My "Dear John" letter to Google. It was nice knowing you, but now you're fucking nuts. Bye-bye now.
Googles oversteps haven't seemed to make much of a dent in their usership. Perhaps your absence will shake things up over there :) It's been nearly 3 years since mk decreed that Google Plus would be their undoing. Perhaps he was right and we are in the midst of their deckine...
Well, they haven't quite lost that big following yet, but I see more and more dissatisfaction with them on the Internet and more competing services. Their new innovations aren't buying them much popularity either — people hated Plus, and there's widespread distaste for Google Glass. I think they've lost touch and it's the beginning of their decline. I was a fan of Google+ initially, but the way they forced it on everyone didn't make them any fans. I had no idea mk called it all that time ago! I've got to give him credit for some amazing foresight there.
While we're on the topic of shouting out mk, how is the switch to DuckDuckGo working for you?
I'm disappointed to say that I switched back to the Goog just last week. DDG has become markedly better. However, it seems that for some searches they are off on a different axis. For my purposes, the two are almost equivalent, but I found myself going back to Google often enough that I eventually made the switch back. I really want DDG be my default, so I am going to try again, but I'll wait a few more months. Next round, I should keep track of which searches sent me from DDG back to Google and send them along to them. It would be interesting to know what component of my affinity towards Google searches is due to their personalization of results. I don't suspect that it is significant, as I haven't noticed much difference when I am not logged in. I wonder if DDG could provide a client-side plugin that had a similar effect, working on the results that they piped to my browser, without sending anything along to them.
I think Google search is still better even without the personalized results. I'm no longer signed in when I search and I have all those tracking blockers installed, so I'm not sure what Google can ascertain about me from an IP address alone. The search is still pretty great, even with the minimal amount of data Google can squeeze out of me. Search is the one product I'm really hoping a competitor can trump Google at. No-one has quite done it yet, but one day…
I dunno, mk. Part of my fear of Google is that it knows everything about me, but it's helpful so I'm still sorta okay with it. That's probably a bad mindset to have, but man, Google Now has saved my ass in terms of transportation help, soccer scores, and the best places to eat in my vicinity so many times. Still didn't make the first time it guessed where I work any less creepy, though. The same might be said of personalization results as well, haha.It would be interesting to know what component of my affinity towards Google searches is due to their personalization of results. I don't suspect that it is significant...
The google search engine is not that good. They artificially boost their result page by listing the same webpage in various version.
You seems to have 100% more result in Google, most of them are the same shit. But yeah in a sense it is better: it's tailor made for YOU. They have enough data to know what you may want to search. It's a "bad" good feature, you'll never have to discover real new thing. Tailor-made is a fuel for laziness.
No one on earth cares how many results they get on google. They care about the first five or ten, and google consistently gives the right first five or ten. Who actually uses google to discover "new things"? I do use google scholar for that occasionally.
for me, google is about getting to what i want quickly. it works for me because 99.9% of the time, what i want is the top result. the reality is that discovery and creativity aren't going to be found by a machine, that's what places like this (and more importantly, the real world) are for. just my two cents...
I've recently left gmail for fastmail and couldn't be happier. I've been using FF over chrome, and I typically use startpage over google search (I've used DuckDuckGo as well, but I think SP is superior). For me it isn't really because I have some overarching issue with google themselves, it's just that over time their products have been turning to crap. I do have smidgen of distrust for google, but ultimately, it's what G+ did to their products and their turn away from being user centric that turned me off. I will say that google's search is still the best out there, and sometimes I find myself flipping over and doing a search on google, but overall I don't really miss much. If there's anyone out there who is interested in fastmail, feel free to drop me a message. It may not serve your needs if you really need tight integration into google apps, but if you're just looking for a strong pop/imap server, their web UI is superb (far superior to gmail at this point).
I've been meaning to take a hard look at everything I have under Google. It has come to my attention that Gmail has become worse over time. They occasionally put a relatively large ad right above your inbox. And to add on to that it wouldn't surprise me a bit that I'm now receiving maybe 1 or 2 additional spam emails (that go under the label "Social" or "Promotion" says Google) because of this company. I do have to agree with the author of this blog. There is not a single better alternative in terms of a search engine. In fact I've trumped a lot of my friends in the ability of finding what they are looking for on the internet through my trusty ally Google. That being said though I might try to find time to switch my email, but this will involve me sifting through all my different accounts that have a direct link to my Gmail and just thinking about it gives me a headache...
One thing that surprised me was realizing how much of my life was in Google's hands. When all my accounts got deleted, I realized just how much was gone, but I also realized I could live without Google easily enough. Cutting loose is a very liberating feeling, although it does take a bit of effort to migrate everything over to a new email or set up your bookmarks and saved data in a new browser.
