9 ms·

Kudos absolutely great to see you do this I moved off Google after they started doing some strange things with our adwords accounts Anyways Agree with you o

Kudos absolutely great to see you do this I moved off Google after they started doing some strange things with our adwords accounts Anyways Agree with you on this -> The only google service that is really relevant and hard to replace is YouTube. Google's earnings from ads went down last quarter. First quarter that has ever happened They are definitely at risk of becoming Yahoo 2.0. The only thing is the immense amount of spying on the world and American citizens they provide to Intelligence agencies. They will stay relevant/be too big to fail because of that Search -> Use Bing, then DuckDuck Go, and if still not good results, then Google Admittedly Google Search is still ahead of everyone Browser - never touched Chrome. Use Epic and Edge. Mobile use UC Browser (possibly even worse for privacy than Google, owned by Tencent), and on iOS use Safari Never used gmail so avoided that entirely. Use outlook, however, it is pretty bad. USe internal email server for work. Rainloop. Don't recommend that either avoid all google services as mucha s possible Trying to find an alternative to Android. Have an Apple iPhone, however, also wants a non Apple alternative to play Android Games

sadfklsjlkjwt 6y ago
Browser - use Firefox.
- ColinHayhurst 6y ago
  Browser - I use Firefox and Vivaldi Search - I use Startpage, DDG, Mojeek
  - sadfklsjlkjwt 6y ago
    Startpage has changed ownership recently. I would look into the new owners...
- therealmarv 6y ago
  financed mostly by Google
  - sheeshkebab 6y ago
    Did you find one that isn’t paid mostly by google?
    - dr-detroit 6y ago
      While receiving millions in cash like Firefox does is nice, search engine referral is what drives the browser economy. hackernews personalities tend to get stuck on whats happening on their phone but the significant details are all in regulations, contracts, and closed door meetings not some deep state conspiracy spying on your low level cache to find out you like pictures of naked ladies.
    - pvorb 6y ago
      Edge used to be an alternative on Windows at least, but now it's also based on Chromium. :-( I'd always prefer Firefox, but if you want to avoid Google money, you're basically up to Microsoft or Apple. The latter tying you to a hardware monopoly.
  - fsflover 6y ago
    At least they have a good manifesto. If they reach independence, it would be of course best. Donations could help in theory...
  - Tijdreiziger 6y ago
    Mozilla, at least, has shown they're not married to Google - they had Yahoo als the default search engine for a couple of years because Yahoo was the highest bidder.
etse 6y ago
Sure degoogle, but that point about Google earnings from ads having dropped doesn’t seem relevant to Google abusing its power, or being incompetent at its core business. I would be surprised if it wasn’t because of COVID-19 shock and that the larger economy wasn’t also moving similarly.
aaron_m04 6y ago
> Trying to find an alternative to Android. Why not use LineageOS with microG? Aurora Store and f-droid for installing apps. It works pretty well for me.
- dasb 6y ago
  It worked well for me even without MicroG. The only proprietaty app that I need and use is Whatsapp, and it doesn't require Google Play Services.
throwmeaway2344 6y ago
If you are worried about American intelligence don't use anything based in the US.
- ekianjo 6y ago
  You can say the same thing for anything based outside of the US. You think China-based services don't have the CCP spy on their users, like TikTok?
  - throwaway936482 6y ago
    Yeah but if you're an American you probably have more to worry about if American intelligence agencies and law enforcement are spying on you than if it's the Chinese and vice versa
    - torgian 6y ago
      I’d argue the opposite. I’m China they can just kidnap you. In America, at least there are rules.
      - ploika 6y ago
        Extraordinary rendition wasn't all that different from just kidnapping people.
      - ganafagol 6y ago
        But that's not what your parent post is about. It's about that in America, you need to worry more about U.S. surveillance than about Chinese surveillance. And when in China, you need to worry more about Chinese surveillance than American surveillance. What you state has nothing to do with that. If I understand you right, you are saying that you should be more worried in China than in the U.S. overall. That might be true, I can't judge. I can imagine there are rules in China too, maybe they are just not so pleasent? And I suspect some folks in Portland have some mixed feelings about the "just kidnap" part too.
    - 6y ago
ekianjo 6y ago
> 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.
- rorykoehler 6y ago
  YouTube recommendations are really annoying. I don’t want to see 50 million variations of the same video. Impossible to discover new concepts etc
  - ojosilva 6y ago
    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.
  - fossuser 6y ago
    I'm not a fan either. Creators rely on them to drive traffic though and that's part of what makes YouTube sticky for producers. The creators remain incentivized to use YouTube as a platform because they can leverage the recommendation algorithms to drive traffic to their content. While this remains true YouTube is here to stay. People will go to where the content is. The content will go to the platform that makes it easiest for them to build an audience.
ekianjo 6y ago
> Trying to find an alternative to Android. You have the Pinephone nowadays. You will lose a lot moving from Android to a Linux based phone, especially if you rely on native applications. https://boilingsteam.com/pinephone-community-edition-ce-review/ https://boilingsteam.com/pinephone-community-edition-ce-revi...
maxekman 6y ago
> Search -> Use Bing, then DuckDuck Go, and if still not good results, then Google Why not use DDG first? I switched to it in the beginning of 2020, have almost never had to fallback to Google.
- ricardo81 6y ago
  Yes, may as well go straight to DDG, which is pretty much Bing anyway, as shown here: searchenginemap.com
  - flas9sd 6y ago
