I have been slowly setting myself up with as many alternatives as possible. We have a Garmin in the car so we don’t use Gmaps, I’ve ditched all corps like Google or Facebook even run my own search engine. Honestly as daunting as it is once your not tied to a phone life is so much better. Don’t fall into the trap
Interesting - I’ve been thinking about trying to decentralize lately, and been having fun collecting my data from sites to analyze my own behaviours in data and build unique recommendation engines for myself and was recently thinking about trying to build a crawler and DIY search engine for myself. Any tips/pitfalls on getting started with that?
Just replied above you. Thought I could dm anyone on Lemmy but not outside our instances it seems…
Kudos to you. I’ve tried to degoogle myself (I’d say I was moderately successful until my last company came along), although it’s been a pretty irritating ride. Now I’m still very sensitive when it comes to security and privacy but not to the extent I was before.
I misplaced my phone a few days ago and didn’t think of looking for it until just yesterday. The only reason I did was for OTP for my banking apps (browser and Paypal still asked me for them). If not for those, I think I can pretty much go without a smartphone, tbh. My PC and laptop, though? Can’t.
Running your own search engine sounds very interesting. How steep would the learning curve be? And is it feasible for only personal use?
Searxng is my go to. Consider using a public instance or hosting off-site to increase anonymity.
Most of the public instances I tried stopped working often enough to be annoying. Like if you set one as your browser default and then google blocks it, it’s just frustrating.
I’ve gotten into the habit of just searching directly on specific sites rather than just searching the whole internet - really when you search for things the vast majority of the time you know what site is going to have what you’re looking for.
For everything else I’ve been using bing. The results are fine and chatgpt really is dope. I know they’re just as bad for privacy as google but at least it’s not google having all my data.
