503-325-8600 JoeDiBartolomeo.com
PRST STD US POSTAGE PAID BOISE, ID PERMIT 411
1139 Exchange St. Astoria, OR 97103
What’s Inside
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Save Your Family From Winter Blues
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Make More Time for Reading Understanding Permanent Partial Disability
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3 Distracted Driving Habits to Give Up Chicken and Leek Filo Pie
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Alternative Search Engines — Are They Worth Trying?
Can You Really Give Up Google?
HOW 2 ALTERNATIVE SEARCH ENGINES MEASURE UP
Only one search engine has become a verb since its founding: Google. According to StatCounter, more than 86% of internet users worldwide depend on Google to answer everyday questions. But the tech company’s Big Brother-like data collection (it stores personal data for many users indefinitely, including what you buy online, your search history, and your real-life location) and privacy breaches have started to raise red flags. In 2013, techies and journalists launched a grassroots “DeGoogle” movement consisting of folks eager to quit the platform. If you want to DeGoogle, the easiest place to start is with your search engine (it’s tougher to quit Gmail, Chrome, or Android). Bing and Yahoo! have the biggest market share after Google (about 6.8% and 2.3%, respectively) but are chips off the same money-making block. To really take a step toward DeGoogling, try one of these two alternative engines with very different missions. Either one can be downloaded as a Chrome extension. DUCKDUCKGO: PUT PRIVACY FIRST (DUCKDUCKGO.COM) Since its launch in 2008, DuckDuckGo has pitched itself as a privacy- focused alternative to Google. “We don’t store your personal
information. Ever,” it promises, and offers private searching, tracker blocking, and site encryption. Fast Company named DuckDuckGo one of its top picks in the 2021 article “Bye Google: 7 privacy-first search engines everyone should try,” noting that it’s “the most polished [read: most Google-like] private search engine available, with dedicated results carousels for videos, recipes, and shopping.” The biggest downside to DuckDuckGo is that it’s search results aren’t quite as complete as Google’s. ECOSIA: PLANT TREES WHILE YOU SEARCH (ECOSIA.ORG) Last August, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released a report predicting more natural disasters, rapid sea level changes, and crop-killing droughts if nations don’t take action on climate change. One way to cool the planet is to plant trees, and 15 million internet users have now turned to Ecosia — a green search engine — to do just that. Ecosia was founded in Germany in 2009. A B-Corp, the company runs on solar energy and plants seedlings with its search revenue. Like DuckDuckGo, it guarantees anonymous searches, but Ecosia runs through Bing, so it does have a Google-like risk of data breaches.
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The Di Bartolomeo Law Office, P.C. 1139 Exchange Street | Astoria, Oregon | 503-325-8600 | www.JoeDiBartolomeo.com
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