anti google article full of google cookies, perfect…
Google hates you
[sign in with your Google account]
Nothing wrong with catering to masochists.
Yes, daddy 🤠
🫦
Its like looking back at an abusive relationship and seeing that they only ever wanted you for the money, and to destroy your mind, and they wanted to climb based on your success. They are leeches.
Good, I hate them too. 😊
On the other hand, this is how companies fall. In my area, many small businesses are foregoing Google entirely. SEO is expensive and complicated, and so are websites, map prominence, and most of the things Google sells. They’re not worth the investment.
Mostly, companies are shifting toward Meta products, so it’s not as though everything is hunky dory (want to know when that hip new boutique is open? Don’t bother with the web search, just look up their Instagram). There is a very real threat of collapse if Google keeps up the antics.
SEO is only doable for larger companies which people are more andore trying to avoid because they’re expensive and shit anyway
Well, I hate Google too. I just can’t divorce because of email reasons
Yes you almost certainly can. It’s less painful than you might imagine. I used Gmail since it was launched, and now that account is unused except for a couple of mailing lists I don’t care about. It just takes a bit of time, but you can do it bit by bit.
Which reminds me, I need to get back to that. I still have some more stuff to move over.
I’ll still keep it for maps and earth when necessary. I wish there were professional grade replacements for Earth but there isn’t unfortunately.
Most websites allow you to change your email address, get one from somewhere else and slowly start changing them over until there are no more you can move. If you get your own domain you can ensure you are never trapped in any particular email provider ever again, though you will be playing about $50/year for a domain and email service. I have maybe a handful of things that still use Gmail.
Starting a new email with Tutamail or Protonmail and slowly making new accounts with those emails is not difficult. Not sure about Tutamail, but Protonmail allows for easy migration from Gmail.
I have my own domain and pay for a hosting service, don’t miss using big tech email services a bit.
Be careful where you place your email address, and even so you can create blacklists on the hosting service. Never had to yet, and in almost 10 years only 1 phishing email 2 weeks ago.
Another fun thing to do when you have your own email on your own domain is create all sorts of fun little forwarders/aliases so you can give out addresses that aren’t your main one, track who passes the address you gave them along to spammers, and delete the alias addresses whenever you like.
For example, you want to buy some cheese from the site Cheesemonger.foo and you need to give them an email address when creating your account. So, you give them cheesemonger@yourdomain.foo which is an alias you set up to forward to your real email inbox, and you receive mail from that site as normal. If you then start getting spam email sent to cheesemonger@yourdomain you know for a fact where the spammers got the address, and you know to delete that forwarder and buy your next batch of cheese elsewhere because screw those address-selling jerks at Cheesemonger.foo.
Catch-all is what you need
I personally don’t like using catchall for this, I prefer to play with aliases, but it’s certainly another way to do it depending on the result you want.
Rest assured, the feeling is deeply mutual.
DDG, Startpage, and Brave Search love me ❣️
Would be a good chapter in Doctorow’s Enshittification.
Fuck SEO. I’d rather focus on content optimization. Search should be powerful enough to find decent matches by now without having to play these games and pay for play BS.
