Tag: google

Categories
Uncategorized

Goodbye Google Search!

DuckDuckGo

Google Search

Remember last year when I quit Google Mail and also quit Google Docs? Well, my efforts to DeGoogle didn’t end there…

I quit Google Search.

Yeah, Google Search… which I’ve been using for a quarter of a century. I even had a Google t-shirt back in… 1999 I think? No more.

DuckDuckGo

I switched to DuckDuckGo, which is a bit more focused on privacy and doesn’t use my search history for advertising purposes. I don’t even have an account to log into. You can still change some settings, which should persist across browser sessions thanks to cookies in your browser. (Though you then have to set them in each browser on each device you use. I think that’s a small price to pay.)

DuckDuckGo AI Settings

DuckDuckGo does have some AI features, but allows you to turn them off. Searching the web, not seeing any AI garbage, it feels like… like Google used to be, or like the web used to be. It’s pretty nice. Occasionally if I cannot find what I need I will open a private window and do a Google search, but it’s rare I need to do that.

SearXNG

While I’ve been happy with DuckDuckGo, I also try not to be complacent. I’ve installed SearXNG onto my home server which can also search the web.

SearXNG is a free internet metasearch engine which aggregates results from up to 251 search services. Users are neither tracked nor profiled. Additionally, SearXNG can be used over Tor for online anonymity.

So SearXNG goes out and does the searches using all sorts of search engines but protects your privacy by being a middle-agent. (There some public instances you can try, though they may be hit or miss, and localized results may be off.)

Mojeek Search

I’ve also had someone suggest I try Mojeek which claims to be “The alternative search engine that puts the people who use it first.” and unlike SearXNG does not rely on existing search engines but instead uses the Mojeek index of the web, so it is independent. (And, not into AI.)

I’ve left out a few options you could use instead of Google, but for those of use remember Ask Jeeves, Lycos, Alta Vista, Yahoo, and all the other search engines of 30 years ago, I think it’s our duty to find alternatives and try them out and see if we can move away from big tech, either by choosing self-hosted alternatives, more ethical companies, or way to subvert the existing system.

Categories
Uncategorized

Hello Fastmail, Goodbye Google Workspace!

Back in May of 2025 I switched from Google Docs to CryptPad. It’s been working fine for my (specific) needs. CryptPad is not the fastest, and there are some quirks if you are used to Google Docs, and I can see someone who is a heavy user of Google Docs who really likes Google Docs not liking CryptPad at all, but I’m different.

So in my continued quest to De-Googlify my life I dumped my Google Workspace (formerly G Suite, formerly Google Apps) account and got my email and calendars out of the Google ecosystem. I still have one “free” Gmail account that I mainly use for mailing lists, but never through the web interface, only through an email client. I’ve also killed off the calendar in that account.

I’ve gone back to Fastmail. Yeah, I was a Fastmail user in 2004… I should have stuck with it! According to my blog post I could have paid for a one-time membership for $15 USD!

It’s not free, but I don’t mind paying $5 per month to not be the product. It’s less than what I was paying for my Google Workspace, which raised the price earlier this year because… AI. Yeah, they added “Google Gemini” AI and I wanted no part of that. A free Gmail account wasn’t an option because my emails are using my own domains. (Supposedly the Google Workspace price went up again since I first wrote this post!)

I actually put off moving to Fastmail for a bit because I was worried about the migration, but it went really smooth with both of my email accounts… no complaints! I was not using calendars with my Google Workspace account because I was just using my free Gmail account calendar, but I’ve replaced that as well.

So I no longer use Google Workspaces for email and I no longer use Google Calendar. (Well, I do at my day job, but not for my own business or personal use. You can’t win ’em all!)

The web interface for Fastmail is pretty good, but again, I tend to just use email clients and calendar applications.

I’m quite pleased to have less Google in my life. In 2025 they’ve become a much worse company for freedom-loving people, and I do not support many of their policies so bye-bye Google!

Categories
Uncategorized

Hello CryptPad, Goodbye Google Docs!

CryptPad

In my continuing effort to get away from Google (and most large US-based tech companies in general) I found CryptPad. I should note that everyone uses software and web-based services differently, and for me specifically there is one spreadsheet I constantly use for my small business. I never really use the documents or presentations that Google Docs offer, and I almost never use Google Drive. Still, CryptPad does offer all of those things, so if you need them, they are there.

