.com)! And it'd be sweet if YaCy (yacy.net) took off.
eterm 10y ago
Except google didn't need learning, in fact that's part of what made it so much more powerful, they early on dropped support for AND and OR and other boolean keywords which other search engines required to get good results. In fact one of google's early "hidden" successful features was using implicit AND not implicit OR, which had been the de-facto on other search engines, so searching for "gold plates" on other search engines would return results for "gold" and results for "plates", that seems crazy now but that's just how it was back then. "learning" how to search is precisely what google didn't require, they used data and some key insights to do a lot of "magic" behind the scenes to match the way people actually used search engines into results, and without needing to advertise being a "human" search engine like Ask Jeeves.
- kazagistar 10y ago
  You certainly did have to learn to use google, you just don't remember it, or remember it selectively. I frequently come across people who ask questions which seem simple to google for, but when they try ask google, they do so incompetently and get bad answers or no answers, because they fundamentally don't get keywords, how other uses of words can override your intended meaning, or how to clarify by adding further phrases, or removing extraneous detail.
  - glimajr 10y ago
    I feel like nowadays you can just Google "how do I change my oil" or "why do spiders make webs" and I pretty much always get something good. It seems to me as if you can just ask Google the way you would a normal person. I know that wasn't always the case, but I'm curious what specifically you feel like you need to learn about using Google today.
    - zeven7 10y ago
      My wife does this. It drives me crazy; I'm thinking "That's not how you search! You should just type 'changing oil'." But she gets the results she's looking for anyway so she doesn't listen.
JoshTriplett 10y ago
I didn't feel that I had to adapt "how to search" at all; I just had to get used to how the results looked. It took me a while to realize how much I'd associated "good search results" with the visual style of Google search results. I ended up temporarily switching to a DDG theme that mimicked the Google search result style, and I realized that doing that alone made the search results seem better.
stuckagain 10y ago
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.
- fooker 10y ago
  Meh result from Google for me. Sitting in Mumbai, India and the first result is : https://www.tripadvisor.in/Restaurant_Review-g45399-d2219937-Reviews-Espresso_West-West_Yellowstone_Montana.html https://www.tripadvisor.in/Restaurant_Review-g45399-d2219937...
- anthony_romeo 10y ago
  Generally yes. I default to DDG, but I when I don't find what I want I often just add the '!g' to the search. The only issue I have with Google search (aside from privacy concerns and the like) is the frequency to which the results don't actually contain any of the search terms I use. This functionality is fine for general use, but when I'm actually looking for something very specific the guesses Google makes often makes the search results less helpful than nothing at all.
  - tyleraldrich 10y ago
    Do you have any examples of queries which google doesn't return any results with the search terms used? I can't even remember the last time this has happened to me so I'm curious.
    - anthony_romeo 10y ago
      I mean, it's usually very very specific things. Yesterday I was looking at a summary query of earning records for a client by the IRS. The form had tons of abbreviations for columns with no explanation as to what they mean. I basically searched for multiple variations of the column names, and I eventually found what I needed, but often I'd open a result on the first page, ctrl-f one of my search terms, and find no results.
keeganjw 10y ago
I switched at about the same time and now I'm hooked. Using the ! syntax to search any major site from my address bar is so damn useful I don't want to go back.
Bombthecat 10y ago
Until Google pulls the plug because they are too famous. They don't have own infrastructure and own algorithms.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
Bombthecat 10y ago
Until Google pulls the plug because they are too famous. They don't have own infrastructure and own algorithms.
pfranz 10y ago
I've used DDG for awhile and been using it as my default for at least a year. However, my pattern, still, is almost always "ddg.gg foo", skim, "ddg.gg foo !g" I'll high-five other techies who I see using it, but I just can't recommend it for the average person without first warning them you'll give up accuracy and time for privacy. Maybe I haven't relearned how to search?
- brightsize 10y ago
  As much as I want to love DDG my experience is similar to yours. It's my default search engine too but I'm constantly having to !sp my way to good results.
darrmit 10y ago
I've been using DuckDuckGo for about the same time frame and have had a similar experience. At first it was painful, but at this point it's extremely rare that I can't find what I'm looking for in one search with DDG.
jbmorgado 10y ago
My biggest issue with DuckDuck go is that it has very limited time search. When programming I restrict most of my searches to 1 year since in most cases it makes sense. DuckDuck go doesn't allow this.
anigbrowl 10y ago
The same way you "changed yourself" initially for google. But I didn't. The whole reason Google was an overnight success was that it usually gave me what I wanted first time, instead of me needing to jump around between Yahoo, altaVista, and Lycos and use regex-type thinking all the time. I love DDG and use it regularly, but my almost 20 years of experience with Google is that 99% of the time It Just Works, and I rather appreciate that it learns from me, because often now I just give it natural language queries the way I would with a person and It Still Works. Frankly the biggest issue I have with Google is that it doesn't display sufficient self-awareness for me to have metalearning conversations with it so I can teach it specific things that I know and it doesn't, and which would be very time-consuming to teach a human.
thomasfoster96 10y ago
Have you compared DuckDuckGo and Google lately? I ask because I used DuckDuckGo almost exclusively for about three years (had it as my search engine on desktop and iOS Safari) until a few months ago. A few months ago I noticed that DuckDuckGo's results began becoming very spammy and that I was having to use Google for anything more than a trivial single keyword search. So I switched back over to Google for a few days and never went back - Instant Answers actually turned out to be not that useful, Google's result quality is miles ahead, and the !bang feature is almost redundant because browsers support search-by-site natively. I know DDG has privacy as a selling point - but it's just not important enough for me to not use an overall better search engine, as much as I root for the underdog.

