The simplicity of dropping Google in 2018 | Hacker News Reader

The simplicity of dropping Google in 2018

macwright.org

90 pointsivanech90 comments

As much as I would like to see more competition in that space, on the topic of search Google is still head and shoulders above the rest as soon as you leave mainstream queries. I regularly try out DDG or Bing to see if they are closer to fitting the bill, but after a few days or weeks it's back to House Google. Maybe it will be simple to drop them at some point in the future. But in 2018? Not so much.

And there's also that one thing, that's kinda hard to avoid because there is no direct equivalent, what's it called, ho yes: Android.

You don't need a Google account to use an Android phone, and you can turn off most of the Google stuff.

I don't even have an active Google account.

It's been a while since I looked into it but, last I checked, the only way to pull that off is with a rooted phone and a custom ROM. Is that what you're on? Seems every time I attempt to do that, the ROM I want to use isn't available for the phone I have or it's future is very uncertain.

I hear you. I think most phones/chipsets are supported by lineage, but it's really hard to know which image to download...

I've been using CopperheadOS and very happy with it. Android + updates w/o anything G in sight... Only downside is that only a select few phones are supported, but if you're getting a new phone you should consider one of the supported models.

No, just start with a new phone, and never get a Google account. You can then remove most Google stuff, install F-Droid, and download open source replacements.

I'll wipe my phone right now if it's possible, but last I remember, it wasn't possible to get to the homescreen without logging in to a Google account, unless you use a custom ROM. I already have F-Droid and the only Google app I have is Maps, I'll give that up. I have Gmail right now, but I use it through K-9.

What I did was to power up the phone from cold start with no sim card or WiFi. That gets you "Log in with Google account" or "Later". "Later" gets you past that, and you can then deactivate the "First time setup" app, so you don't get the message again.

I've mostly switched to DDG and it works great for most queries but I do still end up resorting to Google if I'm not able to find what I'm looking for. I've gotten my Google search use down to maybe five times a week.

I've started migrating from Gmail to ProtonMail but it's been a slow process. Turns out it's not trivial to drop an email address that I've been using extensively for more than a decade.

You're right that Android is a big one. De-Googled Android is possible but it isn't a great experience. I've been desperate for a "true" Linux phone for years.

>You're right that Android is a big one. De-Googled Android is possible but it isn't a great experience. I've been desperate for a "true" Linux phone for years.

I switched to iPhone about six months ago, after having used Android since it was invented. In both cases you're trusting a large corporation, but Apple's business model is more direct - sell products and services directly to customers while protecting their privacy, vs Google's "the user is the product" approach. Apple seems the lesser of two evils in this regard.

I'm thinking of doing the same, and was wondering about Apple's position on ads, selling metrics, selling tracking data, and all the other craptastic stuff.

People have done GDPR requests for apple and get back basically nothing, because almost nothing is stored.

You can read about the limited analytics data apple provides to app devs as well.

Also moving to ProtonMail, and I'm somewhat slow with ditching the Google account, since I use it for stalking a couple of geeks on g+ and do use the chat with close friends. Of course XMPP would work here.

With cellphones I found the new Nokia dumbphone with wifi hotspot and without Android (no Playstore, either) pretty much Perfect For My Needs™.

> De-Googled Android is possible but it isn't a great experience

All I need from Google is the push notifications, so microG provides a great experience for me…

I didn't have much option but to switch to DDG this week. Every Google search from our domestic IPv6 range is receiving the 'suspicuous traffic' blocking page from Google with its demands to complete unending CAPTCHAs. I used to receive one every few weeks, now they're constant [0]

I've found DDG ok so far but need to dig into how to do literal searches.

But since the only Google product we used was Search, it was indeed quite easy to switch away.

[0] seems to be triggered by a combination of having JS disabled on google.com and rapidly refining searches based on the displayed results, without clicking them. Basically Google thinks we're robots because their search results are inadequate.

I'd say probably at least 80% of my search queries are "mainstream", and DDG is absolutely fine for those. As others have said, if I can't find what I want on the first page I just do "!g my query" and I'm on Google's. Hardly a compromise.

> And there's also that one thing, that's kinda hard to avoid because there is no direct equivalent, what's it called, ho yes: Android.

