I've been using Google as my main search engine for a long time now, but I've also been getting more and more fed up with their policies and ridiculousness. They recently made a change on YouTube where now, you can't post comments unless you've also linked your account with Google+, and making that link causes no end of technical problems for me, so that was the last straw. I'm still gonna be using YouTube for the huge number of people who want me to post my videos there, but beyond that, I'm no longer using ANY Google services, search engine included.

So to that end, I've had to look into what other search engines would be a good replacement. The one I've decided to give a trial run as my search engine of choice is Blekko.

So far, it's doing the job nicely. It's certainly not as feature-full as Google, but for simply searching out web pages and images, it works very similarly, with a few extra search features while missing a few minor ones. (Which I've already left them feedback about.) There's even a total lack of ads, though it makes me wonder where they get all their money from to operate... maybe affiliate links through certain search results? That seems to be what their privacy policy suggests...

Actually, said privacy policy is incredibly detailed and easy to read, giving information on every piece of information they collect and what they do with it all. Something I wish more companies would address, rather than just giving blanket-answers that seem to be contradictory at points.

Oddly though, my Avast ratings system is only giving it an average rating and I can't figure out why... unless people are comparing it as a whole to Google in which case, yeah, ANYTHING is going to be less feature-filled than Google, but all I need is something to replace web page searching and image searching and to that end, Blekko is currently doing the job, and if over the next couple weeks it proves solid enough, it'll become my permanent search engine of choice.

So you're saying they have every reason to prioritize certain results over others regardless of their absolute relevance?

You can also try Duck Duck Go. I like the simple design and no tracking policy.

Well, I've only used it a little so far. If they are doing that, it's not immediately obvious.

One thing I've noticed is that if you put in a search query for something you can buy, it will generate a list of "shopping" search results in one of the tabs on the side that link directly to items in various storefronts, suggesting they may have affiliations with those particular websites and may get revenue when products are sold from people who followed through those links. That's how my affiliation with GOG works on my website: When someone clicks through to GOG from my website and buys a game from them, I earn a tiny portion of the sale.

But I still can't get over Avast rating it as "Average". It's the very first website I've ever been to that turns the Avast rating bar in the corner of my browser amber instead of green.

Though I did some more research into Blekko and discovered that for a time, they were offering their Search Engine Optimization (SEO) details for free, then began charging a subscription fee to access them after being in operation for a little over a year, which a lot of people felt was against one of their "Web Search Bill of Rights" rules, which reads: "Ranking data shall not be kept secret". I'd hate to break it to people but "pay-for" does not mean "secret". That's like saying the contents of a book are "secret" until you buy it and read it.

In any case, maybe a ton of people decided to retaliate by downranking the site in the aftermath of that? I dunno, I'm just finding it really hard to believe this search engine has been rated down so much when I've had no major trouble using it so far and can't find any highly negative things about it from other third party sites.

Why not switch to Bing!;D

Yeah, the crapworks going on between youtube and the other google services is nuts.

I would rather have every separate google service use its own session. I want to be logged in at g+ all the time for instance but I may want to log out from mail...
And I really do think of youtube as something completely separate, it shouldn't belong to google at all.

The big problem is they're so damn good. I'm too comfortable and there's too much content. I don't know of any alternatives that are good enough to switch to.

I don't mind linking to google+, since my "account" is bare as can be. I do wish they'd stop asking who I want to post as (Arthur Kalliokoski or akallio9000). How hard can a saved preference be? And I wish they'd stop second guessing what I'm searching for, the people who can't spell be damned.

I second duckduckgo.

Definitely over Bikko or whatever you call it.

Now go to duck and learn the bangs

https://duckduckgo.com/
https://duckduckgo.com/goodies <=== stuff to try !!

It's actually amazing that google are so bad at offering and keeping preferences.
I think it's such a trivial thing to implement, and google has top level programmers don't they? How can they mess such a basic thing up?

I guess they're too busy playing with the latest hot ideas of advanced algorithms to bother with making anything usable.

Yeah, I REALLY wish youtube would remember that I wan't to keep using my original Youtube username. I also wish it would stop logging me out of things. half the time I find my laptop or media box logged out of various google services for no reason. I don't know if this is a G+ problem, or a chrome problem. either way its freaking annoying.