drivingmenuts 10y ago

Ironically, many of their pages are in French, which Chrome then calls on a Google service to translate to English.

mi100hael 10y ago
That's not ironic at all considering you're browsing the page with Google's own custom browser.
- drivingmenuts 10y ago
  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.

nojvek 10y ago

Well Google made a lot of money from ads. They invested heavily in infrastructure, engineers and buying whatever could enhance their reach. Android, Google docs, YouTube, Adclick. All insanely valuable acquisitions. Can't say the same about other big tech companies. It's a great time to be Google

PascLeRasc 10y ago

Why? 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 nice to use. It seems obtuse to just refuse to use a web service just because it happens to be made by Google.

komali2 10y ago
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.
- rmxt 10y ago
  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.
kazagistar 10y ago
This article is not specifically about google, only the title is...
techsupporter 10y ago
> To completely remove anything from your life that happens to have Google as a part of it would be so inconvenient. How so? I don't use any Google services (even search) and don't feel the least bit inconvenienced. Microsoft's suite has those same things (Excel, Word, and OneNote are all available through a web page if that's your thing), translations are widely available (Bing and Dictionary.com), alternative maps (I like Here Maps, it even lets me download entire countries or regions for offline use), and so on. I must be the only person on the planet who doesn't like Gmail, so I'll just leave that one alone.
- 10y ago

mi100hael 10y ago

I 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 this page, but I really wish in general there was a better way to convey the point of free software than the word "free." If every single person immediately misunderstands what you mean, you've already lost.

mwfunk 10y ago
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.
- ma2rten 10y ago
  By RMS? Why would he make his message intentionally less clear?
  - woah 10y ago
    Arrogance
  - mwfunk 10y ago
    He does this stuff all the time, he's always used language in a very Orwellian manner. It's much easier to promote "freedom" (which means all sorts of things to different people, all of them positive) than it is to promote copyleft and all that it entails. Everybody loves freedom right? But it is obfuscating, hence the neverending confusion about exactly what he means when he uses terms like "free", "freedom", and "free software". In general, he seems to be almost obsessively sensitive to how the words used to frame ideas can influence someone's feelings towards those ideas ("GNU/Linux"...). Which of course is true, words are very important. However, he channels this obsession with words towards obfuscation rather than clarity. He's very fond of always using derogatory puns for things he doesn't like in his essays, or incorrect acronym expansion. For example, always referring to DRM as "Digital Restrictions Management"- apropos and humorous as it may be, for me it's hard to not feel like he's treating his audience like children and thinks they can be influenced by wordplay. He has expended an utterly tremendous amount of energy over the past 3 decades scolding people for using incorrect terminology, when in fact the confusion over terminology almost entirely comes from him trying to redefine common terms, or him trying to change the term people commonly use to refer to something to another term that carries some sort of loaded meaning. It's a rhetorical technique, but it's a particular type of rhetorical technique that has always raised massive red flags for me, regardless of who is using it or for what purpose.

daveloyall 10y ago

Their alternative services appear to mostly be existing FOSS projects, re-branded... Normally that would trouble me, but in this context... maybe a great idea! The uninitiated might have less trouble adopting "the frama suite" vs a dozen separate apps... Granted, the GNU ecosystem should already provide that, but of course there are lots of good FOSS apps that don't and won't fly the GNU banner...

majewsky 10y ago
I haven't seen the GNU ecosystem provide anything at all in the web service space. GNU is, for the most part, the same set of applications that it was, say, 10 years ago. (Or at least I perceive it as such.)

