DuckDuckGo

I found an alternative to Google and Bing for web search:

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Unlike Google, they don’t collect nor store personal information. The amount of personal information collected by Google is reaching scary levels, and in the wrong hands, that amount of information is extremely dangerous.

I first heard of DuckDuckGo on Diaspora*, when the user duckduckgo@joindiaspora.com was added, and shortly after handed over to DuckDuckGo, as an official page.

It’s a bit geeky, but I really like it. There is a feature called !bang, which is useful. If I have a problem with Gentoo, as often is the case with the many unstable and unsupported packages I use, I can search bugs.gentoo.org simply by writing “!gbugs searchterm“ in the address bar in Firefox.

Ah, the irony

According to Mashable (Google+ to Support Pseudonyms) Vic Gundotra has revealed that, “Google will eventually support other forms of identity.” And this on the same day that I gave up my primary email address for the last ten years.

My decision was prompted by a statement from Larry Page, that Google+ is an identity service, and using a real name is required. Do they coordinate at the top level at all?

Google profile deleted

I just had my Google profile deleted. I’m rather sad about that; I’ve been a fan of Google since I started to use computers in 1998. As a Linux user I was rather proud of supporting Google.

With Google plus, and their insistence on tieing all their services to a real name, I don’t want to support them anymore. I think it is evil to insist that everyone blogs and comment under their real name. A minority has the need of anonymity to protect themselves.

With the deletion I lost access to all Google services, so now I need replacements for a lot of things:

• gmail ̣- I already have email on aim, hotmail and yahoo.
• contacts – Gist – leo.laursen
• Google+ – Diaspora – leo_laursen@joindiaspora.com
• Reader – tried Bloglovin but I’m not really in the target group
• Maps –
• Calendar –
• Youtube –
• Bookmarks – Delicious – leolaursen

Please comment with suggestions for alternatives.