I switched to firefox again a little while ago, and then switched back to chrome to reproduce a bug I reported to google.. but yeah, I think I need to switch back to firefox again.

I don't really care, except that my G+ profile is set to just my name, and not the nick name I have when you visit my page, so I don't really have any reason to switch, and I don't want the G+ page thing (I need to look up how to remove them as well).

Hear, hear! I ragequit Google+ a few months back when they first required a G+ profile. The whole move is retarded. At first they tried to make you use your real name (as used in Google+). That is absurd. The Internet works because of pseudo-anonymity. You can freely post your opinions and ideas without them easily being linked back to your identity (which could affect education and employment opportunities, relationships with friends, family, and sexual/romantic interests, etc.). Of course, that isn't to say that it's all that hard either, but you should at least be in control of which information you reveal about yourself where.

At first I let it go because they gave you an explicit option of "I don't want to use my real name" and let you bypass the switch, but after a few weeks they made it mandatory to have a "Google Plus" profile associated with your YouTube account. I assumed it would retain my original name (figuring that they would have learned that many or most people didn't want to use their real name on YouTube). After I linked my real profile everything I posted to YouTube (videos, comments) appeared with my real, full-name attached! I eventually found an option to change my name as it appears on YouTube. This ended up creating a new Google Plus "page" thing (WTF) for that new name. Then I realized that all of my favorites/playlists/likes/etc. didn't follow me so I tried to switch back to my original YouTube account. This created another Google Plus "page" and I began getting prompted every time I interacted with YouTube which account I wanted to use (of the 3 available). I ragequit Google Plus right there. I "deleted" my personal Google Plus account (the one I had before all this nonsense), though I'm told from friends that it still appears to be there. I haven't bothered to go near it since.

I still battle with the pages bullshit every time I use YouTube, and typically if I'm watching for a few hours in a night then I'll get prompted two or three times asking which account to use. THE LAST ONE I FUCKING CHOSE. FUCK!

Then yesterday I think it was I saw some notice about comments being integrated with Google Plus to improve the quality of conversations. I just shrugged, figuring it wouldn't affect me any because I don't use Google Plus. I figured it would just mean that YouTube comments would also appear in Google Plus for lusers. Instead of clicking "learn more" I just said to dismiss the notice. Lo and behold comments are now apparently missing from YouTube for me. I cannot find them. I cannot figure out how to find them. It says that you need to link your account with a Google Plus profile to use comments now, but it already fucking is because you short bus motherfuckers forced me to. It's actually linked up to 3 fucking Google Plus things. Nevertheless, I cannot use comments.

All that I know is that the Google+/YouTube teams are incompetent, evil assholes that care nothing about their users and should literally just be fired by Google. If Google as a whole is responsible for this then they need to stop pretending that their policy is do no evil because it's clear that they are doing it.

I concur. Stop using Google products. Personally, I'd like to wean myself right off of Google. I don't care how reliable their services (some of them) are. It's not worth the potential invasions of privacy and these forced regressions. Not to mention that Google is just becoming far too powerful. No company should have that much power over anybody, let alone entire societies.

As for search engines, Duck Duck Go is often offered as the preferred alternative. It allegedly doesn't track you, though it's hard to say if you can really trust them any more than you can trust Google. Also it seems that by default you are searching over plain HTTP so your searches are still sniff-able by eavesdroppers, etc. Plus under the hood I think that it is actually more of a proxy to Google and Bing and others. Your searches are still going through these evil engines. I think that image searches actually redirect you to Google... I don't really understand the point of that. I haven't quite figured it out yet so I still predominantly use Google.

I find that I rarely find what I'm looking for anyway though. I'm inclined to say that Google's results have been getting worse over the past few years. Generally when I search for something now the answer is either obvious (and basically any search engine will come up with the right handful of answers as top results), or I never actually find what I'm looking for and give up. Of course, part of that trend might arise from working for Microsoft-based companies and often searching for help with undocumented or poorly documented proprietary software...

Append:

From time to time I get fed up with this Google Plus fail integration and send vulgar feedback to the YouTube team. Beer may or may not be involved. I think I feel another one coming on... They also fucked up the G-mail compose UI in a similar, forced fashion. It seems that Google no longer cares about power users and only cares to cater to the sheeple lusers that are responsible for Facebook's success.

