Happier Abroad Forum Community

Some of the better search engines:
https://www.ecosia.org/
https://www.dogpile.com/
https://gibiru.com/
https://www.givero.com/
https://www.startpage.com/
https://www.wolframalpha.com/
https://yandex.com/
https://www.yippy.com/

Search engine for forums:
https://boardreader.com/

Online maps:
https://www.openstreetmap.org/

Search engines for privacy:
https://metager.org/
https://www.mojeek.com/
https://presearch.org/
https://searchencrypt.com/
https://swisscows.com

Info on some:
https://restoreprivacy.com/private-search-engine/
https://beebom.com/google-alternatives/

Probably the most popular privacy alternative to Google, Bing, Yahoo and DuckDuckGo is:
https://startpage.com/ also known as https://ixquick.com/

System1 has recently acquired Startpage. While being a digital advertising company System1 claims that they are providing privacy focused products. Hence, we cannot vouch for their claim.

In other words, it’s up to you to trust System1 and Startpage.

http://blekko.com/

Blekko doesn’t go as far as DuckDuckGo and Ixquick, but it’s still a big improvement over Google, Bing, and Yahoo. Blekko does log personally identifiable information, but deletes it within 48 hours. In contrast, Google stores this information for 9 months – and then anonymizes it without actually deleting it.

Duck Duck Go's illusion of privacy
http://etherrag.blogspot.com/2013/07/du ... ivacy.html

https://www.feedough.com/how-does-duckd ... ess-model/

History of DuckDuckGo

Founded in 2008 by Gabriel Weinberg, DuckDuckGo was a self-funded project after Weinberg sold his previous venture NamesDatabase to classmates.com in 2006 for $10 million.

The core idea behind starting DuckDuckGo was to provide search results in a secure internet space. During October 2011, DDG was funded by Union Square Ventures because they believed that competitiveness in search engine is through privacy now.

By 2014, DDG was a profitable company although earning a tiny fraction of what Google earns. In August 2018, DDG raised another $10 million from Omers Ventures as Google was accused of biased internet search by US President Donald Trump. Although DDG was doing well off without the funding, the money could be used to spread awareness about the big bout between data privacy provided by DDG vs the giant Google.

Browsers:
https://brave.com/
https://iridiumbrowser.de/

May 27, 2020
https://restoreprivacy.com/secure-browser/

Mar 31, 2019 The most secure browsers | NordVPN
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vDPhFFuG6rc
The winner was Firefox with security add-ons.

https://restoreprivacy.com/firefox-privacy/
https://mashtips.com/best-firefox-security-add-ons/



http://sharemenot.cs.washington.edu/

Did you know that buttons like these allow Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, and others to track your online browsing activities on every site that includes one of these buttons, even if you never click the buttons and (in some browsers) even if you have third-party cookies disabled?

ShareMeNot is a browser extension designed to prevent third-party buttons (such as Facebook's “Like” or Twitter's “tweet” button) embedded by sites across the Internet from tracking you until you actually click on them. Unlike traditional solutions, ShareMeNot does this without completely removing the buttons from the web experience.

Which became:
https://privacybadger.org/

Although we like Disconnect, Adblock Plus, Ghostery and similar products, none of them are exactly what we were looking for. In our testing, all of them required some custom configuration to block non-consensual trackers.

June 2, 2020
Suit Claims Google’s Tracking Violates Federal Wiretap Law
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/02/tech ... ivacy.html

Google violated federal wiretap laws when it continued to collect information about what users were doing on the internet without their permission even though they were browsing in so-called private browsing mode, according to a potential class-action lawsuit filed against the internet giant on Tuesday.

June 3, 2020
Google in $5 billion lawsuit for tracking in 'private' mode
https://www.bbc.com/news/business-52887340
https://www.forbes.com/sites/daveywinde ... 30a84d1485

Well I have yet to see a search engine that doesn't spit progressive propaganda. I went a few weeks ago on "searchconservative", a supposedly right-wing-friendly engine made in the USA. I searched for "safe countries for white people europe" and one the first links provided was "15 Best countries for black families to live"...

