Hacker News Reader

Comment by submeta | Hacker News Reader

Same here: Migrated all my gmail accounts to Fastmail. Took me two days. Migrated Google Docs to Dropbox. And replaced Google Sheets and Doc with a Microsoft subscription (MS Word and MS Excel).

Then there‘s the search engine. I tried hard to replace Google Search with DDG, but I have to admit that Google gives me better search results. Still I would love to leave this also behind.

Finally there is youtube for me. Ain‘t no alternative I know about.

It‘s hard to leave google completely behind.

Edit: Replaced Chrome first with Safari, then with Firefox and never looked back.

Edit 2: Moved all my photos from Google‘s cloud solution to iCloud when I migrated from Android to iDevices.

Edit 3: Fastmail (although a rather smallish company) do a phantastic job with their mail service. Their contact management and calendar are also superb. Fastmail + MailMate on MacOS are a dream-team.

View on HN

> Then there‘s the search engine. I tried hard to replace Google Search with DDG, but I have to admit that Google gives me better search results. Still I would love to leave this also behind.

Try Searx[1]. It's a search engine aggregator that works with DDG, Google, and dozens of other search engines. You can self-host it or use one of the public instances.

[1] https://github.com/asciimoo/searx

I use searx and it's great. There are a lot of instances as well, this site has a list: https://searx.space/

There even are some which are accessible over Tor.

I've been using https://www.runnaroo.com/ and it's very good, better than DuckDuckGo in almost everything.

Sometimes I still fall back to Google but if that was becoming the norm on DDG, not anymore.

Another thing that helps is configuring custom search engines on Firefox. For example, for me typing `gh something` in the address bar does a GitHub search directly and so on.

Any idea why Runnaroo gives you better results than DDG? It doesn't seem to have better data sources.

>Any idea why Runnaroo gives you better results than DDG? It doesn't seem to have better data sources.

Not necessarily better data sources, but different data sources and a slightly different approach.

For organic results, the biggest different is that Runnaroo uses Google as the base for web results (similar to Startpage) where DDG uses Bing.

Outside of the organic results, Runnaroo's strategy is to integrate results from different vertical specific search engines who specialize in a niche topic. I call these 'Deep Searches' because they are essentially pulled from the database of the vertical source. It's the difference between getting an link to a website's home page vs. landing on the page and using their own search function to see the results.

For many queries, I believe this can provide higher quality SERP. For example, see the below results for "parkinson research" [0] or "react.js" [1]. The results are a lot more informationally dense than other search engines. Again, not necessarily better, but different.

DDG is still better for many queries(currency conversions, weather, etc), and definitely more polished, but I only launched Runnaroo a few months ago and new features and Deep Search sources are being added almost daily.

So TL;DR, Google results (with privacy) plus additional search results from relevant niche and authoritative sources.

[0] https://www.runnaroo.com/search?term=parkinson+research

[1] https://www.runnaroo.com/search?term=react.js

Is it ok to get Google results like that?

>Is it ok to get Google results like that?

It is. We integrate the Google results through their web search API, and comply with their usage terms of service (as we do with all the data partners we integrate).

I'm the creator of Runnaroo. Thank you so much for the kind words! It made my day. I was having the same experience where I kept having to fall back to Google, so this was a very much a "scratch your own itch" project.

I went basically the same route; got rid of my Google account (GMail, Android, etc.) and switched to an iPhone. The only things left where I indirectly use Google (see below) are precisely Google search and YouTube like you.

> Then there‘s the search engine. I tried hard to replace Google Search with DDG, but I have to admit that Google gives me better search results. Still I would love to leave this also behind.

I have the same experience; I’ve tried switching multiple times, but at least for scientific topics, I find DDG far inferior to Google Search. My current workaround is to use StartPage.com, which is just a website that searches Google for you, but without letting Google track you.

> Finally there is youtube for me. Ain‘t no alternative I know about.

If you don’t need to actively publish or comment on videos, you don’t need a Google account to get most of the convenience of YouTube. Personally, I just use a good old RSS client to track my YouTube feeds in the same place I track other content (e.g. HackerNews posts). If you say that you use iDevices, I can recommend “News Explorer”, which syncs your feeds via iCloud (in contrast to all the RSS solutions that require a separate sync account).