I love Google.

Says the guy making money off AdSense.

I'd like google more if they didn't have this new habit of releasing un-tested and buggy as heck software.

They are forcing me to use their fucking Google+, fuck you google, FUCK YOU MOTHEFUCKERS!

I'm a Youtube partner and now I can't post/replay comments inside my youtbe account, no, now they are forcing me to use their fucking Google+, fuck you Google, I won't post any comment, fuck fuck fuck Google, is always the same, power corrupts, Google became just too powerful, we need something else or they'll do retarded things like this more often.

Ha! Since Dec 31, the balance is up to $12.68.

I actually did give Duck Duck Go a try already. They lack image-searching functionality through themselves and require you to submit the search to a third party, either Bing or Google.

NOPE! Not happening!

I know, right? Damn Google+ for requiring a Google+ profile! The audacity!

I never linked my Youtube and Google+ accounts, and I can still post on Youtube using my old account. Even though the interface is slightly different, I'm not experiencing the problem...

I love google. Just ordered a Nexus 5 from them <3

Considering you need a Google+ account to post comments on YouTube now, it may be in a state where you don't need a YouTube account to post comments on YouTube, just Google+, meaning linking the two wouldn't be necessary so long as you were logged in on Google+...

*shrugs* Either way, a YouTube account alone is not enough now. Attempting to click on the box to leave a comment without being signed in to Google+ will bring up various messages instead.

One of the founders of YouTube

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I never forgave youtube when they downgraded my million+ viewed video from 576p down to 240p over the course of a year or so, because basically I was getting too many views, and I was refusing to put ads on it and my other videos.

My reasoning follows pretty much this guys logic
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fnTnaEQ39W8

Dear Google,

When the co founder of a web site that was so well made that it lead you to buy it tells you you're doing it wrong, then all I can say Google is, You're Doing It Wrong TM.

Regards,

Long Time Google User

I actually do not see what Google is trying to gain from doing something like this. However, judging by the size of their font now on YouTube, and a few other changes, I would say that they are pulling a bit of a Micro$oft and saying F*** desktop users. #MobileFTW.

That's the only thing I can think of...

As much as I don't like Facebook, I hate G+ more. I don't like the cross product merges.

In addition, the fact that video comments now get piped to gmail/G+ should be seen by someone as anticompetetive. It's basically forcing me to check my gmail and G+.
This is like when Windows9x merged Explorer with Internet Explorer and all kinds of anticompetetivness ensued.

Sorry Google, but you're being evil

One of the best parts of YouTube was being able to anonymously tell an extremely talented person that they suck and that you are better!!11! ... Those days, are gone

I want that. Give it to me now. If you don't I'll beat you up in the face.

Yeah, you could go to the market and buy three or four dozen brothers and sisters with all that!

Not really. It only takes a couple of minutes to create a fake G+ account.

aaaaand this fuss is all about nothing as usual.

I love google, even thou they never call'd me back for that job...

FTFM.

Eventually a G+ account will be required for everything. The hojillion or so gmail accounts are really putting a dent in that plan, I'm sure, but the recent Youtube and Play stuff are making it look like an inevitability rather than wild fantasy.

Google+ is what happens when you take a company public, and suddenly find yourself having to do immensely dumb things to make your investors happy in the short term.

The final insult being the brain-dead "real name" policy they have on G+ accounts.

I haven't either, but every time I log in I get the old "are you suuuuuuuuuuuuuuure you don't want to swap over to a G+ account and make a bunch of other changes?" dialog, and it's getting less obvious as to how to avoid that. The only way I could avoid the change was X'ing out of the dialog box. Not cool.

It is probably taking them some time to release. They can't just flip a switch. The system is on a global scale. There are countless millions of machines spread out all over the planet cooperating. And they can't bring the whole thing offline to update. They have to update mostly live, only taking down tiny pieces at a time if at all necessary.

Have I mentioned I love Google?

The Nexus 7 is so nice.

The comments on YouTube seem more spammy than ever... It's like moving Facebook to the comment section of YouTube...

I don't know what you were seeing on youtube, but nothing can possibly be worse than yotube's old comments. NOTHING.

Well...

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I guess you don't read IMDB boards?

