silence7Google Search is now using AI to replace headlines
Man how the hell are we supposed to degoogle so fast. I literally only became aware that they sucked like 2 years after them being cool for most of my life. Getting rid of gmail is going to be tough. There literally isn’t a service the equal of YouTube or Gmail.
thisbenzingringat my work, one person decided to start an email group to connect everyone for after hours activities…
only 2 people out of 20 were non gmail accounts
Daryl76679I’ve found ProtonMail to be pretty nice. Easy to import your mail into too. YouTube has been hard though. PeerTube is cool but rather small (feel free to ask my any questions about it though). Ideally we’d be using stuff like Nebula and Patreon to support creators directly, but you can at the very least use a fronted to minimize contact with Google.
TruscapeWhat makes you think that?
For one thing the US sent them a list of accounts and they suspended them with no process or appeal just last year. For another Someone who isn’t me signed up for an account and had it immediately suspended for suspicious activity, after a sleuth it was found their IP was on some shady blacklist, despite them not using that IP for anything but social media scrolling and news.
Suspicion is Israel is behind it. Anyway, proton gives no way to appeal like the other one does. I think there was another incident of proton suspending accounts for the US too.
One of the unfortunate realities of operating a sensitive service like email is that you have to cooperate with valid government requests or risk getting fined, or worse, banned from the country. The good thing is that end to end encryption restricts the information they have to turnover about your messages, but this is vulnerability of pretty much any service. Your email provider will not go to jail for you.
I do find the IP blacklisting a little ironic considering they run a VPN, but that’s not much of a surprise either considering their freemium business model. I don’t see how either of these practices would link them to Israel, but it’s fair if you’re uncomfortable with them. I think you’d be hard pressed to find services that don’t also do these things, though. What do you use for email?
The IP blacklist is separate, there are a few dozen firms that compile blacklists, you can run your ip online to check quite easily. This suspicion is the US/Israel is putting persistent critics of Israel that have gotten traction, on these blacklists. If one was born yesterday in a cave that would seem paranoid, but to anyone paying attention it’s really not.
The fact of the matter is, the other privacy focused free email have appeals for these things, while proton just suspends your account based on the word of the most dishonest pieces of shit on the planet.
forestbeastsEmail might actually be one of the easiest to move off of, thankfully!
There’s plenty of stuff out there, both free and paid. You can even use your own domain if you have an extra $15 or so a year. A lot of the paid options let you use your domain with them (and then if you ever need to change providers, you can keep your email address). And you can use both webmail and actual mail apps.
Youtube though… yeah, there aren’t really any good alternatives for that.
– Frost
There are alternatives to Gmail. I’d probably list out such services as Yahoo/AOL (I personally use the AT&T branded version of this service) and Hotmail (now known as Outlook.com), but instead I’ll just tell you that you can enter a query like “free email provider” in your web search provider of choice and find several perfectly viable options.
Those are all awful, none of the corporate tech companies are better they are all garbage. If they force you to give them a phone number, they do not deserve your business.
tutamail.com. tuta.com. No phone required. No email required. No forced 2 factor authorization that is an excuse to grab your personal information to sell it. Never again on any of the tech email companies. Never again. I never agreed to give them my phone, they forced me to years after the fact when I needed to get in there suddenly.
No forced 2 factor authorization that is an excuse to grab your personal information to sell it.
What?
Google, yahoo, aol, et al, will, for your own safety, because they are concerned about your security, make you hand over your phone number that they are allowed to use for commercial purposes in their TOS. You are welcome!
FriskyDingogetting rid of gmail was actually the easiest part for me.
Google drive and maps was the hardest.
And I had replaced maps pretty well until magicearth decided to implode
DigitalprimateWhat happened to magicearth? I haven’t used it much, just one of the google alternatives in my “maps” folder.
They went “freemium” while breaking the app and hiding most useful features behind the paywall.
And I cannot stress enough how much they broke the app. It used to be so smooth and no nonsense. Now it’s just unsafe to use.
iamthetot
Jean-luc Peak-hardso many better Google alternatives out there:
- https://noai.duckduckgo.com/
- https://ecosia.org
- https://searx.space/ (pick any of the 50+ instances)
- https://www.qwant.com/
- https://www.startpage.com/
Don’t forget Kagi! (though it isn’t technically comparable to the others since it’s a paid, but without ads one)
Lena
HuudaHarkitenI love Ecosia because I love trees and will keep using them until I can afford kagi or something.