> I tried hard to replace Google Search with DDG, but I have to admit that Google gives me better search results.

In those cases where DuckDuckGo is not enough, just append !sp to your search, this will tell DDG to redirect your search to StartPage which is essentially a proxied Google search (the results come from Google but you as a user don't get in direct contact with Google itself).

I think Google's invasion of privacy can be regarded as a kind of "symbiotic parasitism" - they are able to leverage the information they harvest from you to improve search quality. A proxy won't give as good results as letting Google spy on you.

They show you results more like those they think you'll want. Woe betide you if you search political things; you'll be trapped in a partisan political filter bubble.

It is true that what Google judges to be best search quality is not the best for the world.

Yeah from my experience you get the kind of results that you would get from searching in an incognito window i.e. non-personalised (mmm although now that I think of it, they probably have fingerprinting techniques so that they can still track you while incognito)

or just !s

Is Microsoft Office really so much better than Google Docs in terms of privacy? Or is mostly just the "I hate Google, others are probably better" idea?

I received many documents in that format in the past. Actually that isn’t the case anymore. I just have thousands of legacy documents in doc/x and xlsx format on my computer. Other than that I don‘t use MS Word to create documents anymore. I prefer Emacs/Org + pandoc.

The mere fact that Microsoft actually has real customer support and implements features alone makes it better.

I was trying to rotate non-image / non-word-art text in a Google Docs table cell the other day and it’s literally impossible. I ended up having to create it as word art and position it as an image so it appears to be in the table but actually is on top of it

When I searched for Google support threads on how to rotate text in Docs, I only found forum posts by Google support agents stating that you can’t do it, which read to me approximately as “fuck you go away.”

Yes. Microsoft Office is dramatically better than Google Docs in terms of privacy.

I hate using Office 365 with a passion. The usability is horrible. Google Docs is much more pleasant.

But in any environment where privacy or security matters, I'd pick it over Google Docs in a heartbeat. In my day job, I work with data with compliance issues. We use Microsoft technologies and zero Google. As obnoxious as Office 365 is, that's the right choice.

What's so usable about Google docs? I mainly use Excel and the Google docs version is unbearable in terms of ui speed and more limited in functions.

Office has more functionality, without a doubt. File compatibility, privacy/compliance/security, and functionality are key reasons to use it.

Google Docs, on the other hand, the things it does, it does well:

1) Works reliably and without bugs. Last Word document I worked with began crashing Word at some point.

2) Works collaboratively. Google Docs keeps docs in sync in realtime. Office 365 has enough lag to suck at collaboration.

3) Keeps better versioning and version history. Word has a half-dozen different ways to do this, none of which are as good. Again, this is important for collaboration

4) Works better with people outside your organization.

The things it doesn't do, well.... it doesn't.

I've never had issue with Google Docs around UI speed. I have with Word. I think part of the reason is the simpler document structure and format.

In addition, Google Docs has working search tools (so you can find documents), albeit not great organization tools.

For most of my work, I'm not doing fancy formatting or other crap. I'm writing plain text, often on a team. For that, Google Docs would kick Microsoft's butt, if I trusted Google to allow me to comply with legal requirements (Google makes clear I shouldn't), and if I trusted Google not to disconnect my account tomorrow, based on some ML algorithm which decides I look like a scammer, or randomly discontinue something I'm using mid-document.

Excel is not word, but ok. If you need to edit plain text, sure. That's not a particularly interesting use case.

I don't collaboratively edit documents with people - I'd rather send them a version, take comments/revision, go through the comments and decide, instead of having them change the document text without my knowledge.

As for my use case I use spreadsheets.

I make spreadsheets that query databases and perform analyses and then spit out reports. Anyone with excel, db permissions, and the right db connector can use them. Google's version doesn't even have half the features I'd need to get it to work when I checked a little earlier this year.

The UI on google sheets is brutally slow and painful to use compared to something running not in the browser. Maybe I'm an odd case because most of my files have tens or hundreds of thousands of rows.

also, on point 4, I think this is some kind of computer tech bubble. once you go away from computer tech, google sheets is not great with people outside my organization because they're all expecting excel.

