Google Alternatives

Posted by Andy on March 20, 2010
Gmail, Outlook, Tech Tips

I love Google, I really do – they generally get it right, but I’m getting concerned.  I rely on Google for so much I worry that too much of my life is in one place.  And although the Ad’s they push are relatively unobtrusive, I’m starting to feel very much “watched”.  Like they know what I do, where I go.  Big Brothery.

So what are some good alternatives for Google services?

Search

How can we live without Google Search?  Let’s face it, they are the best.  Bing is ok, but I generally feel like I get what I want from Google faster than Bing, MSN or Yahoo.  There are a couple of good alternatives out there though that are worth a look.

The best of them is scroogle.org.  Scroogle is a web search pluggin that does some really nice things.  It uses Goggle search but isolates you from the cookies that Googles writes to you , and doesn’t send your IP address to Google.  Most importantly, you don’t get any Ads!  As an added bonus, you get 100 search results per page.  Very nice.

Browser

I use several browsers – IE, Firefox and Chrome.  Chrome is usually the fastest, but I use Firefox more than the others.  A good open source Chrome alternative is Chromium.  It’s basically an open source version of Chrome.  The user interface is nearly identical, and it doesn’t track your info like Chrome does.  The home page for the project is here, and the latest windows build is here.

Google Calendar

There are loads of online calendars out there, MSN, Yahoo, MobileMe just to name a few.  I’d like to stay away from the big names – they aren’t better than Google and have many of the same privacy issues.  I’ve been looking at 30 Boxes (http://30boxes.com/) and so far I really like it.  The format is really nice, and it’s iCal based, so there are lots of ways to view the calendar (mobile devices, desktop, web) and there are tons of calendars to add in (holidays etc).  They calendar will send appointment reminders to your mobile device, and yes, there is an iPhone app.  I have not tried to hook it up to my iPhone calendar directly – would be great is that worked too.

This is a short list – just search for Google Alternatives and you will get plenty of reading material.  Other honorable mentions – OpenOffice.org, Zoho.com (very cool office tool, has email, CRM, project, docs etc).

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