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114 points

I stopped using Google at the same time I closed my accounts with Facebook, instagram, Reddit and Amazon. Currently I’m using Ecosia which I think is German. I’m dumping all the US companies I can based on all the Trump crap. It is taking time and effort but I should be able to actually close the Google account soon and I replaced windows with Linux on all but one of my PCs.

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18 points

Ecosia still uses American services though - they use Google, Bing, Yahoo and Wikipedia for search results.

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95 points

Yeah but don’t let perfect be the enemy of good. Among other things, they just recently announced that they’re starting to build an alternative index with Qwant.

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16 points

I’m using Qwant, used Ecosia before. Really OK for most stuff. I still revert to googling occasionally - mainly for local businesses on maps and sometimes shopping results. But I agree, don’t let perfect be the enemy of good, well said.

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5 points

You’re right but it’s still important to point out in this case since an American index would be subject to any American censorship law. It’s better to use Ecosia than Google for sure but we still gotta be aware of the type of bias we’re working with.

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4 points

Definitely true. I’ll have to try it out. Is Ecosia better than DuckDuckGo or Kagi?

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-4 points

I’ve never heard of Ecosia, but I don’t understand your logic on this.

Problem: Google bad!

Solution: Don’t use google, use Ecosia instead.

Error: Ecosia also uses google.

How is this a good move? If anything it’s just a lateral move with the same problem.

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7 points

95+% of all websites you visit are hosted on AWS or use Cloudflare.
But that’s their decision, not yours.

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5 points
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Do you have a source for that? I think it’s nowhere near 95% of sites given there’s several major providers that aren’t AWS or Cloudflare (eg Hetzner, Google Cloud, DigitalOcean, Wordpress.com, and a bunch more)

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ecosia is developing their own engine apparently

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2 points
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I hope that goes well for them. It’s hard and extremely expensive, which is why there’s so few good search engines and half of them just use Bing’s API.

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15 points

What about DuckDuckGo?

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10 points
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7 points

Same here! Loved the switch to Linux.

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4 points
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1 point

I wouldn’t say dogshit, I would say the results are good enough for most purposes, not great, my priority just as the moment is dumping USA based companies and I thought Ecosia planting trees was a nice touch. Although as someone else pointed out it is still possibly using crawlers from google and bing in the background. I’m still keen to try out other search engines.

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2 points
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