LoSboccacc 10y ago

This is just a lame advertisement attempt, and it's not even decentralized, the advertiser controls all the published alternatives and links thereof I'll stick linking people to http://alternativeto.net http://alternativeto.net - thank you very much

progval 10y ago
alternativeto is great if you are looking for a software. degooglisons-internet.org is a non-profit that aims at hosting software for people who do not have the skill to host it themselves.
- LoSboccacc 10y ago
  which completely defies the points they're making against google. all the cloud business runs on trust, and giving all data to newcomers doesn't sound a good plan. I can reliably find my emails from ten years ago in Google and there is no end in sight. this other service runs on donations and expects me to believe they'll have comparable lifetime?
  - tikl1 10y ago
    Not sure about them in particular but usually those initiatives also glorify open standards and the fact that even if the company disapear in 10 years, they will allow you to walk away with all your data in standard formats allowing you to continue your journey with another provider that uses this standard. Which is not obvious with some major companies using their own data models. (although I've heard of some bankrupting companies that made efforts to let users backup their datas before the end).
  - dublinben 10y ago
    Every single recommendation on their list can be self-hosted. They are providing you the tools to take control of your online experience exactly so you don't have to rely on a single service provider.
    - 10y ago

inlined 10y ago

The arguments feel disingenuous. A start-up is much less likely able to fight a subpoena for user data. A start-up is much more likely to disappear. The only real case I see is an argument against ads, though I don't see any disclaimer that the service will then need to be a paid service. Disclaimer: I work at a big company. I also worked at a small start-up in the past.

bondant 10y ago
This is not a start-up, this is a non-profit association. They do not want to have hundred of thousands of users. They are only trying to show that alternatives exist. They let you try them for free. And if you want and have the aptitudes, you can host the application on your own server.

Ajedi32 10y ago

> 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 companies; a difficult task to say the least.

ksk 10y ago
I agree with your larger point, but should user privacy be part of the user experience?
- Ajedi32 10y ago
  Privacy _is_ part of the user experience, but only insofar as users actually care about that particular feature. Most users I believe do consider privacy a positive, but often it's a low priority compared to other "more important" features like convenience and usability.
cookiecaper 10y ago
The most crucial thing for the future of information freedom is to fix American intellectual property and network access laws. "Walled gardens" exist because anyone who effectively frees a user's data on the user's terms is at least sued, if not jailed, under statutes like the Soviet-era, pre-Internet Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, and luddite interpretations of the Copyright Act that consider a RAM copy that exists for milliseconds an infringement. Allow coders to make it easy to cart your data around and suddenly the major tech incumbents will have to compete on merit instead of merely holding your data hostage, which is exactly what they don't want. The powerful make laws to prevent others from challenging their power. If we update copyright and the CFAA to address conventional internet use (from the user's perspective, not the corporate giants who were quick to legislate themselves a safe harbor with the DMCA) and constrain the scope of browsewrap and clickwrap agreements to reasonable liability disclaimers, we'll have no problem maintaining a vibrant and accessible marketplace for user-facing services.