    thank you for the se map reference, was looking for something like this
wadkar 6y ago
> Trying to find an alternative to Android. For privacy and security oriented folks, there’s Puri.sm Librem 5 phone that looks interesting. I wouldn’t mind buying one if the reviews are good. I am particularly excited about the removable battery! Anyone has any hands on experience with the phone? Links/resources would be highly appreciated! https://puri.sm/products/librem-5/ https://puri.sm/products/librem-5/
fakedang 6y ago
I can agree with Bing but DDG is plain horrible for searches. It's basically just Google page 2+ results on Page 1. Outlook decided it would be a nice idea to change my "Thank you" signature to an emoji in a business casual email. For mobile, I use an Android for all the apps I can't avoid not having, but otherwise I resort to Blackberry like the old coot I am. My Q10 is still reliable af.
- chalst 6y ago
  I made the switch to DDG as my first search engine of choice a couple of years ago and when I am dissatisfied with my DDG searches, I usually compare them to !g and !b searches and find they are only infrequently much better. I think it takes time to learn how best to query DDG. I originally started to use DDG when Google buried Google Scholar queries and I found using the !gsc query more convenient than working with bookmarks or navigating Google. Getting familiar with bang queries I think makes you have a much less siloed view of search.
  - amelius 6y ago
    I just wish DDG would make the bang options available as a button, so I wouldn't have to type them on mobile. Adding "!g" to an existing query requires 7 taps, versus just 1 for a button (!) I guess I'm stuck with Google search.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    - TuringTest 6y ago
      The current Firefox Beta for mobile allows you to store BBG bang queries as buttons, using the "Search engines" option. Just define a search engine with the search string "duckduckgo.com/!g%20%s".
- Tijdreiziger 6y ago
  > I can agree with Bing but DDG is plain horrible for searches. It's basically just Google page 2+ results on Page 1. Maybe a couple years ago. I can't remember getting better results with Google over DDG more than once or twice in the past two years.
stiray 6y ago
There is also another alternative for search... Use search agregator (https://asciimoo.github.io/searx/ https://asciimoo.github.io/searx/) and do the search on all those sites (and more) at once. I am self hosting it and it works great. One more search engine to try is qwant.com. For phone just use microg lineage (https://lineage.microg.org/ https://lineage.microg.org/) and use aurora store instead of play store (https://f-droid.org/en/packages/com.aurora.store/ https://f-droid.org/en/packages/com.aurora.store/) for apps.
- genghizkhan 6y ago
  LineageOS tends to disable a lot of security baked into android, so itmight not be a good recommendation. According to Daniel Micay: "It significantly weakens the SELinux policies, rolls back mitigations for device porting / compatibility, disables verified boot, lacks proper update security including rollback protection, adds substantial attack surface like FFmpeg alongside libstagefright, etc. They merge in huge amounts of questionable, alpha quality code from the Code Aurora Forum repositories too. Many devices (including Nexus and Pixel phones) also don't get their full firmware updates shipped by LineageOS. It's unrealistically expected that users will flash the firmware and vendor partitions on their own each month and of course that's another incompatibility with verified boot and a locked bootloader." [0] [0]: https://www.reddit.com/r/CopperheadOS/comments/917yab/can_anyone_technically_explain_why_lineageos_as/e2xiot5/ https://www.reddit.com/r/CopperheadOS/comments/917yab/can_an...
  - stiray 6y ago
    Security is always weighting between danger and benefits. It means something different for everyone of us, i consider my phone with microg, netguard and xprivacylua and without google or any 3d party application beeing able to connect to the internet unless faking the data as secure (or, if you want - private), while I am not only flashing but also building my roms until I get full linux support for my second phone when I will depart from android world. For now, lineage is as good as it gets, sure, I would love to have patched OS, withoug google etc., but for now there is really not much of alternatives available for various models of phones, and quite frankly - probably more than half of android phones are vulnerable, unpatched etc. let me just mention latest DSP vulnerabilities. At least attack surface isnt that big :D Its on the eyes of beholder. --- update --- Looks like I am moving away from android today. https://support.planetcom.co.uk/index.php/Cosmo_Linux_Mobile_Data https://support.planetcom.co.uk/index.php/Cosmo_Linux_Mobile...
pineaux 6y ago
Why use epic and edge when you can haves Firefox? My experience with Mozilla has always been great. It might be marginally slower than chrome, but I don't notice and they have great features and it's open source
- stingraycharles 6y ago
  Even more so when you know that Edge uses Chromium under the hood, which would defeat the purpose of this exercise.
  - emteycz 6y ago
    I don't think Microsoft left any Google tracking, and Chromium is an open source project
    - stingraycharles 6y ago
      The problem I have is not the tracking, but Google’s dominance of the browser market. They can (and do) push through efforts that mostly benefit Google, and their ability to keep everyone inside the Google ecosystem. In other words, tracking is not the only evil thing they’re doing.
- fibers 6y ago
  because the impending layoffs that mozilla is incurring in light of covid means it's very bad for development and bug tracking. i've been using firefox for several years and that part is kinda worrying.
- patrick451 6y ago
  I have used firefox for a long time. Their continued insistence on forced automatic updates is quickly becoming a deal a breaker. Even putting aside my philosophical objections to this practice (let me update my software when I want on my own damn machine), it is exceptionally frustrating when those updates with forced restarts perpetually occur in the middle of the workday.

