Tuta Blog

The article says March, which coincidences with this:

https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2024/03/core-update-spam-policies

It's possible Tuta caught a stray here because they recently changed their name from Tutanota[0], including the domain name. This update has the SEO world up in arms, in fact - the update is still rolling out, nearly two months after it was announced.

I'd love to be a fly on the wall in the Google Search team's offices to learn just how much machine learning is messing with the ability to properly understand intent -> rank content.

E: Semrush shows that they took a nosedive, but not a complete decimation[1].

E2: I take the initial edit back, looks like they got a classifier applied to their site, also known as the "Helpful Content Update":

https://tuta.com/blog/google-search-problem

It's a nasty classifier and not a single site has been reinstated from it[2] since Google began to apply it in Sep 2023.

[0]: https://tuta.com/blog/tutanota-is-now-tuta

[1]: https://i.imgur.com/E9ybteL.png

[2]: https://twitter.com/glenngabe/status/1781679769735545280

Some of my links:

- https://usvgoogle.org/trial-wrap-11-20

- https://tuta.com/blog/google-search-monopoly

- https://www.androidauthority.com/apple-android-massive-tracking-device-3381617/

- WEI... https://vivaldi.com/blog/googles-new-dangerous-web-environment-integrity-spec/

- https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/jun/28/google-may-have-misled-dozens-of-advertisers-and-violated-its-own-guidelines-report

- https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/05/09/google-privacy-abortion-data/

- https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/03/judge-finds-google-destroyed-evidence-and-repeatedly-gave-false-info-to-court/

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_by_Google

- https://otakukart.com/551722/google-is-showing-ads-to-sell-your-kidney-for-1m-in-india/

- https://www.npr.org/2020/10/22/926290942/google-paid-apple-billions-to-dominate-search-on-iphones-justice-department-says

- https://gizmodo.com.au/2017/09/yes-google-uses-its-power-to-quash-ideas-it-doesnt-likei-know-because-it-happened-to-me/

Tangent: Been looking to switch email providers for a while, and hadn’t heard of Tuta. Looked good enough I just went ahead and signed up… only to find out apparently they provide no real data portability whatsoever.

The only option for getting your email _out_ of their systems is to select small batches of them one-by-one in their app and export them.

There have been many requests for something similar to Proton’s bridge functionality that haven’t gone anywhere. A more useful export function has been near the top of their public roadmap[0] for half a decade now it looks like.[1]

Guess I’ll go find out what their refund process is like.

Don’t mind me. Just yelling into the void.

[0] https://tuta.com/roadmap/ [1] https://github.com/tutao/tutanota/issues/1292

The essentials for me are private email, calendar & cloud storage. Here is my post-Google setup:

https://tuta.com/ is a German privacy-focused alternative that I'm currently using for email & calendar. Easy switch, although I was already using web clients rather than IMAP before the switch.

I looked at Proton Drive for cloud storage, but their CEO Andy Yen is a Trump supporter (https://archive.ph/2025.01.15-162500/https://www.reddit.com/r/ProtonMail/comments/1i1zjgn/so_that_happened/m7a91fs/), which makes me question his decision-making.

I settled on a 5€ / month VPS from Hetzner and using Syncthing instead, but this requires some minimal amount of technical skills to set up and maintain.

There is no alternative to YouTube, unfortunately.

I am looking at Tuta Calendar for my group.

https://tuta.com/calendar

The blurb says "calendar sharing" but the price comparison has calendar sharing unticked for the free version. Guess I'll just try. No cost to do so.

It does seem to work only with client apps, no web interface, and I have had fits just trying to get people to adopt Signal. Many are locked into WhatsApp and FBMessenger. Ouch.

Anyway, that's FWIW. I am Google-free with bundled Apple apps and a boatload of Free and OpenSource apps. I use apple and comcast mail.

Apple office apps are all MS compatible as is Libre Office.

I try to do nothing "in the cloud" since any information that leaves the home is, IMO, subject to loss and seizure.

Or really anywhere on that page! Looking at the source, I can't see it anywhere other than as part of image URLs and one comment. I'm not sure if it's a good idea to rely on Google's crawlers to locally render a PWA for indexing purposes.

> It is extremely unlikely this is some conspiracy and more likely some failure of the most basic SEO measures.

I wouldn't call myself a Google fan, but this seems like the most likely explanation. The company seems to have an axe to grind with big tech in general and Google in particular [1], so I wonder how much effort they really spent on checking their own systems before crying "DMA violation".

[1] https://tuta.com/blog/google-search-monopoly