A recurrent thing is also that whenever you search for men's problems you get feminist sites talking about female problems instead. But there can't be any propaganda in the Land of the Free can it right?

I agree about Firefox being the safest. Then you have Tor but it is very connection consuming and lacks customizing options.

Winston uses Google Chrome

HappyGuy,
Do those search engines have the range of Google? Have they indexed the whole web? If all search engines can see every site on the web then why does everyone still use Google? How did Google make everyone use them?

If you're asking how big companies make Winston do stupid things I don't know.

There are better browsers than Chrome like Brave or the new Firefox or even Opera now owned by the Chinese. There are better search engines than Google like Dogpile and Yandex which don't hide results. Google has been doing that for years long before Trump and Project Veritas. If you're worried about privacy then you can use MetaGer.org to get Bing results, they used to offer Yandex results. There are search engines like Presearch.org and Startpage.com that use Google results but offer some level of privacy.

Private search engines that don't get results from any of the major sites might work well enough for most searches. When you need more results you can use something like Startpage and never have to resort to Google.com or even Bing, Yahoo, Yandex or DuckDuckGo. Because those are the major search companies and they are collecting your information for profit and surveillance and they may filter your results in the future like Google is doing now.

Browsers:
https://brave.com/
https://iridiumbrowser.de/

https://restoreprivacy.com/secure-browser/

Originally there was Chromium as an alternative to Google Chrome. Now there are many Chrome and Chromium alternatives.
https://beebom.com/best-google-chrome-alternatives/

There used to be a time when Google Chrome had clear speed advantages over other browsers and hence it was hard to recommend any other browser despite its faults. However, that is not the case anymore. With the launch of Firefox Quantum, the beloved Firefox browser has become as speedy as Google Chrome, even beating it in certain metrics. Firefox Quantum has been build from scratch with a new and powerful engine which brings rapid performance. That means users experience faster and better loading times with less consumption of computer memory. Firefox also solves one of the biggest problems we encounter while using Google Chrome browser which is the memory usage.

Apr 5, 2020 - 17 Great Search Engines You Can Use Instead of Google
https://www.searchenginejournal.com/alt ... es/271409/

As of January 2020, Microsoft sites handled a quarter of all search queries in the United States.

One could argue that Bing actually outperforms Google in certain respects.

For starters, Bing has a rewards program that allows one to accumulate points while searching. These points are redeemable at the Microsoft and Windows stores, which is a nice perk.

In my view, the Bing image search GUI is superior to its rival’s and much more intuitive.

Bing carries that same clean user experience to video, making it the go-to source for video search without a YouTube bias.

Have you guys noticed something? Google really SUCKS now. When you search for a term, it doesn't even give you relevant results anymore sometimes, especially if you search for something obscure. For example, if you search "concave earth" to try to find out about the concave earth theory, it gives you entries from encyclopedias about the Hollow Earth Theory, which mention the concave earth theory in passing, but are not mainly about it. There are blogs about concave earth theory which I've found by other means, but they don't come up in Google for those terms. It seems that Google only wants to bring up hits from big corporate sites, or encyclopedia sites, even if they aren't relevant or are the best match, just to prioritize corporate sites over other sites, even if the other sites are better and more relevant. That's stupid. So Google is sacrificing QUALITY for CORPORATISM essentially. Surprise surprise. That SUCKS definitely. Of course, Google will not admit that publicly. But it's obvious to people who use Google, especially when searching for obscure topics. Really stupid.

I wish people would start using other search engines once they see that Google has gone down in quality and relevancy. Why don't they? Why is Google still God?

More lawsuits against Google for illegal wiretapping.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/emmawoolla ... bde3973035

Are you ready? Here is all the data Facebook and Google have on you

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfr ... ou-privacy

How do you join the class action lawsuit and collect on the $5000 of damages from Google?

Thanks for those alternatives. I'll give em a try.
Google has become indefensible.