I would argue collaboratively editing documents is by far the most common and interesting use case, followed by presentations.

You seem to have an odd, complex workflow which is representative of 0.001% of the population. I'm glad Excel works for you. Microsoft does well with a number of complex oddball legacy workflows, full of VBA macros and what-not.

Your style of working collaboratively isn't very collaborative. Google Docs does allow that (you can share with suggesting changes), but for the most part, there's a gap between getting feedback on a document, and working together on one. I find version control to be super-helpful too; it's not like I don't see the changes after someone makes them.

Out of curiosity, what's the benefit of replacing Google Docs with Dropbox? I seem to remember HN's readership is occasionally hostile to Dropbox. Myself, I use it but the same drive that would have me ditch Google would also make me ditch Dropbox... (I haven't reached that point, though)

I ditched both for similar reasons.

I didn’t have a really strong need for either though and I do use iCloud to sync among my apple devices.

I also use iCloud for all my iDevices. It‘s not fast or as flexible as Dropbox but privacy wise I prefer them over any other cloud sync solution.

iCloud is the only one with servers in China, so it is objectively the worst privacy-wise.

You misunderstand the situation. Chinese users, in China, connect to iCloud servers in China.

They are not used for anyone outside China.

You misunderstand. Chinese users in China connect to Dropbox and Google Drive servers outside of China, where nothing is available to the Chinese government. Non-Chinese users in China connect to Chinese iCloud proxies in China, which handle data that has already been decrypted using the storage key, which remains outside of China, so anything the user accesses is available to the Chinese government. Chinese users in China have their iCloud data stored in China, where it is all accessible to the Chinese government at any time. Aside from that, there is no meaningful difference in privacy among the services.

My first impulse was to move away from everything google. I don‘t know much about any wrong-doings of Dropbox. Maybe I need to do some research.

This did it for me: https://www.drop-dropbox.com/

But if it hadn't, then probably this: https://help.dropbox.com/installs-integrations/sync-uploads/...

Dropbox was such a great and conceptually simple tool, having a kernel extension for smarter syncing feels like a step into Enterprise lala land.

Interesting, thanks for the link!

Of particular interest, if you're someone who's ditching Google services out of concern about privacy issues, is that Condoleezza Rice voiced support for warrantless wiretaps during Bush Jr's administration, and was also involved (to what degree is debatable) with the authorization to use "enhanced interrogation techniques" (aka torture). Whatever you personally think about these issues, if you're concerned about privacy, that she is in Dropbox's board of directors should be a big red flag.

Agreed, 100%.

I also wondered why she dropped out of public for a while, for current events.

Their board list probably has some good hints.

There appears to be a Wikipedia page dedicated to this topic:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Dropbox

Conceptually, using what the SEO community feels google does every time google does an algorithm change that muddles SEM / organic after a revenue drop (source: mozcom 2019), you would have to assume they would keep marginally pushing incremental borders to ameliorate any drop or “lower than wall street expected growth” in ad revenue. So the OPs approach to fully migrate is consistent with that world view.

Texasbigdata -> texasbigsentence? ;) I think I even agree w you, but whoa cowboy, is that some stream-of-consciousness you've laid down there!

Haha...dammit. You win! :)

For my use case, I choose to be mostly serverless -- I use Resilio Sync. It's not a perfect solution as they still host the tracker and if one device cannot find another then it routes via their servers, but otherwise all my documents are stored on my devices.

Another feature lacking is sharing with a non-resilio user is not possible with Resilio Sync.

You can also try SyncThing, which works in a similar manner, but it's FOSS and you can host your own tracker.

While I like Syncthing and used it for a couple of years, my experience is that Resilio is way faster for syncing large numbers of files (e.g. Git repos or large photo collections). Resilio also appears to be more easily reachable behind routers and corporate firewalls that for some reason block Syncthing. For those with an iPhone, that platform is also supported by Resilio but not Syncthing.

This is my experience as well.

Nextcloud is indicated here.