I mean... iOS. But I suppose it's not a direct equivalent.

You can proxy your google search via startpage.com.

How does that work? Why doesn't Google block their proxy/scraper, use captchas, etc. as they do on Tor?

They have an agreement with Google. Not sure if money is involved, but google's sponsored links are still shown.

I just switched back to Google.com from DDG yesterday. I told my girlfriend, “well, I tried that other search engine, and it’s just not good enough”.

“Exact same thing you said two years ago”, she said. :-/ I’ll probably try in another two.

DDG just always left me wondering. If the result wasn’t there, it felt like it should have been ... so, !g I go, crawling back like a fool. What’s the point?

For anything location specific — here in Australia — forget it. Google dominates.

You just have to learn to be more specific. Stick "Australia" on the end of your queries. Google excells at this precisely because you've allowed it to spy on you and study your habits. Using DDG effectively requires a minor habit shift.

I'm not going to do that every time I'm out on my iPhone and I want to know the closest [x]. It's just not realistic.

It just seems like you're fishing for excuses now. Typing in the name of your city or something is not even a little bit hard.

What's so unrealistic about a trade-off where you gain massively in privacy and freedom and lose the 1 second of typing "Countryname".

Totally happy DDG user here. Never had any issues using it and the results usually seem to be pretty spot on - in the very rare occasion where it doesn't you just put !g in the query and it goes to Google.

Now with modern Firefox (+ uBlock and privacy badger) you can do a lot of your standard web browsing without using Chrome or Google search or Google AdWords servers

I use DDG as default, and Google when DDG's results don't have what I'm looking for. The upshot is I use DDG 80-90% of the time.

I try, really hard… but for me its nowhere near 80-90% successful, particularly for anything particularly new -- I find the results tend to be much older. `!g` has almost become a default reflex.

Same here.

You really need to be more explicit with your queries and remember that Duck Duck Go has no concept of who you are as a person. Searching for "babel" in Duck Duck Go and Google yield different results (for the first three results). Google knows I'm a software engineer and that I'm probably looking for "babeljs", Duck Duck Go doesn't.

Google's spoiled us.

It's much noticeably worse at locality. Trying to find the happy hours times for a bar around the corner? Good luck on DuckDuckGo.

...well, of course it's worse at locality. It doesn't track your location. It fundamentally can't do locality without not being DuckDuckGo.

Well, then it is fundamentally less useful then?

in theory I could include my location in a search query to get relevant results without having it stored indefinitely, correlated with past locations and other data, and packaged up and sent off to other interested parties.

maybe if I could guarantee that one positional sample was completely independent of anything that would allow it to be correlated? seems tough.

They started offering local results on their searches, I opted out so I don’t know how well it might work.

[edit] provided link https://duck.co/help/privacy/anonymous-localized-results

Hopefully, providing market share to other providers will eventually fund them enough to close the gap a little bit or even just help them approach the statisfice level for more people.

> as soon as you leave mainstream queries.

This is the key point - I'm sure DDG or Bing or any other search engine is just as good as Google for typical/mainstream searches, but every time I try to switch to another search engine I'm always reminded how much better Google is at retrieving relevant search results for obscure queries.

Just curious what exact queries you have to to Google for?

One example I've found where Google excels is when I'm troubleshooting a technical issue and paste a snippet of an obscure-looking error message into the search box. Many times when I've been using DDG I would get little to no results, but the same search in Google would yield usable results. This erodes my confidence in DDG and so even for simple searches I'm never sure I'm getting the best results with DDG.

You might want to try https://www.startpage.com/ (which uses Google search anyway ...)

or may be https://www.qwant.com/

As already pointed out, there's no real alternative to YouTube, and more importantly, Maps. Sure, OSM is a wonderful database, but the UX/UI is years behind GMaps. And other providers are not as fast/intuitive as GMaps. I really hope Qwant Maps is going to shake up things...

What about Vimeo, Twitch, and other video sharing and streaming sites?

I'm not really happy with youtube. In my opinion, it's hard to find quality content if you don't already know what you're looking for. They do have lots of content. The platform itself is the definition of "meh". They have their userbase and massive infrastructure... that's their edge.

