Alternatives to Google

Google has fallen out of favor with many web users, due to their tracking and sale of user data, and liberal activism and polices. This article gives some alternatives to their services.

Search engines

• DuckDuckGo - a search engine that says it does to not track users. They also offer "Privacy Essentials" on Firefox and Chrome and "Privacy browser" on mobile.
• Result Hunter - a search engine that favors conservative results, as opposed to Google which favors liberal results.
• Mojeek - a search engine that doesn't track people and uses a proprietary page ranking engine as opposed to PageRank, and is intended to give unbiased search results.
• Seek Find - a Christian search engine. Cannot be used for a general search, but a search over the Internet for information from Christian sites.
• Worthy Christian Search - A similar Christian search engine.
• StartPage - another privacy focused search option

Email

• Tutanota.com - A robust service with paid and free tiers, which offers end-to-end encryption for sending messages, and encrypted mailboxes.
• ProtonMail - another service which offers "trust no one" encryption.
• Fastmail - a paid service, but worth it. Friends with DuckDuckGo.

Alternative browsers to Chrome

• Mozilla Firefox - uses its own ("Quantum") engine instead of Chromium's Blink engine. A well-rounded derivative is Comodo IceDragon, which also comes with a security scanner that scans Windows PC.
• Internet Explorer was a feature-rich browser. Yahoo! and Bing both have worked very well on Internet Explorer. Version 5 had a lot of security issues, while version 8 was well-rounded. Microsoft ended support for the last few versions before IE11 at once, and may have ended support for IE11 in 2020. The only bad thing about Internet Explorer was that it was slow. Unfortunately, many sites no longer support Internet Explorer, especially graphics-intensive sites such as YouTube.
• Microsoft Edge - better on power usage than Chrome, and much more secure (users get less malware), although it uses Google's Blink engine but used to use EdgeHTML, and doesn’t have all of the privacy issues of Chrome. Edge and Internet Explorer are both great for those who boycott Gooogle.
• Brave - friends with DuckDuckGo. Great for privacy, but enables tracking for Facebook and Twitter by default. Uses Google's Blink engine.
• Slimbrowser, Slimboat (discontinued in 2016), and Slimjet - have built-in ad blockers and don’t report back to Google and Chrome. They are versatile and customizable. Slimbrowser originally used the Trident engine (but may have switched to the Firefox engine), Slimboat used QtWebKit, and Slimjet uses the blink engine.
• SRWare Iron - uses the Blink engine of Chrome. Doesn’t report activity history to the publisher or anyone else.

Alternatives to Android

• iPhone and iPad - the most popular alternative.
• Windows Phone (dead) - more powerful than either Android or iOS, many think it was a superior option, but Microsoft killed it in 2017 due to failure to penetrate the market. The latest is Windows 10 Mobile.
• Ubuntu Touch - open-source, many think it was awesome too, but it discontinued by Canonical.
• Symbian OS - discontinued some time ago, but some think it was good, and it featured Opera.
• Blackberry 10 - uses a microkernel for better reliability, and also allows direct filesystem access (unlike Android and iOS), but restricted (unlike Windows and MacOS).

Alternatives to Google Drive

• Sync.com
• Resilio Sync
• Amazon S3 - Somewhat complex, best left to tech savvy users
• Dropbox - Although not very private, this is at least not known to sell user data to commercial entities

Alternatives to YouTube

• Rumble
• BitChute
• Daily Motion
• GabTV
• DTube

Alternatives to Chromebooks

Chrome OS is marketed as being just a browser on bare-metal, although it did recently add Google Drive and a Debian subsystem so one could install Android and Linux apps. But it's given Google's interest in harvesting private data, it still causes some people concern that it may be engaging in unwanted behavior. Some lightweight alternatives are:

• GNU/Linux (such as Mint or Ubuntu) on a "thin-and-light" laptop. Chrome, Firefox, and Opera all work well on Ubuntu. The thin client edition is Ubuntu Core.
• Windows 10 Core
• Windows Lite (upcoming, rumored) - Windows with the Linux kernel.

See also

• Alternatives to Facebook