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The only Google domains I allow on my pi.hole are youtube.com and a google subdomain that serves the css for youtube. Nobody who can afford to pay for a reputa

The only Google domains I allow on my pi.hole are youtube.com and a google subdomain that serves the css for youtube. Nobody who can afford to pay for a reputable webmail provider should be on Gmail. If not for privacy, because its design is terrible. If you use Google Chrome, or Youtube, or Google Docs, or Google DNS, or an Android device, you should not use Google Search. That's too much data to hand to one company. I use DDG, and when it's not good enough, I use Bing (and if I used Windows, I'd rule Bing out, too). Aside from privacy considerations, Google search quality has been declining for at least a year. I want to skate to where the puck is going, not where to where the puck is a mountain of ads followed by nonsense. "I left Google" is going to be the 20's version of "I left Facebook."

pb7 6y ago
The way you choose to live your life sounds like punishment.
- uniqueid 6y ago
  Over the next decade, a lot of Google data will leak, piling up in giant torrents (literally) forever on the net. Photos and emails and search histories from millions of users. Over the next decade, downloading and storing and processing such dumps of leaked data will continue to become quicker, and require smaller devices. Over the next decade, mobile devices will shrink, resulting in smart glasses much more powerful than today's smart phones. Put that all together... It's 2030 and you're walking down the street. You pass by a stranger wearing Apple Glasses. The stranger once spent an hour installing an "Intel on Everybody!" app, and downloaded 100 TB of random leaked data from a torrent site on everyone in the world. As you enter the stranger's view, the glasses use the leaked data to facially identify you. Now that the glasses know who you are, they automatically alert the wearer of the types of data they know about you. The bored stranger occupies himself by reading your gmails from 2022, perusing compromising photos you saved, checking out your medical records, reading arguments you had here in the comments of HN, etc etc. Maybe my understanding of technology and security is wrong somehow, but that future seems awfully plausible to me. If the downside to minimizing my footprint is that I use DDG instead of Google, the upside is worth it.
  - pb7 6y ago
    You have a very active imagination. What’s your favorite metal to make hats out of?
    - uniqueid 6y ago
      I get why that would be someone's reaction. Unfortunately there's no way for me to explain what concerns me about the way things are going that doesn't make me sound like a prat :( As outlandish as my comment may come off, all the pieces (maybe aside from Google leaking data) leading to such a future are conventional takes. As far as big companies leaking data, it's not that it happens every day, so much as it is the cumulative nature of leaks: each leak adds to the pile.
      - CookieMon 6y ago
        And if entrusting everything about your life to one company ever does backfire, you still won't get to call this out, because then it will be 'blaming the victims' ;) I don't know the likelihood of this all going dystopian, but I did realise a while back that it isn't hard to pick a not-google option early when a thing is new. Rather than attempting to go cold-turkey you can just stop growing more locked in. After a few years you notice you're not stuck any more.
    - dang 6y ago
      No personal attacks, please. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
  - uniqueid 6y ago
    I do wonder which part of my premise readers find unrealistic? - technology is getting more powerful and smaller - large companies can be hacked - leaked data is easily available on the net - smart glasses will become more common - apps can be made to facially id people using leaked data Are any of those statements outlandish?
    - 6y ago
- jakeogh 6y ago
  How would you know? It's entirely possible that not using google is a fantastic choice.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - pb7 6y ago
    Could be. Maybe the Amish are living the peak human experience. I'm not going to find out but you can.
    - uniqueid 6y ago
      I find Bing considerably closer to Google than a horse-and-buggy to an automobile. In some ways, Google is more like a horse-and-buggy, since, like an aging horse, Google Search increasingly ignores the user's instructions, and does its own thing instead.
      - pb7 6y ago
        Consider that the vast majority of users are not like you and they need help using the right search terms. Searching used to be an art and I vividly recall a lot of folks struggle to articulate in search query terms what they were looking for. Nowadays those types of people find what they're looking for at the cost of you not being able to treat it like a command line interface. I'm sure Google has the data to back up that it's a net gain. You're welcome to use whatever you'd like.
        uniqueid 6y ago
        I see two ways in which Google Search is changing. Neither of them work for me. It is true that, as you point out, the majority of Google users probably prefer a less literal algorithm. Do the ways Google Search is changing benefit people who aren't me? One way that Search is changing does align with what the average user wants: it increasingly interprets results semantically (synonyms,contextual data,domain-specific knowledge,etc) instead of just 'grepping' text content. The other way Search is changing is user-hostile. Google is an established monopoly now, whose founders have ridden off into the sunset. As its competition and idealism have waned, so has its willingness to put search quality above profits and strategy. It does not serve the user to include more paid content, to find excuses to personalize search, to cross-promote other Google products, to make Privacy settings inscrutable, to steer customers to AMP pages, and so on. Google has "actually, it's a feature!" rationalizations for these changes, I am sure. No matter! If the only metric Google cared about were customer satisfaction, I would agree that their surveys, statistics, and A/B tests matter. Sadly, Google seems increasingly concerned with attributes that are at odds with their users: advertising revenue, marketing, etc. In my judgment, even for normal users, Google Search's bad changes already outweigh the good. I reckon the bad incentives will remain in effect for years to come, too, which does not bode well for Google users.
hn_throwaway_99 6y ago
> "I left Google" is going to be the 20's version of "I left Facebook." So you mean it will be all the rage to talk about in tech forums but somehow the number of active users will continue to go up every quarter?
- uniqueid 6y ago
  Yes, it will be almost exactly the same. The people leaving Google will be young users and techies. Google has plenty of smart employees, and they will eek out growth from the rest of the population.