There was a recent post to HN about alternatives to Maps. Maps might be the best, but it isn't like other maps services aren't just as good for most users.

The real elephant in the room is Search. I haven't really used another search engine in years.

Anecedotal: I think Duck Duck Go (DDG) is adequate for most of my searches... I still switch to Google to check when DDG doesn't satisfy...

I just gave it a shot on a pretty simple phrase that came to mind ("rails render") and it came up with multiple Japanese links on the first page (even when I go to settings and change region to US and language to English). It doesn't tell me how many results it found, or suggest any alternate queries until I get to the end of all the infinite scrolling. Also I'm somewhat offended by infinite scrolling. You can turn it off, but it still just does a "load more" instead of pagination.

It seems to get around 50 results for this query. Google returns 7 million. No foreign languages in the first two pages.

I decided to give it another shot. "sort git commits by date" was my query. I was pretty impressed by the formatting of the card it displayed at the top, but it was wrong (other top results seemed good though).

I don't know if this is ready for the switch.

> it's hard to find quality content if you don't already know what you're looking for

But if you already know what you are looking for, then YouTube will usually have the most relevant, and sometimes even high-quality, content.

That's the direct result of massive userbase+infrastructure and an edge very hard to beat and gets even harder as time passes and more content gets uploaded to YouTube.

Oh, absolutely. But here's the thing - a lot of content wanes quickly in relevance over time. You may never catch up to youtube in terms of total content (at least... not soon). But you can beat them in features, in look and feel, in the way you treat your content creators and users. And that can add up over time.

As Paul Graham said, "There is always room. In a hundred years the only social networking sites will be the Facebook, MySpace, Flickr, and Del.icio.us? Not likely.”

You don't start out by beating the giant. You pick users away here and there. You find a niche. You find other niches. You keep what you have, take what you can. You don't even have to beat the giant ever. Become the number 2 video sharing site. Hell, become the number 10 video sharing site and I bet you'll have more money than you know what to do with, even if most people have never heard of you.

Do you mean on the web? Are you looking for a web API or a mobile app? I argue that Apple Maps is a reasonable alternative for many... (Then again, I'm a biased Apple user so I could be mistaken)

Yes I'm talking on the web, and I do not own any Apple devices, so Apple Maps is not an option.

This is in beta: MapKit JS (https://developer.apple.com/maps/mapkitjs/)

Free daily limit of 250,000 map views and 25,000 service calls.

Apple maps is undergoing a major upgrade. So, maybe they'll be a viable competitor?

Still missing some stuff though, like cycling info....

Regarding the maps you might want to have a look at https://en.mapy.cz/

> FastMail has other, excellent security standards. They probably don’t take part in intelligence-gathering for nation-states, like Google did with PRISM.

Google also had the NSA wiretapping their fiber optic cable connections between data centers[1], inserted NSA insiders as Google employees, wiretapped upstream internet providers(LEVEL 3), etc, etc. I don't think fastmail could ever defend against the NSA even if they are not voluntarily giving up user data.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muscular_(surveillance_program...

He doesn't really address the most difficult Google service to give up, YouTube. There's literally no replacement, especially from a content perspective. There are alternative search/email/map providers, there just isn't one for YouTube.

Yeah, this is the only Google service I still use - and my Chromecast I guess. I'd be more than happy to jump ship once all the channels I like to watch are available somewhere else...

I've started using youtube-dl to download videos and watch them locally. It isn't perfect but at least I don't have to see what terrible videos Google thinks I want to watch (or which terrible videos are "trending") or accidentally read a comment.

I will use Google services while blocking ads. That way I am actually costing them money.

Another one is Photos. Sometimes it is creepy what they do with your photo stream, but sometimes the AI hits the nail straight on the head by producing entertaining mashups, and I have to admit I started to love it. I know it's the bait and I am a dummy to bit on it.

As a consumer, you don't need an account to use it. I have a Google account for Android and Gmail but my YouTube account is deleted. I "subscribe" to channels with RSS. If producers make their content feed available elsewhere (and they should, even if it happens to only link to YouTube for now) I use that feed instead. If producers only publish to YouTube, that's really their dependency problem. You can download an store anything you find worthy of archiving. Use an ad blocker to avoid supporting the platform. Producers should be selling their own native ads if they need to make a living off the videos, like pod casters do.

