I have historically been a big fan of Google. Their products are engaging, though not reliably durable in their lifespan. I was a big fan of Google’s Pixel phone in all its Android purity. What has slowly become distasteful for me with Google is that they are an advertising sales company who builds cool tech … to serve the advertising. I’ve been thinking a lot about what it would take to move away from them. The three most compelling services are a personal domain email I have locked up with them that my kids make heavy use of, the calendar sharing, and their photo storage story. I’m working on a exit strategy on these, but they are not a high priority today.
What is easy to do though is to leave their search engine. Google’s search is undeniably good, but search stopped being good and became creepily good about ten years ago. I do not need to find answers to questions I have yet to pose - I just need to look up the occasional thing. I shifted all of my default search engines from phone to work browser over to DuckDuckGo in the past few weeks. I have been very satisfied so far. Search does not need to be magic. I do not need AI and I do not need a rich history of advertising preferences to find for me an occasional image of Clippy to share in a meeting.