Weekend Blues and Ask-City

gettingoffgoogle — Mon, 04 Dec 2006 22:25:56 +0000

I got really frustrated this week while trying to find a Specific Hotel i wanted to stay at. Ask.com and Live.com just never managed to find it. It was an independent hotel so it didn’t have a memorable wed address and for the life of me i couldn’t find it.

On another note Ask.com Unveiled AskCity today, AskCity is similar to Google Local etc, but it has some nice features that others don’t i love the map feature where i can draw marks and outline states or regions and print them or email them. I also like the ability to able to take multiple snapshots of a Map and go back to it later. I am in the middle of posting a full review which should be up shortly.

Long Live Lycos

gettingoffgoogle — Thu, 30 Nov 2006 10:13:44 +0000

Ask is annoying me, for no reason really other than i am just going off it. So while dredging through other famous search sites from back in the day, remember Excite.com? i came across Lycos, some might say i had a 1998 moment, i remember using Lycos quite a lot back then, i had a Lycos Web Mail account and everything. It’s still going and is more of a portal these days much like MSN and Yahoo, and speaking of Excite it seems they were aquired by ask.com in March of 2004. I am extremely sad for knowing all this but i must use Wikipedia to keep myself away from YouTube.com.

As for how it’s going – well it’s weird,i feel like my safety net has been taken away and i am out in the big virtual world with no directions and i am having to speak a foreign language to get my information. It’s not like ask.com search.yahoo.com etc etc. don’t have the same basic function as Google, it’s just that it’s not quite the same not quite what i am used too.

More to follow tommorow. As For Now Goodnight.

An Uneventful Day One

gettingoffgoogle — Thu, 30 Nov 2006 01:02:28 +0000

Well my first proper day on the Google Diet and it’s been uneventful. I have not even had the urge to go to Google.com mind you i haven’t spent all that long 0nline today. One big pain is getting my mail over my mobile phone with Yahoo, just because i a grew so fond of the Gmail Java App, however i do love the Yahoo Web Mail client, it’s a lot like Outlook but without the bells and whistles it justs needs that little bit more storage one gig just isn’t big enough these days.

I do however have a confession to make from my first day, i did have someone go to my Gmail account to forward my mail to my Yahoo account, i didn’t really want to do it buy i needed to otherwise Emails may have gone unanswered for a whole month.

I am just wondering weather reading a Blogger blog counts as using Google, i don’t think it does.

I have a busy day tomorrow so it should be interesting to see how i do, with the day passing off without incident, there is only one thing left to say Viva Yahoo!!!

And So It Begins

gettingoffgoogle — Wed, 29 Nov 2006 08:35:12 +0000

It’s come to my attention recently that I use Google way too much. Search, Email, Spreadsheets and Word Processing and now even the silly little viral videos I get sent are from YouTube which of course is now part of Google. So i thought i would liberate myself from the big G Machine for one whole month i thought i would give it up cold turkey. Within the last hour i have got myself a new Yahoo Email Account, I’ve downloaded Open Office and decided anything the domain youtube.com has to be blocked at Router level.

Of course the first thing to do was to sign up for a free blog so i typed in www.blogger.com (Google Owned) arghhhhhh within the first minute it’s coming to haunt me. So i decided to go for another big player in the hosted blog world wordpress another big thing was for me to change search engine so i went for Ask.com i almost went for the new Microsoft tool Live.com but decided against it, my first surprise was that it is no longer called Ask Jeeves, it’s actually very good from what i have seen so far, it’s almost a natural thing for me to type Google.com whenever i am looking for a site, so i’ve put ask.com as my homepage and i am determined to stick to it. Apart from YouTube i have blocked nothing on the router i wouldn’t have blocked YouTube but i am totally addicted to it at the minute. I really want to see how many times i go to Gmail.com or Google.com over the course of my working day without realising it.

So as it is this Wednesday 29th of November 2006 i start a Cold Turkey regime to get myself off Google.

Show your support in the comments and i welcome emails of course to w.howard@yahoo.co.uk