sadfklsjlkjwt 6y ago

Browser - use Firefox.

ColinHayhurst 6y ago
Browser - I use Firefox and Vivaldi Search - I use Startpage, DDG, Mojeek
- sadfklsjlkjwt 6y ago
  Startpage has changed ownership recently. I would look into the new owners...
therealmarv 6y ago
financed mostly by Google
- sheeshkebab 6y ago
  Did you find one that isn’t paid mostly by google?
  - dr-detroit 6y ago
    While receiving millions in cash like Firefox does is nice, search engine referral is what drives the browser economy. hackernews personalities tend to get stuck on whats happening on their phone but the significant details are all in regulations, contracts, and closed door meetings not some deep state conspiracy spying on your low level cache to find out you like pictures of naked ladies.
  - pvorb 6y ago
    Edge used to be an alternative on Windows at least, but now it's also based on Chromium. :-( I'd always prefer Firefox, but if you want to avoid Google money, you're basically up to Microsoft or Apple. The latter tying you to a hardware monopoly.
- fsflover 6y ago
  At least they have a good manifesto. If they reach independence, it would be of course best. Donations could help in theory...
- Tijdreiziger 6y ago
  Mozilla, at least, has shown they're not married to Google - they had Yahoo als the default search engine for a couple of years because Yahoo was the highest bidder.