I've run a nextcloud instance as a dropbox (+contacts/calendar sync) alternative for years. But recently I was looking through their collection of apps, and there's actually so much more you can do with it. It has a webmail interface, video conferencing, collaborative document editing, a Google maps replacement, feed reader, etc etc.. I haven't used most of these yet so I can't say how well they all work. And a decent number of them are basically just iframes to embed other services (eg, etherpad or BigBlueButton). But, as a whole, it pulls together a ton of the things you might think of as "internet utilities". It's a shame about the brand, because the idea of it being your Own [personal] Cloud fits really well. I could totally see running an instance for less tech-literate family members or friends. Particularly my grandma, whose collection of bookmarks in her toolbar basically comprise "her internet".

I loathe Google Docs for the horrible UX. Dropbox was great (modulo security/privacy) but they are increasingly moving away from what made it great (a simple file system abstraction). My absolute favorite today is Keybase (it includes cloud file storage too) which is the only of my options that I actually trust to be private.

Keybase recently sold itself to Zoom in what looks like an acqui-hire:

https://blog.zoom.us/zoom-acquires-keybase-and-announces-goa...

The blog post only talks about integrating Keybase's team - no mention of their product.

That was what I was referring to. They sent an update and wrote a blog post when it happened: https://keybase.io/blog/keybase-joins-zoom

"Ultimately Keybase's future is in Zoom's hands, and we'll see where that takes us. Of course, if anything changes about Keybase’s availability, our users will get plenty of notice."

No update since. Keybase still works (and I use it constantly), but will it be around in two years?

> Out of curiosity, what's the benefit of replacing Google Docs with Dropbox? [...] the same drive that would have me ditch Google would also make me ditch Dropbox

They're both for-profit US companies saving your data overseas, so yes, for your last point it doesn't matter much. However, there are two advantages:

1) You're giving your data to a company aiming to sell you storage space vs a company which tries to make money of selling your (meta-)data, where selling storage space is only a minor accounting item. This also gives clear priorities: Dropbox loosing or being caught selling your data is a big reputation hit to them [0], while for Google it would neither change their reputation nor their total revenue by much.

2) You're not putting your eggs in one basket. If you're all in on Google, loosing your account does kill your calendar, contacts, mail, storage (possibly with the backups you need right now) ... . Also, that one company has basically full access to your life. If you're using diversified services you're far less likely to suddenly loose access to multiple services [1] and those services only own a part of your data vs your whole life [2].

Concluding this, selfhosting surely is the superior solution. But if you must use external storage providers (i.e. as worst-case backup or due to lack of money/space for own servers), choosing Dropbox over Google has its advantages.

[0] Yes, I'm aware it has happened.

[1] Assuming 2FA and a reasonably secure mail service, of course.

[2] One could argue that Google is going to guard your data with world-class engineers while the other services are probably less well equipped and therefore you have an increased risk of (at least!) parts of your data being leaked. That's personal risk management, though, and the consensus seems to be diversification.

> selfhosting surely is the superior solution.

You go on to partly refute this, but not strongly enough. Self-hosting is clearly inferior in major objective measures: availability, durability, and security. Unless you spend all of your time managing your personal storage solution, self-hosting will be far inferior in these respects, and probably also in cost if a true accounting of time is included.

Not so.

Availability: Raspberry Pi plus USB battery pack is more available than the Internet, since when my home power's down my Internet connection goes.

Durability: Have you ever heard of a Raspberry Pi dying?

Security:

  sudo apt install unattended-upgrades
  echo "0 4 * * * reboot" | sudo tee -a /etc/crontab

And all the functionality's available through Nextcloud. It's easier to set up than a Facebook account, and easier to maintain than a Google account.

This is assuming you don’t leave home. If you travel a lot, self-hosting on your residential internet connection is not going to be a very good experience.

When your house burns down?

Your house is less likely to burn down than Google is to cancel a service you use.

> Self-hosting is clearly inferior in major objective measures: availability, durability, and security.

I'd not go as far. You can have your setup behind a VPN on a high port, go for distributed storage (for example at your home and at your parents) and be rather secure with a stable, auto-updated distribution. Cold backups could be an encrypted blob in a cloud or a tape somewhere.