pb7 6y ago

The way you choose to live your life sounds like punishment.

uniqueid 6y ago
Over the next decade, a lot of Google data will leak, piling up in giant torrents (literally) forever on the net. Photos and emails and search histories from millions of users. Over the next decade, downloading and storing and processing such dumps of leaked data will continue to become quicker, and require smaller devices. Over the next decade, mobile devices will shrink, resulting in smart glasses much more powerful than today's smart phones. Put that all together... It's 2030 and you're walking down the street. You pass by a stranger wearing Apple Glasses. The stranger once spent an hour installing an "Intel on Everybody!" app, and downloaded 100 TB of random leaked data from a torrent site on everyone in the world. As you enter the stranger's view, the glasses use the leaked data to facially identify you. Now that the glasses know who you are, they automatically alert the wearer of the types of data they know about you. The bored stranger occupies himself by reading your gmails from 2022, perusing compromising photos you saved, checking out your medical records, reading arguments you had here in the comments of HN, etc etc. Maybe my understanding of technology and security is wrong somehow, but that future seems awfully plausible to me. If the downside to minimizing my footprint is that I use DDG instead of Google, the upside is worth it.
- pb7 6y ago
  You have a very active imagination. What’s your favorite metal to make hats out of?
  - uniqueid 6y ago
    I get why that would be someone's reaction. Unfortunately there's no way for me to explain what concerns me about the way things are going that doesn't make me sound like a prat :( As outlandish as my comment may come off, all the pieces (maybe aside from Google leaking data) leading to such a future are conventional takes. As far as big companies leaking data, it's not that it happens every day, so much as it is the cumulative nature of leaks: each leak adds to the pile.
    - CookieMon 6y ago
      And if entrusting everything about your life to one company ever does backfire, you still won't get to call this out, because then it will be 'blaming the victims' ;) I don't know the likelihood of this all going dystopian, but I did realise a while back that it isn't hard to pick a not-google option early when a thing is new. Rather than attempting to go cold-turkey you can just stop growing more locked in. After a few years you notice you're not stuck any more.
  - dang 6y ago
    No personal attacks, please. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- uniqueid 6y ago
  I do wonder which part of my premise readers find unrealistic? - technology is getting more powerful and smaller - large companies can be hacked - leaked data is easily available on the net - smart glasses will become more common - apps can be made to facially id people using leaked data Are any of those statements outlandish?
  - 6y ago
jakeogh 6y ago
How would you know? It's entirely possible that not using google is a fantastic choice.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- pb7 6y ago
  Could be. Maybe the Amish are living the peak human experience. I'm not going to find out but you can.
  - uniqueid 6y ago
    I find Bing considerably closer to Google than a horse-and-buggy to an automobile. In some ways, Google is more like a horse-and-buggy, since, like an aging horse, Google Search increasingly ignores the user's instructions, and does its own thing instead.
    - pb7 6y ago
      Consider that the vast majority of users are not like you and they need help using the right search terms. Searching used to be an art and I vividly recall a lot of folks struggle to articulate in search query terms what they were looking for. Nowadays those types of people find what they're looking for at the cost of you not being able to treat it like a command line interface. I'm sure Google has the data to back up that it's a net gain. You're welcome to use whatever you'd like.
      - uniqueid 6y ago
        I see two ways in which Google Search is changing. Neither of them work for me. It is true that, as you point out, the majority of Google users probably prefer a less literal algorithm. Do the ways Google Search is changing benefit people who aren't me? One way that Search is changing does align with what the average user wants: it increasingly interprets results semantically (synonyms,contextual data,domain-specific knowledge,etc) instead of just 'grepping' text content. The other way Search is changing is user-hostile. Google is an established monopoly now, whose founders have ridden off into the sunset. As its competition and idealism have waned, so has its willingness to put search quality above profits and strategy. It does not serve the user to include more paid content, to find excuses to personalize search, to cross-promote other Google products, to make Privacy settings inscrutable, to steer customers to AMP pages, and so on. Google has "actually, it's a feature!" rationalizations for these changes, I am sure. No matter! If the only metric Google cared about were customer satisfaction, I would agree that their surveys, statistics, and A/B tests matter. Sadly, Google seems increasingly concerned with attributes that are at odds with their users: advertising revenue, marketing, etc. In my judgment, even for normal users, Google Search's bad changes already outweigh the good. I reckon the bad incentives will remain in effect for years to come, too, which does not bode well for Google users.

hn_throwaway_99 6y ago

> "I left Google" is going to be the 20's version of "I left Facebook." So you mean it will be all the rage to talk about in tech forums but somehow the number of active users will continue to go up every quarter?

uniqueid 6y ago
Yes, it will be almost exactly the same. The people leaving Google will be young users and techies. Google has plenty of smart employees, and they will eek out growth from the rest of the population.