Actually, much to my surprise, comments on my stuff on YouTube so far (for what little time I've been using the service for) haven't been all that bad. There've been a handful of lame comments, but most of those were down-voted out of existence.

I was fully expecting all kinds of stupid comments and that I would have to pretty much ignore them and was pleasantly surprised that it didn't turn out that way.

...and now that YouTube's made it so much harder to track the comments, it's probably gonna seem like I'm ignoring them now.

I don't get email except some special offers now and then because I downloaded some free crap, except now half the stuff is email spam from YouTube and I can't figure out how to complain about it.

Hm. I'm not getting spam from youtube.

And I'm hoping some of the current spammyness of youtube goes away. A lot of it seems to be 12 year olds playing with the new features like unicode support and ascii art, etc. It should eventually get boring to some/most of them. Then they'll go back to commenting about how u suk and they are 4w3s0m3.

Oh, hello. You must be new to the Internet. Welcome.

Hey, the "first" comments disappeared after years of that shit.
Makes me wonder if someone on the youtube team coded an automatic first filter to get rid of them.

First comments get down voted and marked as spam nearly right away.

That used to be all manual user action. Now the comment system will be sorting and filtering comments automatically.

TL;DR version of this thread: Folks are wildly furious after services we use for free had changes to them made so the party operating said services could try to make a buck or two. What an outrage. Profit, for god's sake.

They were making more than "a buck or two" already.

*adjusts tinfoil hat* Welcome to the club! I have been (trying to) avoiding Google for years. I use DuckDuckGo now. I've never been fond of video's in flash, because of the horrible performance. HTML5 barely improves on that.
The Dutch FaceBook-like site^[1] I have an account on is turning into a game-site. I will probably buy some server-space and make a personal web-site. I also have Linkedin. I will never use G+ or FB. (knock on wood)

No, the TL;DR version of this thread is: Folks are wildly furious after services we use for free had changes made to them that make using the service far more difficult than it needs to be, while in the process, forcing people to sign up for and use more services provided by the party who made them in order to continue using the services they're already using.

Honestly, I don't see how Google+ makes them more money than they already make from the ads they show. If anything, Google+ is far less riddled with ads than everything else Google does.

They just want to be competitive with fb I guess... and the only way for that would be if they could count every YouTube user and every gmail user as a G+ user.

Social Media is a great source of information for advertisers. Add the social stuff to the data google already collects? they'll be able to target things even better, and sell more data to companies.

I think I may make it a requirement to sign into a.cc with Google+.

I really don't give a shit what you do, so long as I get my $12.68.

I want my two dollars!!!

Matthew, Google is going to drop support for Oauth so you won't have a choice.

I think you should add SQRL support instead.
https://www.grc.com/sqrl/sqrl.htm

At first, I thought this was a joke since I had never heard of SQRL before now, then I noticed the grc.com URL, then I read through the page... and I would not be against this.

The thing about SQRL authentication seems to be that your entire account is owned only by this automatically managed key-pair. Lose that key-pair and you lose access to your account. There's nothing particularly new about public key authentication. See SSH. The reason it isn't widely used is predominantly because managing keys is non-trivial and far too complicated for the users that already have trouble with usernames and passwords. Also, if the private key doesn't require a passphrase for use then all of your accounts are a lost or stolen cell phone/laptop away. Sigh...

*has done some more thinking about SQRL* ...though I can understand why it isn't really in use anywhere yet. There's still a lot of hurdles to overcome. The idea that you can take back your accounts due to the way access to them works is nice, but then what do you do to stop the illegitimate access, and couldn't the person with illegitimate access in the first place do the same thing against you yourself?

EDIT (not many hours later): Back on topic: I finally found a way to get Google+ integration working with YouTube in Firefox, no thanks to their official help system. Because Google+ does not equal YouTube, but you need to be signed into Google+ to do YouTube stuff now, and because Google+ and YouTube do not have the same domain identifiers, the cookies generated by Google+ won't work from YouTube unless your browser is set up to allow third-party cookies or session-specific cookies.

Firefox does not have a global ability to allow session cookies like IE does, but you can allow session cookies for specific websites, so if you set up google.com as an exception to default cookie handling and set it for session cookies, Google+ will work properly again while on YouTube while using Firefox. You could also set it for third-party cookies, but I'm a bit weary of allowing third-party cookies that aren't linked to the present session, since those could easily be used for tracking purposes.