danielpatrick 10y ago

Why doesn't google offer a paid version which encrypts your data and takes all manors of privacy measures? I would go for that

awqrre 10y ago
Google gets some special perks from the Government if they don't...
- dredmorbius 10y ago
  Citation requested.
  - awqrre 10y ago
    not being sued for monopolistic practices could be one
mjevans 10y ago
It would be nice if Google offered a paid set of services that: 1) Would use a public cryptography key to encrypt for storage any messages sent to you in the clear. 2) Not index or advertise to you (since you're now a customer). 3) Provide some reasonable support. 4) Have 'opt out' for ads elsewhere in their networks too. 5) Provide access to a fully anonymous (globally shared profile, no search/user matching logs of any kind) search system.
- linkregister 10y ago
  G-Suite (their $5/mo/user Google Apps offering) fulfills some of these. 2. Email isn't scanned and ads aren't presented within Gmail (Search still has them) 3. Limited support The rest can be self-fulfilled by running an ad blocker, and using Incognito/Privacy mode for searches. Granted, these are annoying . All Google accounts can disable indexing for advertisement, and can opt out of using web history to "improve" ad placement.
ocdtrekkie 10y ago

oliv__ 10y ago

It's unfortunate that it comes down to this but... maybe people will use an alternative to Google when it stops looking like this: https://framadate.org/images/date.png https://framadate.org/images/date.png Unfortunately for these projects, user experience is pretty much everything. Yes people care about privacy, but obviously not enough to have to use lesser products.

a3_nm 10y ago
I'm surprised because I wouldn't have said that Framadate's interface for voting is particularly ugly or unintuitive, compared (e.g.) to Doodle. The mobile version of the interface is crappy, but so is Doodle's. However I have to say that Framadate's interface to set up the poll (in particular, choosing voting options) is quite unintuitive and unpleasant to use.

dao- 10y ago

> The increasingly centralized online services provided by sprawling giants like Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple, or Microsoft (GAFAM) pose a threat to our digital lives. Curious that they don't talk about browsers. Your browser sees everything and knows everything it wants to know about your online life, it's arguably the most sensitive piece of the puzzle. All major browsers except Firefox are owned by "GAFAM."

JBiserkov 10y ago
An important point. I've switched to Firefox (with uMatrix) for this very reason. I can't yet bring myself to stop using Google. But I make a deliberate effort to not use their search when I don't have to: - when I know exactly when I'm going, I rely on bookmarks and the browsers history or just type the URL in full. - when my destination is a deep URL I use the method above to navigate to the website's homepage, and search using the builtin search (Wikipedia, IMdB). - when all else fails, I Google. The small decrease in productivity is more than made up by the warm feeling I get inside.
- eh78ssxv2f 10y ago
  Can you explain more. Did you find an example of Google Chrome logging your private information without your consent?

ravenstine 10y ago

Not to get too political, but I find the idea that the internet is better being decentralized and non-corporate to be the new Libertarianism. Sure, these ideas sound nice, just like how "small government" and "free market", but how well do they work in practice on a large scale? Don't get me wrong, I'm not necessarily against such concepts as ideals, but in the end they are hard to implement in their pure form as the entire system gets larger and they aren't without consequence. An internet not dominated by Google, Facebook, Reddit, Amazon, etc., sounds great because, well, screw the man, man! Let's go back to 1999(or better yet, the 80's so we can connect to dial-up BBSes for free by routing through a bunch of local numbers, because, screw the man!). I know I'm hyperbolizing here a little bit, but it seems silly and pointless. The vast majority of users don't want this.

sedachv 10y ago
> Sure, these ideas sound nice, just like how "small government" and "free market", but how well do they work in practice on a large scale? Serious question: do you know anything about the history or workings of the Internet or the ARPANET? Or how email or HTTP works? Your understanding seems to be completely opposite to reality. It took a lot of effort for Google, MySpace, Facebook etc. to build centralized systems on a large scale to interoperate with the existing decentralized Internet, and for the amount of time and effort invested into them they do not actually work that well compared to the regular Internet.

blfr 10y ago

Worth an upvote for the Asterix reference alone. For me it's mostly the smartphone which is difficult to unlock. I use Ubuntu on my laptop, run my own web/mail/irc/etc servers, flashed all routers with OpenWRT... and it all made my experience better but Android with a Google Apps account is hard to beat. Say what you will about tracking and spying but it delivers. Using FLOSS tools I can compete with Microsoft or TP-Link, not Google though.

sweden 10y ago
I have been using CyanogenMOD without the famous Gapps for year and I have to say that I don't miss anything in them.

