I always believed Google was successful because it was pushed and advocated for by geeks, I feel that those days are coming to an end.
I use DDG and I think it's a pretty solid alternative, although it requires a little more effort when looking for certain things. Non-tech types have been curious about why I don't use Google, they seem to be getting the tracking is not good thing.
Those days ended the day Google went public, and quite possibly well before then.
There may be a way to get these things from DDG, but I'm haven't had the time to look for them yet.
Still DDG is pretty good, and obviously will get better the more we use it.
!year girugamesh
girugamesh
It's also a self fulfilling prophecy though - as my threshold to scroll through results on DDG has dropped markedly from when I first started.
You can't just educate everyone. The law need to change to make this sort of thing illegal. Personal data should be limited, and controlled by the person involved. You should not be allowed to sign it away.
"it requires a little more effort when looking for certain things"
What type of things?
1. Older results. DDG's recent (<~5 year) results are pretty good. Going older than that for online content, not so much.
2. Books and journals. Google Books, Google Scholar, and Google Ngram Viewer are phenomenally useful tools, no doubt about it. There's no single resource which can substitute for them. Worldcat (library search) is good, if you've got access to various search databases (usually via an academic library) that's useful, and content access itself is possible (with questionable legality) via Sci-Hub and LibGen. The Internet Archive has less content, but greater legality.
3. Specific technical queries are generally less well answered by DDG, but easier to direct (via bang queries) to the appropriate source. StackExchange, Debian, Debian packages, Ubuntu, Microsoft KB, etc., are (I think) all covered. The ease of filtering from a general case to a specialised search is a real win.
4. Date-bound searches. I very frequently want to look for something between specific dates.
5. Less-prominent content. I use various sites (Ello, Reddit) as filing cabinets of a sort, and being able to search my own posts there is useful. Reddit's post search is good, Ello's not so much. DDG doesn't index (or retain) Ello results well.
Given there's no tracking (feels a bit odd saying that nowadays with any kind of seriousness), do they monitor which queries people use !g for, and try to optimize their engine for these?
One feature I do like though (I'm not sure if Google etc offer this nowadays), is they'll often provide the top-answered StackOverflow answer in response to a query above the search results. That has proven handy a fair few times, esp. for some of the shorter answers (e.g. arcane command lines, git invocations etc).
Google does something like this when it shows images or scientific articles on top of other results.
DDG could even predict that it needs to fallback to Google in last resort.
DDG's auto question-answer stuff is pretty good. Not quite as polished as Google, but IMO far less annoying. Google thinks it knows better than I what I want. DDG seems willing to allow me to provide reasonable prompts. "Weather" and "what is..." queries, for example.
When it comes to this, it's too late. The dollars have already won in the highest court.
They aren't complicit, they're ignorant. Capitalism breaks down if the customer has no idea what they're buying.
There is no such thing as a tech/engineering company.
It's not about developers being perfectly pure and moral, it's about an organisation holding themselves up to a standard that they have set themselves.
And a standard which I expect them to meet and exceed.
Then you're a fool. If you want to slam people for not meeting standards, they'll have to be objectively defined. There's no sense of "evil" you could ever hope for people to agree on.
Your complaint is similar to the chorus of people complaining that they voted for "hope" and Obama let them down. They should have known that would happen when they saw that his slogan was "hope".
Google is a massive company that provides immense value to billions, and they do much of this for free (monetarily to you as the end user) while providing advertisers a great platform that allows for efficient matching of products to consumers. That is a fine standard for a company in my opinion.
Please don't paint broad unsubstantiated strokes over all "non-developers and non-software engineers". You mention Facebook as an example that's not engineering focused but fail to mention that their equity structure is such that Mark Zuckerberg has control effectively through the votes his shares represent which means MZ, an engineer/hacker, is responsible for the decisions of the company.
Google is not a company whose mission it is to preserve people's privacy. They are out to solve search and organize information and in order to reach their goals, they have to find a way to attract the best talent in the world. This requires making tradeoffs in order to get the capital required to invest in changing the world in the way they think will be better.
The engineers at sister companies who were working at the time on an offshore gas terminal were in the same position. Those companies are very much not engineering driven.
It's so strange to be old enough to see the same mistakes of the AOL days repeated again at a much larger scale. I don't want your garden, I want my privacy, thanks.
..... only to find that you have problems delivering email to Gmail users, who are everywhere. :/
I experienced this same problem when moving to a new hosting provider and IP set. couldn't sent mail to Google properties/hosted accounts until my IP's email reputation score was high enough to be approved by whatever lurks in Google.
I was looking into ProtonMail and Riseup as well. There are lots of good alternatives to Gmail.
So no need to inform everyone, just use your new address when you're asked.
People are moaning about Microsoft tracking with Windows 10 which is mostly on home devices. In reality Google is worse, they are tracking us 24x7 via our smart phones.
1. Cyanogen Mod: This inherits too many of Android's fatal flaws.
2. FirefoxOS: Oh well. (It's dead, Jim.)
3. Ubuntu Mobile: It's still alive, though small.
4. Windows Mobile: Not my thing.
I may head to a small-form-factor notepad. I really like the concept of a folio-format tablet + bluetooth keyboard, though nobody seems to be making a general 9-10" device. I prefer this to an integrated & hinged laptop, or a smartphone type device, especially in WiFi-only capabilities. The basic hardware of my device is acceptable. The OS, lockdown, user-hostility, surveillence, intentionally broken crap, and App store ecosystem dyfunction are irredeemable.
Plus your post made me a bit sad again remembering webOS. How I miss it!
2) I can't forgive Microsoft the 1980s and 1990s.
I'm leaning toward the idea that a terminal and emacs is about 99% of what I really need.
> Cyanogen Mod: This inherits too many of Android's fatal flaws.
For example?
Well, Google is hyped here on HN (a technology forum) a lot, also in the positive sense. So perhaps HN should start hyping different, more ethical correct, companies?
If the developers and the software engineers cared about other people's privacy and saw anything beyond dollar bills the nons' would not have anything to sell.
I think Google always was an ad company, using technology to push ads and never a engineering company using ads as a source of income.
But, anyway, moving to another company won't help. Unless it's something that is specifically prohibited by contract (and not unilaterally editable), companies will eventually do it if it makes them money. Individuals have zero leverage.
What we need is a massive corporation for all people that will negotiate contracts on our behalf. Oh, wait, that's what governments are for? Governments are so 20th century.
I find it to be not that easy to find good alternatives.
In the long run good products require money, and money is massively flowing at advertisement currently.
That's why the big players are Google (ads), Facebook (ads), and I suspect that's why Microsoft is starting to massively collect user data (from Windows 10).
Building good competition requires money flowing at them, and people don't seem willing to pay for such products.
The only alternatives I see currently are:
- A change of rules (laws) regulating advertisement and personal data.
- A change of the funding system to give more opportunities to people to unite and bootstrap their own initiatives (basic income?).
- A subscription-based subset of Internet were you pay $10-$30 each month and can access to a high-quality service providers (news, email providers, etc).
- A major actor benevolently sponsoring such efforts (states or other wealthy entities with funding capabilities).
Yet Google still finds itself held in such high regard that criticism of their advertising tactics are dismissed as trolling in many cases. And here we are.
Why do you think all engineers do?
For the record, I'm an engineer, have almost nothing to do with web development, and my honest opinion is actually against so-called privacy advocates. At the same time, a lot of marketing people that I meet actually argue against me on this.
If you see a corellation between a profession and political opinion, it does not signify causation.
"But they offer sooooo much money" is not a moral argument.
So glad I'm evaluating other email providers and use Privoxy for ad-blocking.