How Google's insidious behavior led me to find superior alternatives

HanlonsRazor

Google couldn't sign me in, so I signed out, indefinitely. How Google's insidious behavior led me to find superior alternatives.

https://www.quitfacebook.org/file/google.html

I wrote this short lament about Google refusing to log me in when using Vivaldi, and since it shines a positive light on Vivaldi I thought I'd leave it here, if I may.

Dancer18

@HanlonsRazor Thanks a lot for providing precious links as alternatives to google, like Invidious or NewPipe, DeepL or MEGA, F-Droid or whatelse.

greybeard

I used to do a lot of searching on the big g and my gmail account was default email.
Now I do have a Protonmail account for sensitive documents (few and far between) and I search with Bing (another monopoly). I have found that while Bing does not give me the quantity of results the big g did, it did give more relevant results. And there are alternatives if a user wishes not to use msoft as well as the big g.
Years ago I fondly remember "Scroogle"... but the big g kept blocking its servers no matter how many times they changed their IP addresses they decided it was no longer worth the effort.

PrivacyMatters

I avoid the Goo as much as possible.

Catweazle

@PrivacyMatters , me too, although it is not always possible unfortunately.
Although there are alternatives to G's services and applications, not all offer the same functionality. In the case of Android it is directly impossible, although F-Droid and other apps are used, many official and professional ones are only available in the Play Store and only for Android, which also prevents the use of LinageOS instead of Android.
Apart from what is used in Android, if everything is controlled by the OS, that is, by G itself, with Chrome always present as part of the system itself.

HanlonsRazor

@greybeard said in Google couldn't sign me in, so I signed out, indefinitely. How Google's insidious behavior led me to find superior alternatives.:

Years ago I fondly remember "Scroogle"... but the big g kept blocking its servers no matter how many times they changed their IP addresses they decided it was no longer worth the effort.

What a bunch of assholes.

@Catweazle I'm using LineageOS. Since it is based on Android I haven't found any app yet that does not run because I'm using LineageOS.

Oh wait, I think I understand. I installed LineageOS with GApps (pico) installed to have the most basic of Google Play functionality. Not installing GApps would indeed limit the amount of Google Play apps one can install.

HanlonsRazor

https://www.quitfacebook.org/file/google.html

I already posted the same link in chit-chat before I noticed there was a dedicated subcategory. By all means, move or delete one of them.

Anyway, Google tried to discourage me from using Vivaldi by refusing to let me login on YouTube and saying I was using an insecure browser. So I made the decision to drop Google altogether.

Catweazle

I will also add this list
https://degoogle.jmoore.dev

HanlonsRazor

@Catweazle said in How Google's insidious behavior led me to find superior alternatives:

I will also add this list
https://degoogle.jmoore.dev

Added the list to the blog post as well. Excellent content.

Catweazle

@HanlonsRazor , I have it in my bookmarks for a long time next to the essential AlternativeTo and FSF

code3

@Catweazle Maybe you already knew this, but .dev is owned by google... It doesn't make the list bad, just shows you how much of the internet Google controls.
Also - Vivaldi is listed! I don't think it was listed the last time I saw the list, but maybe I did not see.

Catweazle

@code3 , in the normal network it is certainly impossible to do without Google 100% and possible alternatives often do not reach even close to the quality of services that Google offers.
But if it is possible to largely escape the surveillance of G (FB, Amazon), for this there are tools left over.
In another thread I mentioned f.Exmpl. Whoogle as a search engine, which not only keeps browsing private, it even redirects links to YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and others to corresponding Front Ends, such as Invidious, Nitter and others, which is appreciated.

Whoggle settigs are very impressive
alt text

code3

@Catweazle I will add whoogle and mojeek, thanks! (What are the suggest URLs?)

Catweazle

@code3 , I have already edited the post and added the best public instance to Whoogle, you can ad id to the Vivaldi list, simply with right click on the search field and in ad as search engine.

https://github.com/benbusby/whoogle-search
"Get Google search results, but without any ads, javascript, AMP links, cookies, or IP address tracking. Easily deployable in one click as a Docker app, and customizable with a single config file. Quick and simple to implement as a primary search engine replacement on both desktop and mobile."

code3

@Catweazle Thanks! Do you use it as your main search engine or not? How reliable are the results?

Catweazle

@code3 , I use currently Whoogle and Qwant as second. Whoogle is really fast and reliable.

code3

@Catweazle said in How Google's insidious behavior led me to find superior alternatives:

Whoogle is really fast and reliable

Not from what I saw today, but I will give it another chance. It looks like just Google in a restricted iFrame, though.

Catweazle

@code3 , also like Startpage, with the difference that Startpage has ads and is slow.

Catweazle

@code3 , take a look on this extension, shure you will like it

https://github.com/SimonBrazell/privacy-redirect