I have written the cover article for the new issue of the NUJ’s Journalist magazine on organisations offering Google alternatives, covering the likes of DuckDuckGo, Firefox, Runbox, WordPress, OpenStreetMap, Mapbox and Ordnance Survey, as well as what I reckon Google does well. You can read it magazine’s digital version, on pages 18 and 19.
This was inspired by a meeting for journalists at Google’s non-permanent for tax purposes establishment at Central St Giles, detailed here on the NUJ’s London Freelance website.
Links for the Journalist piece are below.
Google alternatives
Search: DuckDuckGo
Web browsing: Firefox
Email: Runbox
Blogging: hosted through WordPress.com or information on using it on your own webspace
Mapping: OpenStreetMap, Mapbox, Ordnance Survey OpenSpace (more on Google, OpenStreetMap and Ordnance Survey here, more on Mapbox here).
What Google does well
Books: Google Books, although those scanned from the University of Oxford’s Bodleian Library are available as PDFs through its catalogue.
Street images: Google Street View
Translations: Google Translate
Online office software: Google Drive, although Zoho Docs is an alternative
All services for journalists: Google News Lab, including Public Data Explorer, Google Trends and reverse image search
If you have a Google account, check your privacy settings and download the data it holds on you.