De-Googling my life: Is there a better search engine?
Can you move away from Google search? Absolutely! And it's not as bad as you think it might be.
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Google as a company is synonymous with the Internet. But the company that once declared a motto of “Don’t be evil” is now very much drawing on the power of the dark side to maximise its profits and limit competition.
Now that a US court has found that Google illegally monopolised Internet search, I feel it is time to de-Google my life.
Across a series of guides, I’ll be sharing my journey to remove my reliance on Google. I’ll compare alternatives, test them out and try to find the best alternatives for my needs.
Google search is a monopoly, but it’s also getting worse
I readily admit I have a deep bias here. Google’s Helpful Content Update in September 2023 and its Core update in March 2024 effectively removed BTTR results from its search engine, even when you searched for a specific review and the brand “BTTR” qualifier.
I wasn’t the only site impacted. Much better publications than mine ended up seeing drastic reductions in traffic to the point they needed to close or lay off staff.
But in the place of independent media sites, Google promoted Reddit, a company it had invested heavily in for training its AI models.
Aside from the actual sites included in search results, Google is also overwhelming its results pages with ads. Search for a product (or the best product), and Google will show an overwhelming number of shopping results, with no justification for their presence.
It highlights more and more YouTube video results, which ultimately means more ad revenue for its parent company Alphabet.
After that, there are the questions of privacy. Google tracks everything you do using its platforms. Sure, it’s anonymised, but all that data is used to target you with ads.
You may feel that the convenience of Google makes sharing that personal information is worthwhile. But it’s worth checking just how much information Google collects. You can head to the My Activity page while signed in to Google and see how much information Google is collecting.
It’s not just your search history or browsing history, either. Google tracks data across all its services, including Android devices, Chrome, and the Play Store.
I just went searching through Google’s data of my search history. Does the tech giant really need to know that I searched for “Doormats” on April 21 in 2019?
It also keeps that data for a really long time, unless you tell it not to. I was just looking at the location history data Google has on my personal account and saw it contained information on a trip to Wellington I made for work in 2014.
That’s a bit of an eye-opener for me. Particularly when you see it also includes records of photos I took at the time.
It’s important to call out here that you don’t have to share this data with Google. You can opt out.
But the reality is that many people — including myself, apparently — will agree to share this information without even realising it.
This is part of the reason I’m trying to de-Google my life.