But yeah, so far I'm not having problems anymore with Google+ and YouTube linked together from within Firefox, but I've only done a little testing since figuring this out. I'm gonna give it another day or so to be certain it's all working again.

The basic idea for SQRL was only made public a few weeks ago. It came from Gibson and since then he and his community have been working on figuring out how to solve all the problems they could think of and work out a standard.

A bunch of people have been very impatient and started implementation straight away, I don't think any working client or server solution exists yet. Even if there is working software it would be subject to big changes as the standard gets hammered out.

The most important feature is that there is no third party involved that can be compromised. And the website you log into also can't leak your password since all they have is a public key they can use to verify that you have the password.
So if their database leaks, there wont be millions of users at risk. The only party that has a secret to leak is each individual user.

So the security is entirely up to the client software and its user.

Unfortunately this user is the SOURCE of each and every security problem.

The best, practical solution to password management is some combination of a standard API and integrated browser support for services like LastPass and 1Password.

There's no reason password management couldn't be a standard browser feature that delegates the implementation to third parties. e.g., I ought to be able to use LastPass on mobile Safari without them having to write some wrapper app.

Google is fiddling with negative comments and view counts.

^[1]

google sold out to endSA. They are collecting data on every one using a genetics web algorithm.

I'm quite amused that people are now spamming the comments section with comments using Unicode characters to form the image of soliders, weapons, and tanks, encouraging people to copy/paste and basically just spread the message to YouTube/Google to go fuck themselves and put it back you short bus motherfuckers. I love to see the Internet working together for the greater good.

They'll probably just tweak the comment rating system to automatically push those comments down.

After crying like a baby for a few days, I must say, is not that bad after all

To me, sorting the comments seems like censorship. It's a good way to suppress ideas you don't agree with. I think it's useful to show the top rated comments just for curiosities sake since we don't all live on YouTube, but I'm against ranking them. People will generally report spam better, and ultimately you can't trust a ranking system with free speech.

Google's right to free speech = censorship. Weird how that works!

Those aren't Google's words. Those are other people's words. Google is hosting them. It might not be illegal to apply bias to them, but it could certainly be unethical and wrong.

It would be like an organization hosting a public debate, but telling people what they can and cannot say during it. It kind of defeats the purpose.

So it would be unethical and wrong for me to categorize the things people say here into organized forums, delete spam, etc? Free speech is free speech ... it doesn't end at your doorway.

It would be unethical and wrong for you to delete or edit posts just because you don't agree with them, yes. Organizing data is fine. Google isn't organizing comments to make it easier to find the ones you're interested in. They're making a decision about which ones you're most likely to be interested in and making you go out of your way to access the rest. Or at least, that's what they claim to be doing. They could just as easily shape the comments for malevolent purposes (e.g., to silence debate or protest).

When you search the Internet for something should Google just display all results in a random order on one huge page?

The whole idea behind search is trying to figure out what you're looking for (i.e., rank resources on the Web and attempt to index it against your query). Certainly it is equally unethical to abuse their power with search and give things higher or lower ranks relative to affiliations with Google. They have been accused of doing this, and it is absolutely considered an abuse of power.

Comments/forums are different. People aren't searching for comments. They're merely trying to read them. I don't even think there's a practical way to search comments unless Google exposes the comments through an API (which you could build a tool against). Obviously when we use A.cc's search page you too are trying to best identify what we're looking for and give it to us. Again, it would be unethical to apply bias there.

It doesn't matter what they have the right to do because it's their "property" / service / etc. This is a matter of ethics. The Internet is still a very young entity. It's a long way from being free of evil influences. People and organizations can and do abuse their control over it, and this should not be tolerated.

Loosely related: https://openmedia.org/censorship

Append:

I never proposed YouTube ordering comments randomly either. I think it stands to reason that ordering them chronologically (perhaps threaded-chronologically) is the best way for people to follow the discussion.

So Google is able to order search results by what is relevant to you, but you don't think they are able to sort comments that way too?

I for one don't want to read the first "first" comment; I want to read the best comments. You want your comment to be read? Then make the best comment.

Actually I don't want to read any comments.

