Comment by cyrialize | Hacker News Reader

Comment by cyrialize | Hacker News Reader

I have mostly de-googled myself. For search I mainly rely on DuckDuckGo, but as many people have pointed out sometimes DuckDuckGo doesn't cut it. When that happens I either use Google or Startpage.

I usually use Google when I want information about a business near me. I haven't tested this thoroughly but I think Google does a better job of getting and presenting phone numbers, accurate store hours, etc.

For email I'm a big fan of Fastmail. The service is great and the web UI is fast and easy to use. For storage I also rely on Fastmail - their standard plan comes with 30 GB of storage. They also provide calendars, notes, and contacts.

My personal phone is an iPhone. I didn't intentionally switch a while back - my android phone broke and my family had an iPhone I could use. I've stuck with it since then, I like the overall experience. I don't currently use any of the Apple Cloud services. It's been rough connecting my phone to my Linux laptop, but I've found the best way to handle it is to just have a Windows VM for uploading music to and downloading photos from my iPhone. I know there's https://www.libimobiledevice.org/ but it looks like it only works for images.

For music I either use Spotify, Bandcamp, or ripping CDs. I never tried out Google Music.

The one thing I haven't found a good replacement for has been YouTube. I'm definitely going to check out some of the suggestions people have made in this thread regarding that.

I have a quick suggestion for you, re: using Linux: rely on web apps. iCloud.com works fine on my Linux laptop using FireFox. Same with a Microsoft Office 365 (web apps, not native apps). I am a million miles away from being a security expert, but in my non-expert opinion, I feel safer using web apps than native apps, especially on my iPhone. I hate installing apps, and always resent prompts like “install our f@cking app...”

When DuckDuckGo doesn’t cut it, which IME is not often, then Google is always easily available with !g query

or Startpage with !sp. or Bing with !b.

Amazon is !a, etc. etc.

DDG has some neat functionality via bangs (aka !): https://duckduckgo.com/bang

I’ve been positively suprised many times, guessing for these bangs as well, very often they tend to be exactly as one would expect, even for sites in my own native language: norwegian, there are bangs for the more niche sites as well.

When I want to look something up in the norwegian Wikipedia I do !wno, for english just !w or !wen (and if I for some reason unbeknownst would want search in another language, it would be just a language tag away), I was very happy to see bangs for both the online norwegian dictionaries I use (!naob and !norsk), and some of the nicher sites, though, maybe not quite so niche here in HN: !dfw (Dwarf Fortress Wiki), even !nhw (nethack), etc.

My biggest gripe with DDG is that if I search for a business, even when using the exact name, it will almost surely come back with a couple Yelp results (which is like getting a link to a 2005 MySpace page) followed by a dozen Facebook profiles that vaguely resemble the name of the business I was searching for.

This being said DDG was able to take over 99.99% of my searching needs for some time now. And when I have some query that doesn't seem to return anything useful on DDG it turns out Google doesn't really do much better (YMMV).

I still use Youtube and Google Maps heavily compared to alternative services. But for everything else I decided to "spread the joy" and not rely on a single provider of services.

> My biggest gripe with DDG is that if I search for a business, even when using the exact name, it will almost surely come back with a couple Yelp results (which is like getting a link to a 2005 MySpace page) followed by a dozen Facebook profiles that vaguely resemble the name of the business I was searching for.

I've had this same experience. Looking up businesses is pretty much the only time I use Google.

If you're looking for offsite backup (which seems to be the main use case of your use of Google Photos and now iCloud) then Backblaze if you're on Mac or Windows, or Backblaze B2 if you're on Linux is very affordable.

My co-worker is a big fan of Backblaze, I'll check it out!

I'm using Backblaze to hold my backups for both my home server and my production server. For almost half a terabyte of data I'm currently paying $1.89 per month for around 300 GB, which is down from the $2.04 I was paying when it was around 400 (fixed an exclusion directive in my backup script to store less files). It is absolutely worth that trivial price to know everything digital I give a crap about has an automated offsite and encrypted backup in addition to my other backups.

I'm using the B2 storage (https://www.backblaze.com/b2/cloud-storage.html) since I'm backing up multiple machines and arbitrary sets of files, and it works on a pay-for-what-you-use basis. You can get more storage (they say unlimited, and I couldn't find anything in their literature to contradict that assertion) in the basic backup plans, but you don't get as much choice: https://www.backblaze.com/cloud-backup.html

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