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Comment by Antoninus | Hacker News Reader

I’m quite satisfied with my move away from google products. Moved from gmail to protonmail. Chrome to firefox and search to ddg. Ddg isn’t perfect though and I find myself using !g tag more often than I’d like.

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Try !s instead -- same results as google (apparently) but via startpage which supposedly doesn't track..

I don't really understand how startpage is able to operate such a service, I assume it's maybe because if google started trying to stop them it would be rather hypocritical?

Starpage is now owned by an advertising company. I wouldn't rely on them not tracking me.

I have also hopped to Qwant / DDG for their proxied Bing search.

Keeping that in mind, doing a !s bang is probably better privacy-wise (bonus - you get the same results) vs a !g bang, even if it is no longer as good as it was.

> Moved from gmail to protonmail

Obligatory mention of https://fastmail.fm/ I've been using the paid version (it's quite inexpensive) for over a decade now and it remains fantastic.

Thank you kind soul, I was investigating email solutions to replace gmail, had fastmail in my list of open tabs and lost all of them due to a crash and couldn't remember what it was called.

Yay!

How do you search through mail in protonmail? Due to the nature of end-to-end encryption, online search features are very limited. You can't build an index if you can't read the data.

Do you download everything and search offline? Or maybe, unlike me, you don't rely on search so much?

I recently switched to qwant, seems to be a decent search engine, owned by a European company (as far as I know ddg is american, so pretty weak legal protection of user data). Though I also occasionally have to search on google.

Does the "pretty weak legal protection of user data" matter in this case though? There are no accounts or cookies (by default at least), and DDG's privacy policy states they don't log or store any user data. For me, that's enough, but I understand if others don't want to take DDG at their word on not storing any logs - but at that point, you'd probably want to be using Tor or a VPN anyway.

Same for me but in case of search I prefer to use Ecosia.org over DDG. It plants trees from its revenues and privacy like ddg.

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