For the most part, who even has time to read comments on YouTube? If I find a video particularly provoking then I'll generally post a comment and skim the latest ones and if I see something that provokes a reaction from me then I'll reply too. That's about the extent of it. I think that's all you can ask for. You can learn a lot more from watching more videos than you could from reading through the comments of a video (all fucking week since there's 30000 of them). It's basically just an opportunity to leave your mark on the video, and possibly interact with a random stranger as you pass through. Not all that much unlike visiting a real world landmark or attraction and meeting a random stranger and sharing a moment with them. That's all it is.

A better option would be a choice of how comments are sorted.

I think that they're supposed to offer the choice, but that's not much different than Microsoft shipping IE with Windows. Most users are too oblivious to even imagine changing it! I'm not clear if it is something that is permanently stored, or temporarily stored in a cookie, or only applies to the current page either. One way or another, most of the time, you aren't even going to realize how comments are being ordered. It isn't going to stand out.

So either way, you come to a video and you see a bunch of "random" comments. Why does it matter to you which 10 you see?

Now when I just visited youtube to see what the fuss is about, I get this video on the home page:

I click on it, and the first comment for me is by famous a.cc guy 23yrold. I'd rather see that than some comment that says "b00bies" or "first". So good job, Google, on figuring out which comment I'd like to see.

It's supposed to be more relevant.. but like anything youtube pushes out, it shows up half done and broken.

Some monkey has the first comment on that video for me.

Still, whether you agree or disagree with the recent Google+ integration change, being able to block people from directly replying to the public comments you make is definitely one of the worst ideas in the history of everything.

Allegro.cc supports that.

Not entirely true. A.cc allows you to "block" people from posting in YOUR threads (though you aren't supposed to abuse it). In reality, I don't think it gets used constructively very often (if ever).

At first I thought the reply system only had "in reply to" links requiring a total page load to see what replies to. However, this seems to only be something affecting the older comments. I was worried it was going to be almost as bad as Twitter for following a discussion.

Still, I'm going to look into removing what little G+ I have.

Google actually allows you to disassociate your google login from G+. But it warns that it'll delete any information/data associated with G+, which now I think includes some youtube stuff and any photos you may have stored in G+ or picassa (since picassa now stores them in gdrive/G+). That would suck for me, I have my phone auto backup my photos to G+

Get Dropbox, they were doing the auto-backup-photos thing before G+ was. I got a few GB bonus for being one of the beta testers the other year.

Google's giving me MORE reasons to hate them now. I just had to install the latest update for Flash, since I've got it implemented in Firefox now, and they changed the install process. Now, there's a sneaky, easy to miss checkbox on the DOWNLOAD page, not the installer itself, that asks if you want to install Google Chrome and Google Toolbar at the same time.

Fortunately, it tries to download all three components at once and the Flash install was faster, so when it was done I simply cancelled the rest. Still, that's absolutely retarded. I'm constantly on the lookout for crap like that and if *I* could miss it, I'm willing to bet tons of other people already have and are still going to following this post.

Yeah google sucks these days.

Try using startpage.com as your search engine, it looks like it works like scroogle used to.

My two email hosters have been gmail and uni email account.

but them the uni email system was migrated to microsoft azure and accessed via live.com

and then they migrated to office365 and singing in at live.com or outlook.com doesnt work and it has to be mail.office365.com

So now I run my owm mail server and setup the reverse dns and the spf records and so on. I read my mail in an ssh terminal with mutt (and w3m -dump to handle text/html).

Maybe I will set up a proper IMAP server so I can use a normal mail client.

I tried the new version of thunderbird lately, and its completely shit. It's geared towards people using popular services like hotmail/gmail and to actually be allowed to enter your actual server connection details is more cumbersome than it should be, so I still don't know what I will go with for the long term.

I have a G-mail account for now, though I am starting to want to host my own E-mail (I guess my main concern would be backups, which would not be cheap to do well). In any case, I use Mutt as my preferred client (yes, even for G-mail). I have been pretty happy since I switched to Mutt. As a matter of fact, I hate trying to compose mail from the G-mail Web interface. And they're only making it worse.

Google has to pay $17 million for bypassing user preferences to block 3rd party ad tracking cookies.

Try digital ocean's $5/mo vps.

I ordered a Google wallet card today.

I'm thinking about getting a bitcoin debit card.