How I Learned to Live Google-free | Hacker News Reader

How I Learned to Live Google-free

spectrum.ieee.org

129 pointsssn76 comments

I think this is a little silly because a lot of the fruits from the google-tree have already been reaped by the author.

Its not particularly hard to live google-free now, now that you know all of the places you want to go on the internet and have many good Google-alternatives.

Because you're already aware of wikipedia, and allrecipes, and reddit, and BBC news, etc, etc.

All of the fine websites you enjoy however were almost all once learned about from Google Search or else someone who used search.

Had you not had any contact with Google Search or the people who used it in the first place from 2001-2011, you'd probably still think the internet is a trite place where there's not much to learn.

And presumably if you stopped using Google Search now and there were no good search alternatives, you'd miss out on a lot of good sites that will be developed between 2011 and 2020.

Luckily for the author, search is a booming field today. It's true that Google isn't any better than the other options available today, but when you were doing most of your fledgling searching for good content sites back in (say) '02-'06, it was there and you benefited massively.

In this way I kind of think the article is essentially saying "It is easy to live without parents once you're already an adult." Trivially true, but greatly mis-understanding of the importance that his search-parents had on him.

"Because you're already aware of wikipedia, and allrecipes, and reddit, and BBC news, etc, etc. All of the fine websites you enjoy however were almost all once learned about from Google Search or else someone who used search."

That's going a tad bit far. Many of these sites have promotions outside search. I am pretty sure the BBC didn't need Google to help people find their website. There was a time before Google and the web existed.

I agree, if you hadn't said it I would've. Other search engines existed before google. There were other ways to walk the net be it not that fast or somewhat accurate.

This criticism seems like a non sequitur. The author is not claiming to be free of Google genetically, he's trying to free himself from actively using Google services. So what if he had to use Google in the past to build up his knowledge about how to use the internet effectively? He doesn't have to continue to use it.

And re:

> In this way I kind of think the article is essentially saying "It is easy to live without parents once you're already an adult." Trivially true, but greatly mis-understanding of the importance that his search-parents had on him.

I wish it were more true that Google was something you grew out of in this fashion. People instead seem to become more and more reliant on it over time.

Um, I actually learned about Google from BBC I think. I think the only "big" website I've learned about from google is w3schools.

For me it goes like this:

-I don't like the fact that my services are so scattered out among different companies.

-I start moving stuff to 1 service.

-I get intensely excited about the integration.

-I get paranoid about Mogul Company X having all my data.

-I move parts of it away.

-Repeat.

[slight exaggeration]

I think there needs to be some sort of common API among all these web apps that lets us store our data wherever we like. The way they just assume we want to keep our data on their server, I think, is ridiculous.

I don't think we can expect all the different service providers to agree on a standardized API, but that doesn't mean it wouldnt make sense for someone or group of someones to take up the cause of creating a standardized API for a category of services and maintaining the connections to all of the different providers.

It's like the ebb and flow of the tides, stars forming then dying.

Why would I want to live "Google free"?

Compared to other companies who collect similar amounts of data, G has (as of yet) behaved quite well.

If I don't want AdWords or Analytics tracking, I can redirect their domains to 127.0.0.1 (which I do for Analytics).

you can opt out as well - http://www.google.com/privacy/ads/

Thanks. Opt-ed out. Although I must admit the ads seem pretty much the same.

Can you post a list of your /hosts/

Here's a full set: http://winhelp2002.mvps.org/hosts.htm

Here's the ultimate hosts file.

http://someonewhocares.org/hosts/

You can also use the Ghostery browser plugin for that, and it also protects you from many other ad services.

Unpaginated link:

http://spectrum.ieee.org/telecom/internet/how-i-learned-to-l...

Or:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2636894

It's amazing how things have changed about Google. I still remember the day when Google released GMail, and the /. crowd were talking about how Google wanted and needed to make its product(s) more sticky since switching search engine was considered to be painless and that would put Google in a very vulnerable position. Now Google has grown to be so sticky that people start writing about how to live without it.

I am not fond of many things Google is doing, but have to admit it has come a long way in the past 7 years.

I think it's relatedly interesting that Google is still the canonical search engine, too, despite the non-stickiness of search engines, to the point of simply being synonymous with search.

Search is sticky because the cost of trying another service is high while the benefits are (seemingly) quite low. For another search engine to supplant the notion that google = search they need to not only beat google in search quality, but do so significantly enough that others will immediately notice.

it's sort of like the difference between physically and psychologically addictive drugs - there are no real penalties for switching your search engine, but you're used to google so there's a certain "feel good" reward to keeping on using it.

Can you explain how the cost of trying another service is high? If you hear about another search engine that's supposed to be better, it seems easy enough to try it for a few searches or compare results. Seems like plenty of people tried Duck Duck Go and others, but they simply weren't better.

