Best Alternatives To Google Services

[SilentParticipant 303]

I haven’t moved away from Google completely yet, but I plan to. I can’t stand this company anymore if only because it’s becoming more Nazi like in the way of unifying it’s services all on one account. Sure, this has it’s benefits, but I’d rather have more freedom. And usually when companies start doing this like Apple, Canonical, and Microsoft are doing, you tend to lose that freedom you once had.

Search Engines

Ixquick (this is my personal choice)

DuckDuckGo

Startpage

Yandex

Options For Email

(Personally, I plan on getting my own domain. I can’t stand the free email services anymore)

Outlook.com

Yahoo.com

GMX.com

Mail.com

tutanota.com(This service would be my choice if I wasn’t going to buy my own domain, it’s an open source email service based in Europe)

Phone Options

iPhone

Any Android Phone (I plan on disabling all of my Google services on my Android phone) (I would install a custom mod, but I honestly don’t know how and even if I did, I still probably wouldn’t do it)

Blackberry

Basic phones(That only have the ability to text and call)

Online Storage

Dropbox (Personally, I don’t like using online storage in general, but if I did, I’d rather use Dropbox)

If anyone else can think of more alternatives to Google it would be helpful. I’m trying to get off of Google services completely because I hate the way they never listen to feedback unless a large enough user base of theirs complains. I also don’t agree with their current privacy policies. They take way too much unnecessary data from my machine, email, and profile.

[SpacemonkeyParticipant 1481]

Agreed, Google are a set of c~~~s.

I changed a couple of weeks ago to Tor browser, disconnect search engine and squirrelmail. Tor is OK but can be a little slow as it routes your traffic through 3 external nodes thus masking your true IP address. All for free. I deleted all google stuff from my computer but unfortunately still have android on my phone. I think I’ll look at Ubuntu for my phone soon.

“Long is the way and hard, that out of Hell leads up to light.”

[SilentParticipant 303]

@spacemonkey

I’m using Firefox. I would use Tor, but I want my browser to be a little faster. Especially since I’m already using free proxy services.

As far as my cell phone goes, I plan on either getting a basic phone or just giving up having a cell phone altogether.

[QuietlyquietlyParticipant 728]

Every company collects your information and sells it on. Most give the information to the NSA, via a program called PRISM, so it doesn’t really matter who you go with, other than for annoyance reasons.

“Microsoft – which is currently running an advertising campaign with the slogan “Your privacy is our priority” – was the first, with collection beginning in December 2007.

It was followed by Yahoo in 2008; Google, Facebook and PalTalk in 2009; YouTube in 2010; Skype and AOL in 2011; and finally Apple, which joined the program in 2012. The program is continuing to expand, with other providers due to come online.”

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jun/06/us-tech-giants-nsa-data

[Mister Man SmithParticipant 285]

On search engines the biggest advantage of duckduckgo over google, is that duckduckgo doesn’t try to “guess” what you wanna see, google will actively filter out stuff if it’s algorithm thinks you wouldn’t be interested in that, people call it a “bubble”.

For email I can tell you I had a lot of problems with mail.com regarding passwords, honestly I had to keep using the damn password recovery when I promise I was typing the right one.
I like gmail because it allows me to set passwords over 45 characters long (don’t remember the limit) using not only letters and number, but also characters, you know, such as !”#$%&/()=.
Outlook (last time I checked, don’t quote me on this) had a 16 character limit, and you could only use letters and numbers on the passwords.
So Yahoo is probably your best bet, you can set passwords 25 characters long, but at the end of the day they aren’t much different from google.
The problem with your own domain for emails is both security and uptime, personally I couldn’t be bother with something like that.

Phones, maybe Windows Phone? I never used it myself, but I would at least expect it to be nicely compatible with Windows, another reason is the price, I find iPhones just too over priced for what they offer, a Windows phone you could at least get one for a reasonable price without opening hand of “smartphone.”

For online storage I like box.com, I got a problem with dropbox a while ago, I’d delete files but they’d keep taking space? Besides dropbox even insisted on installing a program on my computer that would make a remote folder, which worked meh and I think it was more of a liability than anything else.

Since someone brought up browsers, try Opera, it’s always my primary or secondary browser, I only stopped using it as my primary one because “Opera Link”, the service that keeps it synced between your machines, wasn’t really working well.
With Chrome I can stand up and go to my laptop and I have all my history there, as well as saved passwords if I chose so.

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