rihegher 10y ago

Framatalk is surprisingly quite good and easy to use

throwaway0391 10y ago

I haven't really looked at what this start up is offering, but I want to point out that you can delete your user history, disable personalized advertising and disable tracking by Google by going to myactivity.google.com. I would encourage everyone who cares about this issue to do that. The only disadvantage that I have seen is that the maps app does not autocomplete past queries anymore. I would also recommend you install browser plugins that prevent tracking by other companies. A point I also wanted to make is that contrary to popular opinion Google's business model is not build on collecting user data. Google actually makes most of it's money on search ads. These don't really require a lot of information about the user since advertisers are advertising to a specific query. Disclaimer: I work at Google. Opinions are my own and not that of my employer.

gvurrdon 10y ago
Another disadvantage is that turning off "web and app activity" prevents useful features of Android Wear from functioning, e.g. setting reminders or receiving commute time notifications. If it weren't for smartwatches I'd still be using Android with all account activity settings turned off (or "paused"), but instead I am reluctantly using an Apple Watch (and therefore an iPhone, unfortunately) and searching with DDG. By the way, I'd happily pay for software with the ease of use and functionality of Google's location history browser if I could host it on my own server and keep all that location data to myself.

brilliantcode 10y ago

It's unlikely to happen as the vast majority of the public simply does not care. There is a deep technological disconnect. The only way to de-google-ify is to bring about mesh network that runs on our mobile devices or volunteer run nodes. Maybe you need to take the Skytrain to a remote part of the city to access specific information because there are no nodes there yet. The centralized infrastructure created between telecom companies which inevitably under the control of you know who makes it very difficult to be truly decentralized and free ourselves from corporations that provide a better user experience. It's tougher to do on a decentralized platform but I fear that it will do little to sway herd behavior-vast majority of the population are clueless about the underlying technology and can't be bothered. That might change in the future but for now, it's the people who are unwilling to make a change, especially outside of HN and tech circles that is the big challenge. A bigger campaign that really sells the value of de-google-ify is going to take lot of resources and earn the ire of Google who is unlikely to support their own demise.

superkuh 10y ago
As more and more ISP implement data caps and prioritize only some traffic mesh nets and other p2p software will soon become infeasible for most users. Already with Comcast putting a 1 TB cap on my data (up+down) I'm feeling the pressure to shut down my Bitcoin full node and I've stopped contributing bandwidth to I2P.
cortesoft 10y ago
I think the public doesn't care for a good reason; no one has articulated a realistic, tangible cost to quality of life caused by letting Google track you. Lots of people talk about it being 'creepy' and dreaming up possible scenarios where it WOUDLD be costly, but for most people, the costs simply aren't actually felt. I am trying to think about it for me personally, and I can't come up with a single time that Google tracking me has had a negative impact on my life. I know people have examples for themselves, but none resonate with me as being something I am at risk for. Seriously, though; how is my life negatively impacted (in actuality, not hypothetically), in a way that I can notice the difference, by letting Google track me?

pierre_d528 10y ago

Well, Alan Kay and a couple of friends built an entire system in 2.8MB[1] "Large companies" are overrated. People who think we cannot do better are ignorant and probably overrated. [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BUud1gcbS9k https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BUud1gcbS9k

ianstormtaylor 10y ago

I love the reasons for doing something like this, and I'm personally really glad that people are investing time in trying to solve this problem. That said, I think that one of the big mistakes that these initiatives make is trying to solve all of the problems that Google solves, under one roof. It's impossible. The only way Google is able to manage it is that they are an absolutely huge software organization. No free, or even smaller-but-still-not-open-source, alternative is going to be able to match the sheer number of services. But I also don't think they have to. Instead it should be tackled in a decentralized way, which is much easier—one company or organization focusing on beating Google (or whichever monopoly) at exactly one of their products, by offering a better experience, or an equivalent experience with more freedom. It makes me wonder whether a viable alternative approach as a consumer might be to use "best in class, but not necessarily FOSS" solutions from many different providers. For example, you could use... - DuckDuckGo for search, an easy enough switch. - Fastmail for email, which is very similar and an easy enough switch as well. - Dropbox Paper for documents and notes, which is arguably a better, simple experience for most peoples's simple use cases. - Microsoft Office365 for spreadsheets, since it's very hard for FOSS alternatives to be good and interoperable. - Facebook for social messaging and events. - Spotify for music. - etc. You end up with lots of different closed-source, for-profit companies in the list, but none of your data is concentrated in any one large player. At most you'd have to "rebalance" your portfolio when big acquisitions or shutdowns occur. I'd be curious: If anyone is much more aware of privacy issues , could you weigh in on whether this approach would help? It might not help with government-actor spying, but it might help with lots of the other monopolistic issues?