The other way to beat google at search is to disrupt/obviate the search market the way that the social networks are purportedly trying to do. Which I'm entirely skeptical about.

The cost is the feeling you get when you bring up a Bing search that doesn't have what you're looking for and thinking that Google probably had exactly what you wanted. It's the unknown factor: what am I missing by not using Google?

To overcome this psychological disadvantage a search engine has to do a significantly better job. Here's how they could succeed: if you search for "Italian restaurant" and the first result becomes your favorite restaurant. Then your search for "indie music" introduces you to a new site that you visit daily. If you can provide the user with 3 or 4 of those types of wow experiences it can have the effect of changing the psychology of "yeah, but what does Google return?".

Here's the wrong approach: Blekko. Blekko's basically saying "we give up, we can't interpret your query so we're going to ask you to do the heavy lifting for us. We'll index and rank your opinions". You're not going to convert people by making it harder to do searches.

Instead of replacing Google services with other online services, I would prefer an approach that replaces them with free (as in speech) software I can install on my web own server.

I don't think Google is evil. But I would like more control over the information they currently caretake for me.

well, you can do this with email to some extent. i was concerned about my reliance on google, but didn't find any other search engine as good (i use google a lot for debugging and related technical work). so what i did was:

- use the "disconnect" app to make my google searches more anonymous https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/jeoacafpbcihiomhla...

- install my own web server. i use procmail for filtering, with all email stored in imap directories. then i use mairix for searching http://www.rpcurnow.force9.co.uk/mairix/ . finally, i read email with the mutt client.

that works surprisingly well. mairix is awesome once you get used to it (you call it from the command line - or by pressing "!" in mutt - and it populates a maildir directory, so you can see the result in the mail client; it's also fast - uses an index database for speed). and i can read mail remotely over ssh (i use a free aws instance with an ssh tunnel to provide external access - my isp's modem does not accept incoming connections).

configuring email in linux has gotten much easier over the years - yast in opensuse pretty much does everything you need these days.

http://michael-wheeler.org/2011/01/29/leaving-the-cloud/

I already do this by hosting my own email with Roundcube as the web client.

The work of the Data Liberation Front team is one of the big reasons I'm willing to use Google services in the first place.

I appreciate not having my data held hostage. Google isn't perfect but the DLF team represents an effort to continue to improve, and they appear to make good progress.

Anybody else tempted to operate their own "cloud"?

I'm waiting for OS X Lion Server to be released to install it on my home server (really just a mac Mini running 24/7 next to my router). Since most of my sharing (calendar, docs...) is between my wife and myself, it seems doable.

I'm just not sure that iCal, Mail and the file sharing features will be adequate enough to replace Gmail, Google Calendar and Docs.

Does anything like Exchange (but free and preferably open source) actually exist?

What features do you need?

Nothing fancy. Just hosted calendar, address book, and email. I could roll something with LDAP for the address book, and any of the usual email-only servers (Sendmail plus UW IMAP, or more modern equivalents), but that would be a bit administration-heavy.

OS X Server will do that (pay), I've been doing the OpenBSD / Postfix / Dovecot / OpenLDAP / WebDAV thing. Still not sure on the whole calendar thing. It really isn't that bad once you get it setup and make sure to keep up with the updates.

Would you be up for sharing your experience setting it up? Whether a blog post, an e-book, or whatever - I'll bet there are some people who would love to do the same, but use the experience of someone who's already got it working together.

sure, it will be a couple of days - I am working with 4.9 this weekend / next week and it has a different setup (they added rc.d to OpenBSD) - I will do a step-by-step next week. I am also trying to do my spam stuff a little different.

Check out Zimbra.

Do you have any personal experience with Zimbra? Isn't it too feature-rich, and thus overly complicated, for home use?

You will want to run it in a VM to separate the service from the rest of your system, if possible.

It needs very little CPU but, should have about 2GB of RAM due to a big Java component, and because it periodically kicks off programs to clean things up every few minutes.

A bit of a pain to set up, but once set up it works quite well. It might have too many features - if you want something a lot simpler, look for "qmail toaster" or a good guide to setting up Postfix.

Use it at work. I miss Exchange.

Check out Zarafa, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zarafa_(software)

(I have no experience with it myself)

the reason for the cloud is so you don't have to handle hardware failures, maintenance, upgrades, backups, power outages.. etc. All you need is one hardware component to go on your home server to die, and be out of your services.. and possibly lose all data.

Yes.

Besides the Four Fundamental Freedoms of Free Software, people have an additional freedom: The freedom to give up their freedom. In my case, my life is greatly simplified by giving up a little freedom and having Google's sysadmins manage the hardware and software for a lot of my personal data. The risk is even less when places like Google and Facebook allow you to export your data.

I don't know much about AWS, but can't you host a server with them instead and get the same result, but more reliable?