I do notice a lot more youtubers having their own advertiser segments (usually for the same 3 or 4 services, though that's probably due to similarity of channels I watch), and of course Patreon is very popular.

I "subscribe" to youtube channels with browser bookmarks. </old man yells at cloud>

I highly suggest RSS my fellow elder. We haven't much time left. Rechecking bookmarks for new content and trying to remember if we've already watch something is a time-leech we cannot afford to feed.

Bing video shows youtube and other sources without showing ads. Literally costs youtube money on one hand, but still legitimizes them as a content repository on another. I have complex emotions about using it.

The author gives many product reasons to switch (X is superior to Y)

There are ethical reasons (obligations depending on your moral framework): Google enabling the US government's war machine with drone image AI (Project Maven, 'reportedly' shuttered), PRISM complicity, and enabling China's government to aggress against the freedom of information by censoring search.

Shoving ads down into your eyes should be reason enough.

I'd love to look into the alternate universe in which for $REASON the web never developed the ability to have cross-domain requests. I'm sure advertising would still develop, but it would at least be more difficult. Or one where for $EVEN_WEIRDER_REASON advertising-supported websites were banned; either be free or take money. Not because I think it would be a paradise per se, but just, I'd like to study how it developed differently.

That's not really a glowing recommendation for Fastmail. While there are problems with Google, I'd hope that any recommendations would be for something actually better than Gmail.

As far as search goes, there's nothing even comparable to Google.

Note: I may be biased, as I use both Gmail and Outlook web mail (I use Outlook as the recovery email).

I decided to try out Bing just now. What's interesting is Bing results look almost exactly like google's. The layout and cards (wiki) seem to be identical. It also seems to load much more quickly. Hmm.

I keep coming close to trying to divorce myself from Google but it always seems to be too hard to complete. I have tried Fastmail and I like it, but my recipient likely uses Google. I never used Google Docs so that doesn't really matter. I use Google Photos, I could drop that but I don't know of a comparable alternative, I do keep a copy of everything on my NAS too with Lightroom but that falls behind. I am trying to use NewPipe on my phone for YouTube. I try and remember to use OsmAnd but a lack of transit instructions means I can't completely convert. I should be using DDG and Firefox but I have issues with U2F on Firefox and DDG normally ends in frustration.

I would like there to be an iPhone I'd be happy owning instead of my Pixel 2 XL however being stuck with Safari and needing a macOS device to do any development doesn't sit well with me, I suspect Mail.app would be an improvement though, even if it doesn't do GPG as K9 does, K9 just has an ancient UI. I have tried LineageOS on my old Nexus 4 with microg and it's completely usable however my Pixel 2 XL isn't actually supported, besides LineageOS disables security features such as verified boot. I am curious to see if RattlesnakeOS (CopperheadOS "successor") continues to be supported, if so maybe that's an option in the future.

If anyone has any suggestions I'd be very happy to hear.

I still use Google Photos for my real time uploads/backup but I have been pretty impressed with Synology Moments for photos on my NAS. I use it for my historical library.

I just want something simple that could allow me to browse photos remotely and sync new photos over, even if they weren't organised at that point I could import them into Lightroom later. Unfortunately my NAS is actually an Ubuntu box so I can't use the Synology stuff.

I'm with you.

In my view, Google's services are just straight up better. This makes it exceedingly difficult to switch, because I'm not perceiving the choice as switching to a better product. I feel like I would be switching for non-concrete, emotional reasons. Not to mention, Google's record on security is top-tier.

To your point about iPhone, I feel the same. I would like to use an iPhone, but when I sit down and think about it, I'm certain I would be frustrated with the completely locked down nature of the product. I wish Apple would open up a little more and make it a palatable choice for usability. There are lots of aspects of Android I like just because Google _allows_ it. "OK Google, play xxx from Spotify" launches the app and plays music from Spotify. I use this all the time. Meanwhile, Apple explicitly forbids you from doing this and purposely cripples Siri. You can't even use Spotify on a HomePod. I can use all of Google's services on every machine I have with every OS.

When I go down the list, I feel like I come to the conclusion that nearly every service is just better. This makes it hard to leave, despite how icky one might feel about privacy. I'm not keen on emotional choices.