drivingmenuts 10y ago
> You end up with lots of different closed-source, for-profit companies in the list, but none of your data is concentrated in any one large player. But many of these companies are going to offer their services for free, which means advertising and you're right back to square one, except now your data is in the hands of someone completely unknown.

tedunangst 10y ago

What is this map? I tap minecraft, get a menu where I select minecraft again, and now there's a circle on the map. Hurray?

progval 10y ago
The map is adapted from the map in Astérix, a well-known comic in French. The Gallic village (called the Librist Village on this map) is surrounded by Romans (proprietary software) -- and on this particular map, Roman cities are taken back by the Gallics.

Mikeb85 10y ago

I wish them good luck. I do use Google services and devices (written on a Pixel XL, and I use all the track my movements and usage options) because their AI suggestions and integrated features do make my life a tad easisr, but alternatives, especially open ones are never a bad thing.

ChuckMcM 10y ago

I like that they took the illustration from Getafix and Asterix :-) [1] http://www.asterix.com/the-a-to-z-of-asterix/characters/getafix.html http://www.asterix.com/the-a-to-z-of-asterix/characters/geta...

mtgx 10y ago

Google is starting to become dangerous not just in terms of how much data it's now collecting while killing privacy principles they used to abide by in their "don't be evil" days, but also because they now have a powerful lobbying machine, and that machine is slowly starting to turn against the "people". When they fought against SOPA, they were an ally of the people, and they were on the right side of history. Now, they were one of the supporters of the TPP, and largely a rival of the people in this fight and on the wrong side of history, and they lost. Google needs to start being on the side of the people, and the right side of history, once again, before it permanently tarnishes its reputation.

jordigh 10y ago

In the unlikely case anyone is wondering, "publicity" is an incorrect calque from French where it means "advertising". So they are not saying that Google gets a lot of publicity, but that it pushes advertising.

charred_toast 10y ago

We're all economic and spiritual slaves now. Nothing will make a difference. All lights of hope will be stamped out when we get our one-world government. Have a great day!

ourcat 10y ago

Nice Google+ link in the footer ;)

tannhaeuser 10y ago

I used to think of Google as the nemesis of the open web, out of an instinct against monopolies and for the little guy. Now I'm thinking Facebook and others are much worse monopolies (though I always wonder who's using Facebook? Certainly not anyone I know below the age of 30). Fb hasn't a reciprocal relationship with the web in the sense that it takes content from the web but doesn't give back. Best thing about Fb is that it's a good filter for people I choose not to care about, was what I was thinking. But now I believe the kind of communication going on in Fb is extremely detrimental, dangerous even, to an open society/democracy, because people with opposing views don't talk to each other but rather prefer to talk themselves into rage with like-minded people, and get fueled with fake news. Needless to say, worse things happen in autocratic states. It's only in Google's best interest the web doesn't become a scripted ghost town anymore than it already is. Therefore I don't understand what they want to accomplish with AMP. I used to think that p2p is the future of the web, but eg. zeronet/ipfs don't help one bit with the above problems. Also, I don't want to cede the web; it was created by a whole generation of liberal-minded people. Google should leverage their power for something big to counter web balkanization and echo chambers.

anigbrowl 10y ago

Oh dear...when will the left learn? a goal is not a strategy, and as other posters have pointed out, these offerings are Not Very Good. Nor has Frama invested much in making them accessible. For example, I am a big consumer of news, so I clicked on FramaNews...only to be taken to a page entirely in French. Now I happen to know french, and like it, but most people....don't. And there wasn't much on the page anyway other than an exhortation to use RSS. If you can't be bothered to localize in even a few major languages, how am I supposed to be confident about the development of quality services? I agree wholeheartedly with the principle, but restricting myself to only using Free Software means I'm going to incur a major hit to my productivity, which is strategically stupid. I would be better off leveraging the capitalist establishment's tools against them to provoke change than sitting around waiting for for free software tools to catch up. It depresses me that a lot of free software advocates don't seem to get or care how shitty their products are. I know, if you've spent ages working for nothing on a very complex software product it's infuriating to have some jackass like me come along and sneer at it. But a lot of Free software products are, well, broken. I use LibreOffice but I hate it, because of things like selecting a single paragraph for a formatting change only to have the paragraph before or after included in the format change as well. I get that making a WYSIWYG word processor is a truly massive software development undertaking, but what's the point if it doesn't work properly for even the most basic tasks? It's like a bicycle with the world's most incredible carbon-fiber frame where one of the wheels consistently falls off. I don't care how brilliantly engineered the thing is or how much work went into it or how great the sacrifices of the designers were; if the wheels fall off it's a shitty bicycle. I am left-wing. I'm very much in favor of cooperative ventures, Free culture, mutuality, privacy, and all the other things the Frama people care about. I want to live in essentially the same kind of world they want to live in. I want to support this project....but I'm not going to, because my resources are too limited and using (most of) the tools they recommend might make my life better in theory but is definitely going to make it worse in practice. tl;dr ain't nobody got time for that shit if it don't work right.

