Search Risk – How Google Almost Killed Proton Mail
Search Risk – How Google Almost Killed Proton Mail
For nearly a year, Google was suppressing Proton Mail from search results for our primary keywords. This episode illustrates that Search Risk is serious and potentially fatal for small businesses.
Google is excelling again - as the whole "uncensored" Big-Tech IT now.
The short summary is that for nearly a year, Google was hiding Proton Mail from search results for queries such as ‘secure email’ and ‘encrypted email’. This was highly suspicious because Proton Mail has long been the world’s largest encrypted email provider.
Google has become an awful company. I'm in the process of degoogling but it's not easy given all the monopolies they have created
My one holdover is YouTube. There's just no good replacement for it.
I like Nebula so far, but most of the videos are also on YouTube. I signed up for a promo through a channel (I can provide some if you like), so I got it for essentially $2.50/month.
I also sub to a few channels on Odyssee, and a couple on Rumble. If you're good at searching for stuff, PeerTube can also work, but I personally haven't found anything I really like there.
Only about half of the channels I follow are on YouTube, so if I really needed to ditch it, I could.
Fair. I just learned about and like PeerTube so far (activitypub federated video hosting), but it's has even more infantile adoption than Lemmy does. I don't know that anyone I follow on youtube posts there, and if they do I don't know how to find them.
There is nice tutorial here - simple steps how to get rid of the Google on Android Phone: https://www.jumagazin.cz/How-to-protect-your-self-on-Internet-part-II_468.html
It is good. The problem I’m having is they still gobble tons of data from any Android device that hasn’t been rooted and locked down.
For example the Google Play store, the main source of apps for everyone, grabs what when and how of everything one touches in there, and they squirrel it away with all your other juicy information to craft the better advertising weapon.
Yes, F-droid, apkmirror, others. But the point is it's not enough to just limit interactions with official Google apps, the platform itself has to be locked down via a custom rom (which is its own, different set of challenges).
The real sane option would be nationalization of google under some international body, not breaking it up, or leaving it, and just waiting the market just centralizing itself around some other company that will repeat what google has become and done.
How about some kind of federated alternative instead? But maybe with a better pricing model than what Lemmy does, where instances have 1% of their users tossing in a few bucks, and many smaller instances have the operators paying for most of it out of their own pocket. This would take a lot more bandwidth, storage, and CPU/GPU than a Lemmy instance would.
No, that's an insane option. Look at how the government runs other services and ask yourself if you really want Google to be run that way:
- Defense Department consistently fails audits
- Healthcare.gov was completely unusable at launch
- this list of high risk programs
Do you really think the government is capable of running something like Google if they can't even keep up with tax returns?
No, nationalizing it would likely just make things worse, breaking them up makes a lot more sense.
Government should stick to things where it can actually make a difference a commercial company can't, like welfare programs, policing, etc.
Last update on July 10, 2023 Published on October 26, 2016
That’s such a misleading thing to post! Thanks for adding this for lazy ppl like me
@pooky55@lemm.ee - best practice is adding [2016] to end of headline
Lemmy’ll let ya edit it now still!
I believe the reason it was posted is because Proton recently linked to the article again on Twitter, claiming that Proton Pass is appearing too far down in Google's search results relative to its popularity. This is when searching for "password manager" (Google's own password manager is the first result).
Recently I used Google maps to search for the nearest DHL near me so I could return a package. DHL is not that popular near me and when I specifically typed for DHL, I would get only their competitors in the search results.
There was a DHL service center near me and I had to scroll a bunch to find it. Oh, and apparently big box stores (or anyone) can pay Google to come up in the search on maps, even if unrelated.
I don't think they have skin the in shipping game but their algorithms are over optimized that they don't even show what your searching for, but trying to infer why you're searching for it. That or whoever pays them more. Certainly a search risk