Before this "cloud" nonsense came along this was known as operating ones own services, and is still done by many.

However, it is a pain. I remember sitting in a hotel lobby in Saigon next to a guy who was trying to revive his ailing mail server in London while in the middle of his honeymoon. I myself am still serving web pages and forwarding email for a handful of friends and family. When things go wrong (despite many levels of redundancy) I have to sacrifice my valuable time for what could be somebody else's problem. It sucks.

I could probably switch to DuckDuckGo without much trouble. I could definitely switch to a newsreader, although I'd miss syncing. Still, might be some other service that does it or it's even possible to hack something together myself.

But Gmail? That's the tough one, I really like the interface and it seems every competitor tries to look like a desktop client.

Having a hosted Emacs might be an option (RSS reader/highly customized GNUS). My paranoia/principle level isn't high enough for that right now, though.

Re: E-mail

That's the thing that annoys me the most about Yahoo.

I don't want a sluggish, UI heavy e-mail client. I want minimalism without in-browser tabbing.

For me it's the conversation views, the shortcuts and the labels -- and search, of course. You're right, neither yahoo nor gmx.com seem to get it, never mind how "polished" they got their HTML outlook clones.

Google Reader is indispensable, because it lets you see old items even after they've been deleted from the current feed. So many podcasts do this: only give a few recent episodes in the RSS feed, keep the old files on the server, but either bury the link somewhere or never link to them at all. With the silly default no-listing permission on the directory.

Without Reader, many podcast archives would be inaccessible most users.

I recently migrated to GNUS and all in all I'm not missing the Gmail interface that much. Though Google still has all my stuff since I am just using their IMAP service.

And I've recently migrated off Google Reader to a ncurses RSS reader I wrote (https://github.com/abhiyerra/rutt).

In both cases there are issues that I have to deal with, but overall it has been sort of fun.

It's become more and more important for me personally to be google free over the last couple years, and I largely am, but DuckDuckGo only gets me about 80% on getting free of relying on their search, which is my main paranoiac worry.

The problem with getting off of Google search is that it is such an excellent product. When I want to dig hard, I can't help but go back.

All Pages version: http://spectrum.ieee.org/telecom/internet/how-i-learned-to-l...

More interesting for me is now living Microsoft-free.

Why is this more interesting for you? I have found living MS free nowadays to be extremely easy. It's not even a conscious effort for me, I simply haven't found an MS product that is the best in its class (or at the very least, best for me). With the exception of the Xbox 360, I do still use that regularly.

ie/windows-plugin-only websites, for one

Which ones? Work related, I assume?

no, mostly government sites that no one has bothered making cross-platform

It is interesting to those of us who have been using computers for over a decade. There was a time when a great many things required Windows.

I like Microsoft Keyboard 4000. ;) Only thing Microsoft I use at this point, except for maybe Skype now.

Since I work with other people, I still see a lot of Word, Excel and PowerPoint docs and the non-Microsoft viewing options for those remain very weak.

Also, I consider Google's offerings to be a pleasure to use.

I'm using several different google user accounts for different services. This feels safer, and allow easier separation of work and personal stuff.

About search engine replacement: DuckDuckGo is nice, but unfortunately works only in a strict english-speaking setup. For any search in a non-english languages, its performance lacks dramatically compared to google.

Then again my main issue with Google search is that it forces me into a search specific to my country (Germany). I know, I know, if I would just accept their cookie, I would be able top change that. Without the cookie, not much luck.

Does http://google.com/ncr not work in germany? (Or does that also require the cookie?)

I think it also requires the cookie. Also, to be honest I was too stupid to get that configured in the Firefox search bar so far (couldn't figure out how to do it I mean).

The only thing i still use my google account for is GoogleReader. I have looked around a bit but never found a good replacement for it

I enjoy Newsblur, http://www.newsblur.com/ , and paid for it to support Samuel

Exporting Tasks might be easier now, as Google has recently announced an API for Google Tasks. I haven't looked into it, though.

Would there be a market for a Tasks exporter? I'd enjoy throwing one together, but I suppose there isn't real demand... :-/ (If you need one, you could pay me in BitCoin).

I really dont get why OP is so scared about eliminating the presence of all google services? Some services might be bad agreed,but why ditch everything? sounds paranoid to me. Replace chrome with firefox. whats the point?

Because he wanted to?

But the reason behind it?thats what iam not getting.

He made a personal choice. He explained it in the first 5 paragraphs.

TL;DR table of alternate services: http://min.us/lG4uE

what this story actually proves is that it's not hard to migrate your data from google any time.

tl;dr anyone?

page 3 has a short table about what services he switched to, how easy the switch was, and how the new service compares.

gmail is a big ask. would be so rad if it was open-sourced and i could just host myself with pop.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com