throw2016 10y ago

I think it will be all fun and games untill someone has to pay a price for all the tracking and then most will wisen up. Untill there is a personal price to pay no one really cares as the risks are theoritical. Anyway since a significantly large number of software folks are actively working on creating and enabling these systems discussion in a software centric environment usually leads to handwaving and normalizing.

anigbrowl 10y ago
someone has to pay a price for all the tracking and then most will wisen up No they won't. Otherwise dictatorships wouldn't survive for very long. Most people do whatever they're told by whoever has power and think as little as possible.

partycoder 10y ago

I think this is a good initiative. Pretty much like Wikipedia is to Mediawiki. I hope they can implement single sign on so you can reuse your account across the different services.

mikebay 10y ago

Google is bad for your business! They censorship and the source of fake news. Please, avoid this company

9erdelta 10y ago

I'm as much a google/fb/microsoft "hater" as anybody. I waste countless hours trying to get a linux based workflow that doesn't create huge conflicts with getting my real work done (everyone else at work is on Windows). But despite my idealism, the pragmatic truth in my opinion is that commercial companies offer a product that to the completely none technical user, is FAR better than any "free as in freedom" product. Even looking at the link provided here, I clicked on it and immediately my reaction was "oh another freetard website." Until this kind of stuff has state of the art websites and user friendliness, it won't catch on with people who struggle to turn on a computer. And that happens to be the majority of people. Diaspora? My aunts and uncles would probably think they logged into the dark web when visiting that site (except they don't know what the dark web is).

mads 10y ago

I recently reinstalled my system and didn't immediately install any AdBlock software, so for the first time in many years, I actually saw ads (that I noticed). I was surprised how relevant the ads actually were. They very clearly had an idea about what I had been researching the last couple of days. I think this is probably a good thing, if ads are supposed to be a necessary evil.

malkia 10y ago

Well, I'm sorry but it's in french and I don't speak it, and english is not my native either, but it's rather established when comes to open software.

hobarrera 10y ago

Hint: you window needs to be over 1020px for the page to actually work. Otherwise the actual content you get when clicking the map is hidden behind the map (I almost dismissed this, but noticed it by coincidence).

ommunist 10y ago

The question is what I really gave up when signed in to Creative Cloud for example, instead of continuing using GIMP.

ilaksh 10y ago

See http://reddit.com/r/rad_decentralization http://reddit.com/r/rad_decentralization

maxt 10y ago

It's quite possible to break the Internet by blanket-blocking core Google IPs[1]. I tried blocking these in my firewall and my surfing sessions became really slow. I would much prefer things like uBlock which do it at the browser level and it doesn't cause a lag. 74.14.192.0/18 216.58.192.0/19 216.239.32.0/19 64.233.160.0/19 66.249.80.0/20 72.14.192.0/18 209.85.128.0/17 66.102.0.0/20 74.125.0.0/16 64.18.0.0/20 207.126.144.0/20 173.194.0.0/16 This is usually because if you're resolving domains to 0.0.0.0 or 127.0.0.1 in hosts then there is an inbuilt timeout as localhost is typically not running any services. Best to make localhost run a service. A personal thing I use is lighthttpd[2] which ensures such a lag is vanished [1]: https://gist.github.com/int64ago/1d72c80e8082b78777c9 https://gist.github.com/int64ago/1d72c80e8082b78777c9 [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lighttpd https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lighttpd