etse 6y ago

Sure degoogle, but that point about Google earnings from ads having dropped doesn’t seem relevant to Google abusing its power, or being incompetent at its core business. I would be surprised if it wasn’t because of COVID-19 shock and that the larger economy wasn’t also moving similarly.

aaron_m04 6y ago

> Trying to find an alternative to Android. Why not use LineageOS with microG? Aurora Store and f-droid for installing apps. It works pretty well for me.

dasb 6y ago
It worked well for me even without MicroG. The only proprietaty app that I need and use is Whatsapp, and it doesn't require Google Play Services.

throwmeaway2344 6y ago

If you are worried about American intelligence don't use anything based in the US.

ekianjo 6y ago
You can say the same thing for anything based outside of the US. You think China-based services don't have the CCP spy on their users, like TikTok?
- throwaway936482 6y ago
  Yeah but if you're an American you probably have more to worry about if American intelligence agencies and law enforcement are spying on you than if it's the Chinese and vice versa
  - torgian 6y ago
    I’d argue the opposite. I’m China they can just kidnap you. In America, at least there are rules.
    - ploika 6y ago
      Extraordinary rendition wasn't all that different from just kidnapping people.
    - ganafagol 6y ago
      But that's not what your parent post is about. It's about that in America, you need to worry more about U.S. surveillance than about Chinese surveillance. And when in China, you need to worry more about Chinese surveillance than American surveillance. What you state has nothing to do with that. If I understand you right, you are saying that you should be more worried in China than in the U.S. overall. That might be true, I can't judge. I can imagine there are rules in China too, maybe they are just not so pleasent? And I suspect some folks in Portland have some mixed feelings about the "just kidnap" part too.
  - 6y ago

ekianjo 6y ago

> 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.

rorykoehler 6y ago
YouTube recommendations are really annoying. I don’t want to see 50 million variations of the same video. Impossible to discover new concepts etc
- ojosilva 6y ago
  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.
- fossuser 6y ago
  I'm not a fan either. Creators rely on them to drive traffic though and that's part of what makes YouTube sticky for producers. The creators remain incentivized to use YouTube as a platform because they can leverage the recommendation algorithms to drive traffic to their content. While this remains true YouTube is here to stay. People will go to where the content is. The content will go to the platform that makes it easiest for them to build an audience.

ekianjo 6y ago

> Trying to find an alternative to Android. You have the Pinephone nowadays. You will lose a lot moving from Android to a Linux based phone, especially if you rely on native applications. https://boilingsteam.com/pinephone-community-edition-ce-review/ https://boilingsteam.com/pinephone-community-edition-ce-revi...

maxekman 6y ago

> Search -> Use Bing, then DuckDuck Go, and if still not good results, then Google Why not use DDG first? I switched to it in the beginning of 2020, have almost never had to fallback to Google.

ricardo81 6y ago
Yes, may as well go straight to DDG, which is pretty much Bing anyway, as shown here: searchenginemap.com
- flas9sd 6y ago
  thank you for the se map reference, was looking for something like this

wadkar 6y ago

> Trying to find an alternative to Android. For privacy and security oriented folks, there’s Puri.sm Librem 5 phone that looks interesting. I wouldn’t mind buying one if the reviews are good. I am particularly excited about the removable battery! Anyone has any hands on experience with the phone? Links/resources would be highly appreciated! https://puri.sm/products/librem-5/ https://puri.sm/products/librem-5/

