More de-googling

Saturday. September 07, 2024 - 2 mins

A while back, I made a concerted effort to remove some google-ness for my life. In part because the data collection is creepy once you start pondering down that rabbit hole, but also because anything from Google is bound to disappear at some point.

Ever since its initial launch, Google has been the default search engine / homepage for whichever browser is the flavour of the moment. That means every keystroke in the search bar, along with the spiders web of data from the resulting search is captured. After trying a few alternatives in the “finding webpages” space, Startpage has been settled on.

The service promises a privacy focused search experience. There are ads, which are optional, but they’re of the same ilk as ~2010 SERP results and not as intrusive as those were all used to nowadays. The results are, for the most part, on-part or better, with less emphasis on sites that game SEO and more emphasis placed on quality content. When searching for answers to tech questions, you’d be much more likely to land on a personal blog page. If I didn’t have an LLM to help me code, I’d probably be looking for something like Kagi, however the Claude / Co-Pilot / Startpage combo works well.

With Startpage replacing the number one search engine in the world. . . its time to address the second largest. YouTube.

Whilst Jellyfin serves up the households music collection, I have been using the mobile YouTube website to find the odd new track and keep up to date with people I’m subscribed to. The downside with this approach is that YouTube shorts are an attention whirlpool to me, and they’re placed at the fore of the mobile interface.

Thankfully, NewPipe is a shorts, ads, and tracking free interface for using YouTube and YouTube Music. There’s far from a 100% feature parity with YT, and the music related functionality is particularly lacking. . . however it’s more than good enough. It’s nice to be able to play long history documentaries in the background, dipping into the video when there’s something going on.

What NewPipe provides for mobile, Invidious offers via a web browser. Namely, an ad free YouTube experience. Depending on the instance, it can be a flakey loading experience due to the Invidious and YouTube teams continuing battle with every video requested. Thankfully, anytime a video won’t play, a quick refresh of the page puts things right.

Between the three services, another chunk of my life data is no longer ending up on a Google server. . . which can only be a good thing. I’m sure they’re happy enough with the non-stop stream from my Android phone, and every keystroke via the GBoard keyboard.

Almost no-one ever thinks about the keyboard.