What's wrong with DuckDuckGo?

I have been using yandex for images for several years now ever since Google ruined their image search and I have been using yandex more and more for regular searches. I also mainly use yandex for video searches.

Google has been becoming worse and worse over the years.

Yandex is Russian and it returns what I think are the best, most relevant results.

I mainly use Google for reverse image search, but I use it in addition to Yandex and TinEye when I am reverse searching an image or want a to locate better quality image or identify something or a person in the image or when I screen shot a video to try to find the image used in the video. Once in awhile Yandex won't have an image in its reverse search but Google will, but most often its the opposite. Yandex can identify the image but Google can't identify the image.

Also, Google censors websites and makes them vanish because of copyright claims. Yandex does not censor anything because of a copyright claim or make a website vanish from search results.

Winston wrote: ↑

June 13th, 2020, 7:41 pm

What's wrong with DuckDuckGo?

It sells your data

April 5, 2020
Microsoft Edge becomes the second most popular desktop web browser
It's more popular than Firefox after just a few months
https://www.engadget.com/2020-04-05-mic ... owser.html
https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/m ... s-firefox/

Microsoft's gamble on a Chromium-based Edge browser appears to have paid off, at least in the short term. Bleeping Computer noted that Edge is now the second most popular desktop web browser based on usage, with NetMarketShare giving the software nearly 7.6 percent of the market in March, eclipsing a declining Mozilla Firefox with almost 7.2 percent. Edge is still far behind Chrome's 68.5 percent, but that's no mean feat for a browser that wasn't even three months old.

Microsoft is offering free upgrades to Windows 10 if you bought Windows 7 or 8.1. That's coming from people like Bill Gates who proudly said in an interview recently he will get a 20 to 1 return on his $10 billion investment in vaccines. The offer of a free Windows 10 and the new Edge browser is from the same group of people who want to vaccinate 7 billion people and track them through a chip in their skin. Gates said they plan to start mandatory vaccines within 18 months of the Covid lockdowns.

If you've got Windows 10 then you should consider an open source operating system not made by Microsoft or perhaps downgrading back to Windows 7 and turning off all updates to limit the spying they do on you. I'm not sure how secure and privacy-minded Apple's macOS or Linux are but they can't be worse than Microsoft! I would steer clear of the Google Chrome OS as well.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MacOS_Catalina
https://www.computerworld.com/article/3 ... stems.html

When people used Windows XP the system became less secure against spyware and hacking with new updates that were released by Microsoft. I don't know about the service packs. Why did XP and Windows Vista need so many updates when they had years to develop a secure system? An update is a computer form of a vaccine.

Feb 7, 2018
How much info is Google getting from your phone? - Fox News
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0s8ZG6HuLrU

Cellphone tracking:
viewtopic.php?style=1&f=14&t=42457

flowerthief00 wrote: ↑

June 13th, 2020, 2:08 am

Google has become indefensible.

Even without NoScript, if you download https://privacybadger.org/ you'll see how often they track you.

By the way https://searchencrypt.com/ does not work with Firefox. They're trying to force everyone to use Google Chrome/Chromium based browsers.

April 5, 2020
https://www.engadget.com/2020-04-05-mic ... owser.html

Edge is still far behind Chrome's 68.5 percent, but that's no mean feat for a browser that wasn't even three months old.

Not that Google is necessarily worried. While Edge does encourage people to use Microsoft services over Google's, the engine switch also consolidates Chromium's grip on the web. Developers may be less inclined to build sites that are truly browser-independent instead of optimizing for Google's engine, and that could hurt people who'd rather use Firefox, Safari or other alternatives.

I refuse to use Google Chrome after getting a download of my Google account's associated information last summer; it was totally creepy how much they stored about me. I use Firefox and I like it a lot better actually. I'm very familiar with Startpage and DuckDuckGo as search engines; DDG actually just put up a whole bunch of billboards along US 41 here in Wisconsin over the past couple of months, kind of cool actually.