Better search engine and email options

[votivesoul]

If you are tired of Google or Yahoo or anything Microsoft has to offer, for whatever reason, especially privacy issues or issues related to advertisements, or fake news, you might try the following:

Search Engine:

https://epicsearch.in/

Email:

https://protonmail.com/

[Esaias]

Thanks for the info. Just did a comparison search query between google and epicsearch. Naturally, google reaffirmed their near uselessness.

[Steven Avery]

One problem I have seen with non-Google search engines is that some, including epicsearch, do not take totally seriously a search with quote marks around some words. I did a search on "Homestead Heritage" and "Yahweh" and all sorts of entries show up on the first page which are not "Homestead Heritage". I use that type of search every day, very frequently, and I have not yet found a Google replacement, but if you can help me, fine, remembering my requirement.

ProtonMail, Runbox (Norway, which I am now using, just be sure not to eat the farmed salmon), and Fastmail (USA, thus less privacy here) are examples of good non-Google mail servers. There is a forum emaildiscussions.com that is all over the comparative mail servers. If you are only using this as a Pop mailbox holding place you might end up with a $3 a month cost. However, if you really want to keep all your mail in the cloud, and you get forum mail and it is gigabytes over the years, you might have a greater cost, and you might not have the full robustness of Google search. If you limit the mailbox to personal mail, that might not be a problem, even if you do use it for long-term archiving. Points to consider.

And I actually do very little with my mail in the cloud, I have it all (even Gmail) work its way back to my "home base" on my PC. Where the living is easy. And I have worked with Eudora and TheBat! and now am considering Pandora (new Eudora Plus) email clients. For that purpose I do have a Runbox account from which I download. I am often searching for the details of correspondence and forum mail from 3, 5, 10-15 years ago.

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For research purposes I do recommend Linkman, for many of the reasons described here.

Bookmark Bliss -- Linkman by Outertech0
http://www.eve-golden.net/linkman.htm

Although I do not really use it for local files on my disk. I use it with multiple browsers, Firefox, Chrome, Palemoon, Opera, all at the same time, and have an absurdly high number of bookmarks collected over 10 years or so, and it works virtually perectly.

It will give you more privacy too, as an incidental benefit.

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Stevem

[coksiw]

I use DuckDuckGo.com on the regular basis.
I find Google Doogles offensive sometimes. Got tired of it.
Google has gone from being a useful tool to and ideology magazine.

[Esaias]

Originally Posted by Esaias

Thanks for the info. Just did a comparison search query between google and epicsearch. Naturally, google reaffirmed their near uselessness.

I mean, googke reaffirmed its own near uselessness.

Yandex is good for some things, but hasn't indexed enough to really compete.

The problem with all search engines is the SEO that businesses use, in addition to the for-profit tinkering with the indexing algorithms a la google or youtube.

I remember when just about any search engine (AltaVista, anyone?) would turn up TONS of useful, interesting, NON COMMERCIAL NOT FOR PROFIT independent results. Now, everything is sinking under a pile of stupid crass commercialism. Root of all evil, and all that.

Someone needs to develop a search engine that works more like a phone book with sites indexed by subject, without "ranking". Sites could be listed for a small fee just like the old phone books used to, ad space could be sold on the results page sidebars, etc.

Of course, people looking to focus on making money are gonna go with easily manipulated engines like google to bring in revenue, maybe, unless the masses wound using the PhoneBookSearchEngine because they found it more efficient.

[diakonos]

I miss webcrawler, metacrawler, and excite. 😔

[Michael The Disciple]

I use Startpage.com. Supposed to be good for privacy but is disappointing in the number of results.

[n david]

I started using ProtonMail, but stopped after having issues with 2 factor authentication and getting completely locked out of my account.

I've used DuckDuckGo a few times, seems alright.

Haven't heard of epicsearch.

[votivesoul]

From what I understand about epic is that it is more beneficial in terms of privacy, in that it scrambles and pings your ip address all over the globe so that it makes it incredibly difficult to track.

Also has an automatic, no ads allowed ad blocker.

[Steven Avery]

Originally Posted by Michael The Disciple

I use Startpage.com. Supposed to be good for privacy but is disappointing in the number of results.

In my quick test, Startpage does not respect the "quote marks" as meaning only give me the exact phrase, the problem I referenced above with epicsearch.