I’ve relied on Google as my primary search engine and Chrome as my backup browser for some time. Now that Chrome is segregating the enterprise (paid) users from the consumers for the purposes of ad-blocking, I’m downgrading it to my 3d place browser, after Firefox and Microsoft Edge. I’m starting to rethink my other participation in the Googleverse too.
Search
I have long since turned off my Google search activity being recorded, as wel as other Google web activity on other Google platforms (Youtube, etc.). There was a time when I might return to a particular search but I find that I can usually recreate a search using browsing history the odd time that’s really necessary. For more unusual searches, I drop the search into a research notebook in Microsoft OneNote in the cloud and just access that if I need to rerun it.
Pause Google Search activity in your Google account settings (if you have an account)
If Google was still a definitive best search engine, I might be more reluctant to look for an alternative. But it isn’t for me. As far as I can tell, most of my searches can be done on any major web search engine; Google is merely the one that is pre-configured.
In particular, it has over the years made it harder and harder to search how you want to. This may not be as noticeable in the US but you get different results in Canada, so it has required constant tweaking.
First in the way I saved the search engine in the browser, and finally, when that doesn’t work, having to customize the URL. Every. Search. Because Google looks at your location, on the assumption that your search is mostly about things near you.
To force Google to search the US index, you change:
https://www.google.com/search?q=make+this+better&pws=0
to
https://www.google.com/search?gl=us&q=make+this+better&pws=0
The pws=0 should depersonalize your search. The gl=us should force it to search US results. When you add in the attempts to personalize, localize, and otherwise interfere with anticipate your search purpose, it seems like a challenge to get unfiltered results. At least on the desktop you can customize the experience. Although there is an option to switch to classic search on mobile at the bottom of the results page, I’ve never found it to work.
The difference can be seen in the search donuts.
A straight up search for donuts from a computer using an ISP in Toronto, Canada.
Above you can see the typical search results for food or restaurants. Since I do legal research in a variety of countries, this emphasis on travel and shopping isn’t helpful to me. Below is the same search with gl=us added.
Less location-driven search results.
I think it chose Kansas because lots of services have a default longitude and latitude if they don’t know where you are. Clearly, if I was looking for donuts, I might prefer the location driven results. Assuming that my ISP was in fact in the location that I was looking for donuts. In most cases, this is not an asset.
I’ve switched over to DuckDuckGo. Not because it’s more private – although it is – but because it seems to be a good alternative. Bing still returns results that aren’t consistently responsive and I try not to use any Oath/Yahoo! powered property.
One thing I’m interested to see is if I find that the DuckDuckGo results are good enough or do they leave me with a sense that there are more, relevant results in the Google index. There are more, but it’s not always qualitatively better or needed.
DuckDuckGo has some search nuances. You can still search a specific site using site:domain.tld. They also have bangs, shortcuts for searching. By default it searches globally but you can narrow a search to a country or a time period.
If you use Firefox, you can long press the DuckDuckGo.com search box on your phone or tablet to add it as a search option. Then you just switch to it as default, and remove Google. It’s already an option on desktop Firefox.
The nice thing about search is that you can always use something else by just typing in the URL. I’m hoping the convenience factor, especially around non-Canadian results, will make me that bit more productive.
Browser
Google Chrome has supported fewer and fewer of the add-ons I use for my search and it’s announcement about ad blocker API access was a final straw for me. We have it as a corporate standard (with Edge and Internet Explorer, soooo not really much of a standard) but Firefox is common too. I end up using Chrome only at work, and only for sites that need a language translation on the fly.
Edge is a decent second string browser. You can reconfigure the search and it now supports some browser extensions, through the Microsoft Store.
Adding DuckDuckGo to Edge is kind of kludgy. It may be because I attempted it on a locked down corporate version, which blocks addons. But even on that version, if you go to DuckDuckGo.com, Edge will “discover” the search engine. And it will appear as a search bar option in your Edge > Settings > Advanced options.
I still need Chrome for one or two things. I can do spot translates using Google Translate from any browser. Edge’s Bing Translate is a good alternative for in-browser translation but, on my tablet at least, not always reliable. Sometimes it’ll translate a page and sometimes it won’t. But I figure the sporadic and disconnected history or activity won’t be of much commercial value.
The Hard Place
There are other apps that are harder to part with. Google Mail (GMail) is probably the most obvious. Not because there aren’t good and better alternatives, depending on your needs (less intrusive ad scanning, more secure, etc.). Just because people send you emails.
The good thing is that a GMail address is most likely a personal address, not a business one. So one option I’m considering is to just send an email to my contacts, tell them the new address, and move on. I can export my old email from GMail for archival purposes (or to move to the new account) and then stop using it.
You could also forward email using GMail’s filters to your new address. I don’t use GMail for anything like accounts and billings, though, so I don’t really need to forward anything.
There’s also the benefit of having access to some other Google apps, in my case Drive and Photos. Since GMail is a service, though, not your entire Google account, they are separable. That may be an option down the road.