De-Googling

GooglelogoI wonder if that’s a word.  It should be.

I’ve been de-Googling my life today.

It’s hard to remember, but there was a time when Google was cool.

Back in the 1990s, I remember reading about it, and checking it out and discovering a blisteringly-fast search engine without all the garbage you found on sites like Yahoo.

At the time, Google was so hungry to promote itself that if you partnered with them, they’d pay you for each time someone searched using it.

I made a few bucks that way — not much — but it’s hard to believe today that Google used to pay people to use it.

Google even sent me a t-shirt by post to thank me for mentioning them in an article.  (I wish I’d kept it.)

This was ages ago.

Today, Google is a monster.  Nearly everyone uses at least one of its products — maybe it’s your Android phone (Google owns the operating system), or Gmail, or the Chrome browser, or Google Analytics for your website.

We share so much information with Google these days that even if the company did pay its taxes, I’d still be worried about its monopoly of information, especially personal information.

Back in December, I decided to quit Gmail for these reasons and others.

Today, I’ve taken it a step further by dropping other Google products:

  • I no longer use Chrome, and have gone back to the excellent, free, open source and non-profit Firefox.
  • I don’t use Google for search anymore — I’m now using DuckDuckGo, an incredibly stupid name for what seems to be a perfectly good alternative to Google search.
  • I’m replacing Google analytics with Clicky.

And for those who’ve forgotten, my web-based email client these days is Fastmail.

The next big step might be to drop Android altogether — I’ll have to see about that …

I’m not encouraging anyone else to do what I’ve done. I just wanted to see if one could live without Google, and I think one can.

2 Comments on "De-Googling"

  1. jill biddington | 31/05/2013 at 22:42 |

    It’s a horrible web and degoogling is on my agenda also.

    I am suffocating under the chains of Windows 8 – they seem to map every move via their account system.

    I feel like we are only resources for data harvesting these days.

    best of luck,
    solidarity!

  2. Eric, I have been using the resources of Copernic search products for well over a decade to provide an alternative to Google. Copernic’s Agent and Tracker are particularly good.

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