alternative-front-ends VS whoogle-search

> Do you block YouTube on your network so you don't see content from that platform? I'd wager you don't.

I don't block YouTube, I just don't use any of their official frontends. There are plenty of alternatives in this space[1]. This might not work for everyone, but I get a much better UX with these tools. Not seeing ads is one benefit, but it's also about not being a participant in training algorithms that effectively cause psychological damage.

> I am pretty sure you pay for things that bring value or make thing easier for you in life

Of course. And I happily support content creators who don't rely on advertising or Google itself. I just refuse to be forced into a corrupt business model.

Anyway, I didn't mean to antagonize you, so apologies if my response came across that way.

[1]: https://github.com/mendel5/alternative-front-ends?tab=readme...

There is a great list of many alternative frontends I found here: https://github.com/mendel5/alternative-front-ends

They work well for internet archiving too, e.g. when Twitter or Reddit are being annoying and showing popups/login redirects/etc. you can replace the URL with an alternative frontend version and archive the content without the cruft.

I use Tor for everything that doesn't require identification, and I use very few of those services. Feel free to ask me anything.

>There are sites that I have been unable to get working

This happens, most of the time because of Cloudflare. A solution is to get a new Tor circuit 3-5 times, and then the page will load. If a site simply won't work, like Meta platforms I won't use them. Using alternative front-ends[1] makes most sites that usually wouldn't work, work as well.

>The Tor browser does help here, by not easily allowing obvious mistakes like using http.

This is false, HTTPS only is enabled by default in Tor Browser. It's common knowledge for everyone including users of Google Chrome and Firefox to not use HTTP sites.

[1]: https://github.com/mendel5/alternative-front-ends

May I suggest:

https://github.com/mendel5/alternative-front-ends#facebook

thanks, found a bunch here https://github.com/mendel5/alternative-front-ends

For Gmail you can use (neo)mutt if you want to use in the CLI. For the other services check this out

In addition, Youtube is a notoriously heavy website with a ton of javascript. There are plenty of opensource front end websites that use a lot less or no javascript. Piped is a popular frontend for Youtube.

Google Search → Whoogle

Google Search → Whoogle

I deployed whoogle search at home. For laptops it is rather easy to define it as the default search for alfred and the respective browser, but for iOS devices I have not found a way (except some rather clunky and intrusive extensions) to change the default search engine beyond what Apple tells you. Is there a way to to this via pfSense or pihole? So whenever someone searches in the address bar in safari on iOS that pfSense redirects that search to the whoogle URL?

I host an instance of Whoogle Search that I use and never looked back. It's like someone brought Google back to the golden age. No (direct) tracking, no ads, complete control over the results.

Source Code: https://github.com/benbusby/whoogle-search