{"id":753,"date":"2013-05-31T15:54:02","date_gmt":"2013-05-31T14:54:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/?p=753"},"modified":"2013-05-31T16:12:19","modified_gmt":"2013-05-31T15:12:19","slug":"de-googling","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/de-googling\/","title":{"rendered":"De-Googling"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Googlelogo\"<\/a>I wonder if that’s a word.\u00a0 It should be.<\/p>\n

I’ve been de-Googling my life today.<\/p>\n

It’s hard to remember, but there was a time when Google was cool<\/em>.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

I made a few bucks that way — not much — but it’s hard to believe today that Google used to pay people<\/em> to use it.<\/p>\n

Google even sent me a t-shirt by post to thank me for mentioning them in an article.\u00a0 (I wish I’d kept it.)<\/p>\n

This was ages<\/em> ago.<\/p>\n

Today, Google is a monster.\u00a0 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.<\/strong><\/p>\n

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.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Back in December, I decided to quit Gmail for these reasons and others<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Today, I’ve taken it a step further by dropping other Google products:<\/p>\n