Now, of course this needs quite some upfront investment in time and money; without a solid setup, I fully agree that the cloud is superior (unless your prefer your data lost over read by the NSA).

Other than that, it mostly boils down to risk management: A third-party hacker might have an easier time with your network than Google or Dropbox, but being script-kiddie save is not that hard [0], so it needs to be someone with time and skill. TLAs can't simply subpoena your data, so it might be harder for them - unless your home network is setup badly [1] or they're willing to possibly burn a zero-day. Your day-to-day ad agency is not going to lay hands on your data. It really boils down to what aspect you optimize for; given the grandparent, I assumed it to be privacy and therefore selfhosting to be probably better. But I should've been clearer on that :)

[0] Yes, mistakes happen, but big corporations have also been hacked with trivial exploits, so let's call it even.

[1] This also poses a danger to your login data, though, so the Cloud security team does not help either.

DDG works well enough for me on anything but programming. The moment I need to search for anything programming related, Google works much better for me.

I'd recommend StartPage; essentially a proxy for Google.

Love Startpage, and get decent signals from them, but their ownership should be observed closely.

Unfortunately they started blocking lots of tor exit nodes after they were bought by the advertising company.

If it's about privacy, you can still use google search through various proxy search engines as others have mentioned.

That‘s a good perspective. Never thought about it that way.

I'm not sure if this will work. Google results are absolutely horrible for me, but not for my brother. It may be because they don't have a profile on me, but they have years of data on him. Using a proxy search engine may result in degraded results for someone who is currently getting good results from Google search.

>It may be because they don't have a profile on me, but they have years of data on him..."

That might be true, but I'm not sure. Outside of local searching I am skeptical of the benefits of filter bubbling.

I think it is just as likely that you and your brother have different opinions of relevance (even if you were both returned the same exact results unrelated to past activity), and the relevance decisions Google makes more align with your brothers perspective.

I am the creator of one of the search engines [0] named in the post. It will return the same exact organic results no matter who you are or what your prior searches were. Feel free to give it a go with your brother and see how it compares for both of you. For organic results, it works like DuckDuckGo does with Bing, but the difference is the main source of our organic results are actually from Google.

[0] https://www.runnaroo.com/

You can use a pejorative if you want, but context is quality. Context-free searching is dumb and the results are bad. An example: if I search for "2020 Honda Insight EX" on Google, I see some mixed bag of stuff about my car. If I then search for "tires" -- no other terms, just tires -- Google shows me shopping results for 195 50/16 car tires, the right size for my car. There are important inputs to my search result that I didn't have to type.

Now go to DDG and search for "tires". Useless results only. All advertisements and commercial results, but nothing relevant to me. "Getting out of my filter bubble" did not help me in this use case.

However, when you change car, or happen to have many, or switch interest from buying a car for your family to learn about tires manufacturing process, then madness is ensured.

I bought a large refurb iPad Pro and pencil this spring. Presumably a high value segment, since YouTube, amazon and google keep on pushing me iPad related ads and content for months now, for things I have already bought, out of my own research.

I guess I’ll have to fake some baby related purchases to have their focus changed.

I have yet to find a case where "profiling" benefits me, as a user.

>Google shows me shopping results for 195 50/16 car tires, the right size for my car

That's actually a really interesting example. The tire sizes for a 2020 Honda Insight EX are either 215/55/16 or 215/50/17 [0].

So taken at face value, the filter bubbling was either incorrect or Google was just returning results for a very common tire size in this case.

I agree that context is important, but Google doesn't return results blindly when they are not able to do personalization. They already know the results that millions (billions?) of other people who have searched for tires have clicked and found relevant.

[0] https://tiresize.com/tires/Honda/Insight/2020/

Wow! I just realized that for "business" accounts Fastmail is $5/mo and GSuite is $7/mo which is what I'm currently paying.

Drop-in replacement for same/less cost & better privacy while supporting a slightly better cause? I'm switching tomorrow.

GSuite is not just gmail - it also includes docs, sheets, slides, meet etc.

Those things are free, the drive space is the real bonus

Thanks! We're very proud of our work. Glad to hear that you're having a good experience :)

Thanks - your stuff is really great, I’m a happy user.

