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I have made a conscious effort to avoid Google products as much as I could for some time, part social experiment, but also because I could use Bing without havi
by aclsid 9y ago
I have made a conscious effort to avoid Google products as much as I could for some time, part social experiment, but also because I could use Bing without having to use a VPN while living in China.
My personal results are that you can totally ditch Google Search, Gmail, etc, and no, Google stuff is not orders of magnitude better. Nowadays, living outside the GFW again, I switch freely between Bing and DuckDuckGo, but it will always be a pain in the ass not having access to Youtube. That, imho, is Google's killer product.
And then you have things like Yandex which is a tad better than Google in Russia and Baidu which does the same in China (compared to Google HK)
- seanmcdirmid 9y agoWhile working for Microsoft china, I would use Google at work at Bing at home... Baidu is never good, every search I do there seems to turn up mostly porn (and I'm far from searching for porn).
- aclsid 9y agoI should point out that Baidu is good for China IF you are searching the Chinese internet. Which means writing stuff in pinyin or Chinese characters. It is pretty cool how it deals with pinyin though. Plus the other benefit of Baidu is that unlike Bing, where you would get a whole bunch of results, only to find that the page was blocked in China for one reason or another, Baidu allowed you to actually work without too much hassle inside that ridiculous censorship system.