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Comment by mahmud | Hacker News Reader

Is there a check-list for Google products & alternatives? I was just thinking of going through this exercise last night. Don't feel comfortable with them anymore.

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It would indeed be useful, and since I had a shell open I ventured over with the mouse and typed

  $ whois googlealternatives.com

The result made me chuckle. :)

  Registrant:
        DNS Admin
        Google Inc.
        1600 Amphitheatre Parkway
         Mountain View CA 94043
        US

I am currently going through this exercise, and here's what I done:

1) Chrome -> Firefox (Firefox 9 is surprisingly snappy, seems to me like a perfectly sensible alternative)

2) Search -> https://duckduckgo.com/lite - doesn't even show your query string in the URL. BUT: Works only in general search terms, not for specific (long) queries. There, Google is still unavoidable, it seems. But for 90% of my searches, DDG is perfecly OK.

3) Zoner instead of Picasa and zonerama.com instead of Photos in G+. [zonerama gives 2GB for free]

4) GMail: I found Hotmail to be adequate, but recently I switched to paying for my own webhosting, so I don't use free email anymore.

5) Google Calendar/Tasks -> Toodledo.com

6) Google Analytics,Adsense -> don't know...haven't found alternative yet.

In mu current understanding, it is not a problem to use some of the Google services, if one found them to be the best. What one should avoid, in my opinion, is to register account with Google and attach one's real-life identity to it. I did it in the past, and now consider it a big mistake of mine. I must say that I am still amazed so many people are ok with that.

4) GMail:

For a highly symbolic $5/year (with options to buy more space and features if and when you need them) fastmail.fm has an excellent mail service.

Yes type any google service into this, http://alternativeto.net/

Also http://duckduckgo.com/

http://www.wolframalpha.com/ ( not just math!, for example type in your local weather)

http://blekko.com/

They have a way better privacy /user policy!

I'm wondering how many down votes I would get for suggesting Bing as an alternative to search.

I wouldn't say that jumping ship to Bing would be a bad thing, but I would want the alternatives to be of a wider variety then just "Google or Microsoft."

I have been trying duckduckgo since last week for search, so far over 95% of my queries are resulting in good results, its my default now in pentadactyl. I will be installing Zimbra ZCS opensource edition on one of my servers for mail, calendaring. Haven't found any alternative for youtube yet.

I've been using duckduckgo for about a week now, and I'm very happy with it. I managed an in-house instance of Zimbra at my last job, and I remain a vocal, enthusiastic supporter of that product. If your organization's requirements list aligns with Zimbra's feature list, I wholeheartedly recommend it.

For personal email, I've been happy with fastmail.fm so far, although their spam filtering doesn't seem to be as good as gmail's.

I've been using them off and on since learning of their existence on this forum a couple of weeks ago. They are surprisingly good!

But I did have the damnedest time remembering their domain name! "Google" was an inspired name choice, including the trademark-friendly intentional misspelling. "Duckduckgo" not so much! I had to re-find the name several times.

However, DDG has a nice shortcut, which turned out to fit within my limited wet-ware RAM: http://ddg.gg.

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