Siri is getting more powerful with Siri Shortcuts on upcoming iOS 12.

https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2018/211/

So, what IS a good alternative to Gmail? Are any of the self-hosted alternatives actually better?

Any self hosted alternative is better, eg. I get 'grep', Sieve, no false positive spams and missed actually important mail.

fastmail is decent. I really like how it's a paid service.

I use Zoho and like it quite a bit. It's free for up to a certain number of emails per domain (5 I think?). Surprisingly, its spam filter hasn't been noticeably worse than Gmail's for me.

proton, tutamail, runbox

1. A Gsuite subscription gives me unlimited storage and a private mailing list which is absolutely vital to me. For 10 CAD this is quite a something. And, well, they are Google. And you need to consider your backup provider going out of business, I will be happy to bet Google will stay alive longer than any other perhaps the exception being S3. But Drive has a pretty UI to spot check them in backup or download a single one (I use rclone to back up).

2. I can't drop Google Docs / Sheets when every client of mine uses it to share documents.

Have been looking for an alternative to Google Voice for years. I have been completely unable to find something that does all of the following:

1) allows me to recieve texts to my computer and my phone at the same time for a reasonable price (twilio is much too expensive to use for personal use)

2) MMS, group texting

3) "transparent" call forwarding, essentially by spoofing CID's

4) speech to text voicemail

from a single phone number.

A full blown VoIP system like FreePBX comes closer than anything else, but still falls quite short.

If anyone has any insight into this that would be amazing.

I’m in the same boat. I’ll be moving from the US to the UK shortly, and my options for what to do to keep my US number (and keep it functional while I’m in the UK) are pretty limited outside of google voice. Especially since, as you noted, Twilio isn’t really priced for personal use.

GV isn’t bad, it’s just my absolute last resort given how capricious Google seems to be with these non-core services.

I had a US number with Fi and I think you might be surprised when you move. I still have my Fi number as a Google Voice number however without any other US number Google won't let me receive calls. I can still make them at least, and SMS through the Google Voice app works.

Also in the same boat here. I've enjoyed the SMS searching, typing out SMS texts via actual computer keyboard, location flexibility of GV, and being able to make calls from the same number without needing the cell glued to my head.

I've heard of apps like Grasshopper and have most features I'm looking for at a steep cost for personal use ($30/month minimum) plus the cell phone plan already being paid for. If I'm going to invest in a migration of my main communications platform, I'd rather have the majority of the features self-hosted and rely on the external provider like Twilio for the PSTN/SMS/MMS integration.

The only thing I really rely on nowadays is Search. Gmail would be a major hassle as a ton of stuff is linked to that, but I could use a new name somewhere else and give everybody that matters the new address instead.

But search: too ingrained into everything I do.

As a side note, I posted this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17447280 There seems to be little interest.

Anyone acting like DuckDuckGo provides even close to as relevant results as Google is lying to themselves.

This also doesn't mention Maps, YouTube, YouTube, or AdWords/AdSense which make up 95% of Google's non-Cloud revenue.

Yeah, I gave up on DDG recently. The results were often useless and I was typing "!g <query>" 90% of the time. I decided to just save myself the trouble and set Google back as my default search.

And I feel like a lot of the desktop/work-type queries DuckDuckGo compares the best at.

Try any query requiring some kind of serious recency bias or locality on DuckDuckGo. Completely useless.

There is no dropping Google. Use Fastmail or anything else, Google still gets a copy of all of your emails; all of your correspondents are hosted on gmail or g suite.

By far the best email is ..... yandex.

What would be calendar alternative?

Every time I see some article claiming that dropping Google is easy, I wonder about this!

This article's author says he uses FastMail's calendar funcitonality, but I use ProtonMail; plus I'd like for my calendar provider to be separate from my email provider.

*edited because I wrote DuckDuckGo instead of ProtonMail whoops

Isn't Google calendar easily replaced by any CalDAV implementation?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CalDAV

indeed

fruux user here, pretty great, and really multi-platform. used it on mac, windows, linux, android and blackberry. Their android app is useless with calendars. but works great with davdroid (which is payed in appstore but free in d-droid)

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