this post was submitted on 07 Sep 2025
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Just so you know, it’s totally fine to ignore Google and use something better.
There was a time Google were orders of magnitude better than anyone else. Now with Google basically just pushing ads at the top and SEO articles taking over, the other search engines aren’t worse.
In any case, I find that DuckDuckGo is already enough for 90% of my searches and hence it’s my default. This simple fact made my dependency on Google very low nowadays, basically Gmail and Google Maps are the main thing I still use.
I only fall back to Google Search when I want something more tailored to my country news, something in my language or when I’m searching for something around me (like a store, business etc. which are all on Google Maps). These other search engines seem to be good mostly for English content and struggle to filter for things like “This search should be about country Y”.
I’m a practical person, so I don’t resort to extremist views like “100% free of Google”, but I guess these little gestures compound over time. Recently I’ve been also changing some services to use a different email (a private one) other than my Gmail address, just to avoid centralizing everything on Google, and so I’ve been effectively diversifying the services I depend on, which is good.
I’ve been using DDG for many years, and I haven’t looked back. Recently, I also set up Qwant on my laptop. So far, it’s been pretty smooth sailing.
Swapping Google Cancer to Apple Cancer is one way to reduce your dependence on Google, but I’m not entirely sure that really solves the underlying problem. Either way, there are a few Google services that I could replace with alternatives, but I just haven’t gotten around to it yet. I guess, one day I just need to start paying for a NextCloud subscription or something.