fakedang 6y ago

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

chalst 6y ago
I made the switch to DDG as my first search engine of choice a couple of years ago and when I am dissatisfied with my DDG searches, I usually compare them to !g and !b searches and find they are only infrequently much better. I think it takes time to learn how best to query DDG. I originally started to use DDG when Google buried Google Scholar queries and I found using the !gsc query more convenient than working with bookmarks or navigating Google. Getting familiar with bang queries I think makes you have a much less siloed view of search.
- amelius 6y ago
  I just wish DDG would make the bang options available as a button, so I wouldn't have to type them on mobile. Adding "!g" to an existing query requires 7 taps, versus just 1 for a button (!) I guess I'm stuck with Google search.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - TuringTest 6y ago
    The current Firefox Beta for mobile allows you to store BBG bang queries as buttons, using the "Search engines" option. Just define a search engine with the search string "duckduckgo.com/!g%20%s".
Tijdreiziger 6y ago
> I can agree with Bing but DDG is plain horrible for searches. It's basically just Google page 2+ results on Page 1. Maybe a couple years ago. I can't remember getting better results with Google over DDG more than once or twice in the past two years.

stiray 6y ago

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

genghizkhan 6y ago
LineageOS tends to disable a lot of security baked into android, so itmight not be a good recommendation. According to Daniel Micay: "It significantly weakens the SELinux policies, rolls back mitigations for device porting / compatibility, disables verified boot, lacks proper update security including rollback protection, adds substantial attack surface like FFmpeg alongside libstagefright, etc. They merge in huge amounts of questionable, alpha quality code from the Code Aurora Forum repositories too. Many devices (including Nexus and Pixel phones) also don't get their full firmware updates shipped by LineageOS. It's unrealistically expected that users will flash the firmware and vendor partitions on their own each month and of course that's another incompatibility with verified boot and a locked bootloader." [0] [0]: https://www.reddit.com/r/CopperheadOS/comments/917yab/can_anyone_technically_explain_why_lineageos_as/e2xiot5/ https://www.reddit.com/r/CopperheadOS/comments/917yab/can_an...
- stiray 6y ago
  Security is always weighting between danger and benefits. It means something different for everyone of us, i consider my phone with microg, netguard and xprivacylua and without google or any 3d party application beeing able to connect to the internet unless faking the data as secure (or, if you want - private), while I am not only flashing but also building my roms until I get full linux support for my second phone when I will depart from android world. For now, lineage is as good as it gets, sure, I would love to have patched OS, withoug google etc., but for now there is really not much of alternatives available for various models of phones, and quite frankly - probably more than half of android phones are vulnerable, unpatched etc. let me just mention latest DSP vulnerabilities. At least attack surface isnt that big :D Its on the eyes of beholder. --- update --- Looks like I am moving away from android today. https://support.planetcom.co.uk/index.php/Cosmo_Linux_Mobile_Data https://support.planetcom.co.uk/index.php/Cosmo_Linux_Mobile...

pineaux 6y ago

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

stingraycharles 6y ago
Even more so when you know that Edge uses Chromium under the hood, which would defeat the purpose of this exercise.
- emteycz 6y ago
  I don't think Microsoft left any Google tracking, and Chromium is an open source project
  - stingraycharles 6y ago
    The problem I have is not the tracking, but Google’s dominance of the browser market. They can (and do) push through efforts that mostly benefit Google, and their ability to keep everyone inside the Google ecosystem. In other words, tracking is not the only evil thing they’re doing.
fibers 6y ago
because the impending layoffs that mozilla is incurring in light of covid means it's very bad for development and bug tracking. i've been using firefox for several years and that part is kinda worrying.
patrick451 6y ago
I have used firefox for a long time. Their continued insistence on forced automatic updates is quickly becoming a deal a breaker. Even putting aside my philosophical objections to this practice (let me update my software when I want on my own damn machine), it is exceptionally frustrating when those updates with forced restarts perpetually occur in the middle of the workday.