Difference between revisions of "Alternatives to Google"

Revision as of 16:30, December 13, 2020

Google has fallen out of favor with many web users, due to their tracking and sale of user data,^[1] and liberal activism and polices.^[2] This article gives some alternatives to their services.

Search engines

• DuckDuckGo - a search engine that says it does to not track users. They also offer "Privacy Essentials" on Firefox and Chrome and "Privacy browser" on mobile.
• Result Hunter - a search engine that favors conservative results, as opposed to Google which favors liberal results.
• Mojeek - a search engine that doesn't track people and uses a proprietary page ranking engine as opposed to PageRank, and is intended to give unbiased search results.
• Seek Find - a Christian search engine. Cannot be used for a general search, but a search over the Internet for information from Christian sites.
• Worthy Christian Search - A similar Christian search engine.
• StartPage - another privacy focused search option

Email

• Tutanota.com - A robust service with paid and free tiers, which offers end-to-end encryption for sending messages, and encrypted mailboxes.
• ProtonMail - another service which offers "trust no one" encryption.
• Fastmail - a paid service, but worth it. Friends with DuckDuckGo.

Alternative browsers to Chrome

• Mozilla Firefox - uses its own ("Quantum") engine instead of Chromium's Blink engine.
• Microsoft Edge - better on power usage than Chrome, and much more secure (users get less malware), although it uses Google's Blink engine. Microsoft tracks users (unlike DuckDuckGo and Mojeek), but doesn’t sell user data like Google and Facebook.
• Brave - friends with DuckDuckGo. Great for privacy, but enables tracking for Facebook and Twitter by default. Uses Google's Blink engine.

Alternatives to Android

• iPhone and iPad - the most popular alternative.
• Windows Phone (dead) - more powerful than either Android or iOS, many think it was a superior option, but Microsoft killed it in 2017 due to failure to penetrate the market. The latest is Windows 10 Mobile.
• Ubuntu Touch (discontinued) - open-source, many think it was awesome too, but it discontinued by Canonical.
• Symbian OS - discontinued some time ago, but some think it was good, and it featured Opera.
• Blackberry 10 - uses a microkernel for better reliability, and also allows direct filesystem access (unlike Android and iOS), but restricted (unlike Windows and MacOS).

Alternatives to Google Drive

• Sync.com
• Resilio Sync
• Amazon S3 - Somewhat complex, best left to tech savvy users
• Dropbox - Although not very private, this is at least not known to sell user data to commercial entities

Alternatives to Chromebooks

Chrome OS is marketed as being just a browser on bare-metal, although it did recently add Google Drive and a Debian subsystem so one could install Android and Linux apps. But it's given Google's interest in harvesting private data, it still causes some people concern that it may be engaging in unwanted behavior. Some lightweight alternatives are:

• GNU/Linux (such as Mint or Ubuntu) on a "thin-and-light" laptop. Chrome, Firefox, and Opera all work well on Ubuntu.
• Windows Lite (upcoming, rumored) - Windows with the Linux kernel.

See also

• Alternatives to Google

References