There’s a lot to love about CryptPad and people seem to like it. CryptPad is an end-to-end encrypted and open-source collaboration suite and there are all sorts of options for using it, and I’m pretty sure your data won’t be used to train AI models since, you know, your data is encrypted and not even viewable by the system admins.

I am using CryptPad.fr (specifically) right now, and I make a small donation every month for the space and resources I am using. I do not mind paying some small fee for what I get, and for helping support an alternative to Google.

Public Money = Public code? Funded by and for users? Yeah, more software like this, please!

But is it as good as Google Docs? Again, it depends on your needs and expectations and what you are willing to compromise on. At first I found it “not as good” as Google Docs, but after using it a bit more and just getting used to it, I really like it, and I’ve quit Google Docs, hopefully permanently.

Eventually I’d like to self-host CryptPad. Oh, I should mention this weirdness around OnlyOffice, because some code from OnlyOffice runs within CryptPad. See this Shady Moves post. I am not concerned about any shady stuff because it’s actually being discussed in the open with CryptPad developers. This is very different than the closed-source model where you never even know what shady shit might be happening.

Do I trust open source developers in France more than closed-source developers at Google or Microsoft? Hell Yes. I expect large US tech companies to cave under pressure from a compromised administration, and you should too.

Categories
Uncategorized

Google Reader Dies, RSS Lives!

R.I.P.

Google Reader is dead, long live RSS!

I have a history with RSS, writing my first aggregator around 2000 (yes, in Perl) and over the years I got involved with RSS, aggregators, podcasting, videoblogging, and other things that all relied on RSS.

The real excitement for me in the area of aggregation development started in 2004 when Mr. Genehack suggested I look at FEED ON FEEDS. I did, and what followed was FEED ON FEEDS ala Bloglines, Feed on Feeds Unread List, More Aggregator Madness, Yet More Aggregator Madness and lots of time put into development of an RSS aggregator that fit my needs. I really enjoyed exploring new ideas and getting the functionality I wanted. (Mostly)

I wasn’t being paid to work on all this, it was just my “free time” project, and like all “free time” projects, the free time goes away and you work on other things. So it goes…

Eventually I moved to Google Reader and over time I got to love it. Like many, I use it daily. Daily. Multiple time per day. A lot. Back when Feed on Feeds was on my own server I’d use it at home on my computer, and at work on my computer. This was back in the days when people might have one computer, and use a desktop aggregator client. Some even had an “offline” mode, which was important back then because sometimes you were offline. (!?)

In recent years it’s become common to use Google Reader (with one of the many, many apps that used its back-end) on your phone, table, laptop, desktop, etc. I regularly used Reeder on my iPhone and iPad, and Google Reader via a browser on the 3 Macs I use each day. It worked, and I loved it.

Google is killing reader, and I’m not pleased. I could go back to hacking up my own code to build an aggregator, but I’m not excited about it anymore, and I’m out of practice with coding lately. It’s not something I want to do anymore. Google, I would probably pay for Reader. Others have said this as well. I’m sure this won’t change things, and it’ll still be killed (though I hope I’m wrong.)

So tell me Google Reader fanatics, what will you do?

Categories
Uncategorized

More Tracking (Please!)

Boston

Remember last year when I wrote about how your iPhone tracks your location? (Sort of.) Some people find this stuff creepy, but I’m a fan of geo-tracking, and I want more of this data. It’s part of the reason I use things like Foursquare and Google Latitude. A fellow Milwaukee Makerspace member is even working on a device to seamlessly let your office mates know which office you are in. (See Marco.)

Last 30 Days
Last 30 days of tracking, via Google Latitude

The fact that Google Latitude only shows the last 30 days is (to me) a bug, not a feature, and it means that if I want to save that data, I probably need to dig into the API and write my own code to do it. I wrote some code to grab and save all my Foursquare data, and it worked great until they deprecated the API. I haven’t upgrade my code to use new API because it’s an OAuthMess, which I haven’t wanted to deal with yet.

Delete!
A sad list of choices for hardcore geo-nerds

I understand that many (most?) people don’t want this data public, or shared, or kept, or all of those things. I mean, look at the options: Show timestamps, Export to KML, Delete history from this time period, Delete all history. Half of your choices involve deleting data.

When I look at some of the mapping crazy-geo stuff that Aaron has done… I’m floored by it, and I want to see more of that, not less. Again, it’s not for everyone, but for the people who want their own data, or the ability to share/republish their own data, there’s some good potential there… and I hope to see more of it in the future.