You may want to know that Ad block Plus and ad block has a business deal with Google so they show their ads from time to time... (yeah Google is that evil). The alternative is Ad Block Edge One thing I could never support with Chrome: The most visited page startup screen.
You cannot use a fixed startpage in Chrome (disabled, or most visited, that's all you have)
It's a "devil" feature: it force you to keep your bad habit running. I prefer having a startpage with stuff I dont do every day, but should do everyday. With a bit of config:about messing in Firefox you can have the startpage of your dream... and you can configure anything in firefox.
Opera "was" not that bad. The version 12 is awesome, and they invented almost every good feature every other browser copied. They changed past version 12 to accommodate for their success in smartphone browser share.. It's a chromium spin off, It's shitty now. They went from the more innovative browser, to the worst copy cat... Yeah smartphone ruin everything.
Seriously? AdBlock has a deal with Google? The bastards! I had no idea. Thanks for recommending Ad Block Edge, I'm going to check that out now. It's infuriating that these people are selling out their users behind our backs. Opera had a lot of really nice features when I tried it and I wanted to like it so much, but I use Linux and the Flash support was abysmal. That's half the Internet unusable already. Then I also really liked their built-in mail client, but that seemed to be screwing me around too and saving copies of emails incorrectly. I don't especially like Thunderbird, but it's the best desktop client I've tried.
That's not evil. That's business. This is untrue. There are dozens of extensions that provide this functionality.You may want to know that Ad block Plus and ad block has a business deal with Google so they show their ads from time to time... (yeah Google is that evil).
One thing I could never support with Chrome: The most visited page startup screen.
You cannot use a fixed startpage in Chrome (disabled, or most visited, that's all you have)
It's a "devil" feature: it force you to keep your bad habit running. I prefer having a startpage with stuff I dont do every day, but should do everyday.
Honestly I don't see what google has really done wrong. Yeah, they collect a lot of data, but I have yet to see them trying to sell that data in any form aside "if you are X we will show you from X categories of ads". The competitors will always exist, you can switch when google does something you can't stand. Until then why re-invent the wheel?
It's certainly not something everyone can or should worry about. I'm a computer hobbyist so I don't mind experimenting and running my own servers. What Google sounds like to me these days is some guy who knocks on your front door and says, "You want to keep your stuff at my house? I won't touch it, I promise, and that way you don't have to pay for storage. I'm a nice guy, you can trust me." He may even be a nice guy and he might actually be trustworthy, but I feel vulnerable if someone else has all my stuff. There are too many things that could happen to it and I don't have the same degree of control over it that I normally would.
Same. I'm sure Google actually is selling the data, but I really don't care. There are a lot of complaints about privacy violations and whatnot, but they haven't affected me, and there's not a lot I do online that's totally scandalous. I get the principle, but I'm just completely unenthused by the people who want to declare Google some evil superpower. I love Chrome, it's always been a lot better than Firefox to me. I love Gmail, and I've had my main account there since the service was in public beta, and since then I've always been heavily involved in their beta releases. Google Plus sucks, but I don't care that they're pushing it. It'd be nice if they'd let it be, but I don't blame them for pushing their own product: they're a business. I'd rather they push Google Wave back into existence, but apparently I was the only person who thought that product was great. And yes, Google search is the bar of excellence to me. I've not tried DuckDuckGo yet, but I have no reason to. Their only selling point is that they don't track what you search, but I don't care about that.
I, as well, enjoyed Google Wave. FWIW we've been using Asana at work, and I've taken quite the shine to it.
It's not so much that google has done anything wrong, it's that users had one view of Google, the Company ( the infamous "Don't Be Evil" clause), and Google, the Company, Had another. Google, the Company wanted to move in a more profitable direction for them with better user-directed searches and data-influenced ads. This makes great business sense for them, and generally their ads are still their trademark unobtrusive, mostly text style. However, all of the users who had the view of Our good friend Google have seen the shift away from mostly anonymous customer service to a service that generally works better, but is more data-intrusive. This shift on its own probably wouldn't have raised too many eyebrows, but with what they perceive the growing struggle for privacy on the internet, our good friend Google has become Google: Big Brother in the eyes of the wary.
There was nothing wrong with Google+ in principle — it was miles better than Twitter, say. But then they forcibly linked everyone's accounts and the real fun began. An anti-death project, on the other hand, is exactly the kind of naïve schoolboy undertaking you'd expect from Google, a company whose idea of morality is "Cool explosions and whoosh and everyone lives for ever and airplanes made of hamburgers!" I can't imagine anything more awful than living forever, not to mention the fantastic problems it would create. We're already overpopulated. What happens when people stop dying? And if the average lifespan were 160, when would you retire? 140? How do you feel about working a 9-5 job for literally 120 years of your life? If that thought doesn't send a chill down your spine, then I don't know what will.