Hacker News Reader

Comment by mcv | Hacker News Reader

I agree. I used to be a fan. They were explicitly not evil, gave lots of open source stuff away for free, made lots of other free services.

Turns out they were just making us dependent on them, and now that they've got us, they do whatever they want. We need to make ourselves less dependent on Google. Move away from GMail, use Firefox, DuckDuckGo, OSM, federated social networks, etc. I don't have a good replacement for Android yet, as iOS is just another walled garden. Similarly, Facebook is no replacement for Google+. We need stuff to be opener, not dependent on another company. For email, you need to own your own domain, so you can easily move from one provider to another.

View on HN

god I tried. DuckDuckGo just does not work as well as it needs to. It gets touted as a turn key google search replacement but it’s simply not. 4 times today, I searched 5+ different ways for something after poor results, each thing took one search to find on google. Granted, maybe I am just more familiar with how to get the most out of googles search, maybe it has such a vast profile on me that it understands what I want i am looking for. Either way, i am pretty close to caving and it’s sad

You can use the !SP operator before your DDG search to invoke StartPage, which uses Google results. I mean, it's the same thing, just it doesn't look like you're using Google search ;)

Even better, with same results: use !s as a token anywhere in your search string :)

LineageOS [0] is also worth a look, it's like Android without all the un-uninstallable Google spyware. No play services, no need to log in to a G account to use the device, no G apps (but you can install them separately if desired), no background data harvesting, etc.

The open source MicroG project [1] takes things a step further by acting as a drag-and-drop replacement for Google Play Services. It provides a FOSS location provider backend, allows the device passes SafetyNet checks (Snapchat/Pokemon Go/online banking), and generally makes for a seamless mobile experience.

I've been using both for ~6 months now and the only noticeable difference is GPS taking a few seconds longer to get a satellite lock. Definitely worth a shot if you're interested in de-googling your Android.

[0] https://www.lineageos.org/

[1] https://lineage.microg.org/

>I don't have a good replacement for Android yet

It might not suit your needs, but I've been happily using SailfishOS for the past four years.

> SailfishOS

Descended from MeeGo, I see. I hadn't heard from it yet, but I'll have a look.

... use the contact pages on web sites you like that use AMP- to stop using AMP.

They use AMP to get ranked higher by Google. We need to stop using Google Search if we want sites to stop using AMP.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com