But one thing that drives me through the wall.. If I search something in my native language, because I want results that are in my native language, google/bing (which ecosia uses) decides to translate reddit posts for me and Ecosia slaps them to the top of the results. Its rather annoying.
kazernielI have the same experience and it drives me to nuts - if I wanted English results, I’d search in English!
Its such a weird thing to do. Especially when you click the translated link and it opens a page that is not translated. So if they think they are “helping” people who don’t know the language, how exactly does it help that they translate the title and half a sentence in the search results.
SeductiveTortoiseYes, but they probably know that none of us speaks English, so it wants to help us because we are idiots.
Wait, thinking about that…
Mandatory reminder: Ecosia plants zero trees unless you click on ads.
Hear hear.
Its the only website in my adblocker whitelist.
@HuudaHarkiten @blah3166 The defaulting to google translate links is one thing I'm not liking about Ecosia.
Sadly Ecosia is not good for more niche topics or foreign languages. After a few months of use, I went back to Google with
&udm=14 😕
DuckDuckGo uses a basket of search indexes excluding google - so even if one of them enshittifies they can reallocate that portion to another source.
Startpage is google through a proxy server, and I noticed an article mislabeled the other day as such from there for a link I posted here.
All true, but it generally shows you search results in a reasonable order and including reliable sources. Like a fine-tuner for Google that doesn’t feed them your data. At least not that we know of…
Yeah but it has really gone downhill since 2021 especially, to the point of being virtually worthless. The only quick answers offered now on the search page are by design ai, all the results are machine written seo, restating the question in every possible way to hit results, then explaining why someone would want to know the answer to that question in exhaustive detail, then a short paragraph with the answer, that you have to wade through the drivel to find, when it used to put it on the search page results.
They don’t provide streaming links anymore, defective merchandise only returns links to the companies that make those products on forums they moderate (looking at you best buy everything you sell is now defective, never again,) and articles aren’t provided, even with exact information, date, name of article, name of publication, subject matter. They aren’t even trying and will give you completely unrelated information.
I wouldn’t be mad if I didn’t know it could work better. When it did initially work, I was surprised at how well it returned information. I know it can work better because it did work better.
We need free to the user search that is geared to work for us, not for advertisers and others that pay them, or the armies of often automated programs to write articles to his search engines despite being garbage information.
Lovely. Next you’re going to tell me Proton mail went evil. (Thanks for the explanation though! I’ll have a look at Kagi).
Ecosia seems to be pushing the aI stuff hard as well, but at least you have to press the obnoxious AI buttons to get it. Still, it refuses to make those buttons optional. Duckduckgo let’s you have clean experience without rubbing AI buttons or AI summaries in your face and so does qwant.
Still, it refuses to make those buttons optional.
Not only that, back before I left Ecosia a few months ago, it kept forgetting that I turned off AI summaries. Every week or so it would turn back on… I’ll try DuckDuckGo’s noai. prefix this time, that hopefully won’t have this issue. (I really like Ecosia’s mission, but come on…)
Duckduckgo should not have any such issues. If you need that prefix you should not even need any cookies. Going there has all those no AI settings on by default.
Regarding Ecosia, could it be that you deleted some related cookies accidentialy? Or did they really push in a very sleazy way for AI?
Open source and has its own index
Marginalia Search
Marginalia Search is a small independent do-it-yourself search engine for surprising but content-rich websites that never ask you to accept cookies or subscribe to newsletters. The goal is to bring you the sort of grass fed, free range HTML your grandma used to write.
Their old version with the ‘random’ option is the best way to find random, small, niche sites.
Start page is baked in with waterfox.
Protip, you can use your hostsfile or your router to block google so you don’t get tempted. If you may have to bypass, you can use some blocking extensions to allow an override after a nag screen chastising yourself for being weak willed. I rarely reach for the goog nowadays because I have a whole workflow I go through before giving in.
I still use Google Scholar, but I have recently seen that it is also being enshitified. What’s the next best option?
lens.org
Techbro feudalists are all in on AI. They promised it would replace the human workforce and got initial investments and repeated support from money that should have been smarter then that, but the allure of firing all their workers proved too strong.
Now, they’re sitting on a trillion dollar house of cards. They’ll continue to fail upward. The correction will be delayed as they all move money between each other to cover bad investments.
At least Dutch tulips provided actual value. They could be planted and grow to be something real. LLM “AI” was always a scam.
theneverfoxrepeated support from money that should have been smarter then that
Why would you think that? Look around, everything humanity does is absurd