Ah, the CEO of Fastmail is responding ;) Let me tell you this: It‘s a beautiful product with a very intuitive UI: Every setting is there where I expect it. Also the support is very responsive and very helpful. Thank you!

Keep up the good work.

Yep, I'm a hacker news tragic too :p

Thanks for the kind words!

It‘s good to have you here and a good thing when CEOs keep in touch with their customers, listen to them, and eat their own dog food. - Imagine Tim Cook would have used a MacBook Pro (with the miserable key) and/or listened to the complaints. And a thousand more examples I can think of.

Fastmail also wants a phone number. I no longer know what mail service to use apart from setting it all up myself.

mailbox.org does not require a phone number. It also includes its own calendar sync and online office suite(although I've never really tried the office functionality myself).

I've been using it for a few years now and I can't complain.

I like protonmail myself, take a look at that.

Tutanota seems like the safest and most secure option I’ve been able to find.

Unfortunately we still need some kind of signal that you're a unique person at signup to avoid infinite fraud (as it is we still get waves of thousands of accounts at a time who have worked out a way to get their hands on a pile of numbers and are finessing an attack on someone else via us).

You can delete the number once you've signed up, though of course that means that if you forget your password is reduces the channels by which we can validate that you're the same person! (this is also quite common: many HN users would be surprised how often people forget passwords)

Those people can also stop paying you and just wait until you recycle their email address. No password recovery needed when it's up for anyone to grab.

Apart from that we're no longer recycling email addresses as fast as we used to (except for trials that never paid, they only get prescribed for a short time) that doesn't work so well for getting access to your existing email!

I work for inbox.eu It is based in European Union and has 20 years experience as e-mail provider We do not require phone number for premium users. If You are using free trial version You still need to verify phone number to test e-mail sending (receiving works). It is needed to avoid spammers who signup for free to send spam.

Hm your move from google to iCloud begs the question: You don't see any issues moving from one big-vendor-"free"-lock-in solution to another?

Not an alternative, bit insidious is aborter frontend to YouTube... and om Android there is newpipe.

However, for me, the problems are: Maps. Google Maps are great. Calendar: my calender provider online has ICS calendar sharing, not e.g. itip.and imip.

I decided to start becoming an active contributor to OpenStreetMap. If a business isn't on the map, I just ask whoever works there a series of questions and upload the new POI. Some of the maps, like those in Bangkok actually mapped out a lot of footpaths that say go through a mall that save a ton of time walking vs Google Maps.

I am also a contributor to OSM, but it does not replace the need for Waze, for example. They are partially redundant, but not completely interchangeable.

Oh, I sold my car a couple years ago so these features aren't as useful to me now

Another Fastmail user here. What's missing for me are Android widgets for mail, calendar and note-taking. Also, their note-taking app needs some work.

I’m paranoid about my photos. I have them backed up to:

- iCloud

- iCloud syncs to my Windows PC

- Backblaze backs up my Windows PC

- Google Drive

- One Drive

Similar thing with my photos. All other files can be replaced, what I can't do is re-travel to various locations and re-take the photos I have!

Probably iCloud Photos is the Apple service that most ties me to a Mac hardware.

How's the iCloud syncing to a Windows PC?

Hasn't firefox been defunded and likely to no have a future?

If that was the case I‘d fall back to Safari. Even though my browsing experience wouldn’t be the same anymore (using a dozen addons in Firefox).

I believe the upcoming version of Safari will have WebExtension support, so at least there's that.

As far as I can tell they canned most of the Firefox teams driving new features, so that’s how I read the situation.

It’s interesting how those teams have finally been able to pull Firefox out of freefall, only to be sacked.

They dropped some side teams, but the deal with Google that we thought wasn't happening actually happened a bit later. They're still good. They had future regardless, it's not the end of the world for them to run a bit more lean.

No.

"Mozilla signs fresh Google search deal worth mega-millions"

Moz will likely pocket $400m to $450m a year between now and 2023 from the arrangement, citing internal discussions held earlier this year.

https://www.theregister.com/2020/08/14/mozilla_google_search...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24156813

Yes. That doesn't mean that money will go to Firefox.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com