I used to use Google hundreds of times per day, literally everything I wanted to know I would type into Google.
Between their A) political activities (opinion influencing, censorship, etc.), B) business activities (user tracking, ruinous ads, etc.), and C) search quality issues (they have a major conflict of interest between providing good search results and maximizing A and B), I didn’t even have to try to stop using them out of principle; I literally just don’t get any value out of using Google search anymore.
I use DuckDuckGo (starting circa 2013), which provides a fairly similar/mediocre quality search experience, but without all the other aforementioned problems. The truth of the matter is that these search giants ruined search so bad that I don’t even really use search as much anymore. I’ve gotten to the point where I realize that I can no longer rely on finding things easily. This is not a problem of “the Internet has just gotten too big”. This is a problem created by Google, which has now set a low benchmark.
Between their A) political activities (opinion influencing, censorship, etc.), B) business activities (user tracking, ruinous ads, etc.), and C) search quality issues (they have a major conflict of interest between providing good search results and maximizing A and B), I didn’t even have to try to stop using them out of principle; I literally just don’t get any value out of using Google search anymore.
I use DuckDuckGo (starting circa 2013), which provides a fairly similar/mediocre quality search experience, but without all the other aforementioned problems. The truth of the matter is that these search giants ruined search so bad that I don’t even really use search as much anymore. I’ve gotten to the point where I realize that I can no longer rely on finding things easily. This is not a problem of “the Internet has just gotten too big”. This is a problem created by Google, which has now set a low benchmark.