De-Googling my digital life — Goodbye Google Search
Google is everywhere, Google has everything. Even if you’re not directly using their services, chances are the ones you do make use of their APIs, of some piece of code they developed, some technology they brought to the world, or even just their servers. Google has contributed a lot to the open source world, and has reshaped the way we use the web.
They haven’t done so just to help people, though. Google has strayed very far away from their “Don’t be evil” mantra, going so far as to ditching it. Now I wouldn’t say Google is evil per se, but it has extended its greedy tentacles and shady practices in about every single aspect of our digital lives.
Blink is fast becoming the only engine web developers even test on, Android has an absurd market share, its ad network serves most ads you see on websites, and chances are most of these use Google Analytics as well. Gmail is the leading email solution for individuals, and is grabbing enterprise market share by the day. Google Drive and Docs are well embedded in every student’s life, and most companies I worked with, or for, and Google search has become synonymous of web search.
In other words, Google kinda controls the internet right now, and I don’t like being told which services to use, so I’m going to start a little experiment to try and get rid of as many Google Services as I can. I know, it sounds pissy and paranoid, but give me a few words to explain. While Google services are best in class, and mostly free, and based on open source technologies, the mere fact that one giant company has such control over the web has to raise some kind of red flag. If not, this article, and the ones who’ll follow probably will sound like a guy with too much time on his hands trying his best to craft tinfoil hats. That’s OK, I won’t take it personnally.
Now, I do use some of Google’s services: YouTube, obviously, Gmail, Google Photos, Google Drive at work, as well as Google Docs. Android powers my Galaxy S8, Google Maps is basically my GPS, and AdSense gets me the thousands of cents I make every month from my channel. As per web browsing and search, which is the main topic of this article, here are my conclusions !
Don’t have time to read ? Here is a quick recap in video form:
Search Engines:
Google search is THE search engine. It has all the features, the indexation, the market share, and the ads. It is synonymous with web search, and yet, there are alternatives that are just as good, if not better, with the added benefit of not tracking your every search. I’m not talking about Yahoo or Bing, which do collect tons of data through targeted advertising, or niche and specific search engines, such as Wolfram Alpha.
I’m talking about a french outsider, and a bird. Namely, Qwant and Duck Duck Go. These two search engines have privacy as one of their core values, and do not collect any personal data, or share them. That doesn’t prevent them from running ads, but these do not profile you, and are purely targeted using the search keywords you used, and not your search history, profile, or any personal data.
Both of them are widely available, though Qwant seems to be more restrictive in this matter, and largely absent of Africa, for example. Of the two, Duck Duck Go is the most widely used, with an estimated 640 Millions visits in January 2019, when Qwant reached about 70 Million (source: SimilarWeb, and all its inaccuracies and estimates). Both can be integrated into any browser you decide to use. With that out of the way, how do they behave ?
Very, very similarly to Google. Looks-wise, they both emulate the classic search results, but to be fair, this presentation has not evolved in a very long time and is what all users are used to. Qwant is more colorful, sometimes to the point where it distracts you from what you’re looking for. Incidentally, Qwant has also released Qwant Lite, which does not use any Javascript, is lightweight, and looks a lot cleaner (although it looks suspiciously like Google).
In terms of results quality, I’ve been using exclusively Duck Duck Go and Qwant for about two months now, and there hasn’t been a single search where I could not find a relevant result on the first page. Both implement cards with information from Wikipedia, and mini-maps for adress. On this matter, Duck Duck Go switched from Open Street Map to Apple Maps, which is weird, but I do admit that their maps look good and that Apple is about the only major tech company that does not collect user data to sell ads. Qwant Maps are powered by OpenStreetMaps, which they enhanced by using a better looking set of tiles, provided by OpenMapTiles.
Qwant can also provide location details if you’re looking for a restaurant for example, which Duck Duck Go doesn’t seem able to do. Options-wise, Duck Duck go is absolutely the winner here. You can customize about anything: the fonts, the colors, the behaviour of the header, the visibility of favicons… you can tailor the website as much as you like. Qwant just implements a dark mode, which is nice as well, but not nearly as customizable.
In terms of search tools, both implement search operators to let you search a particular website, and filter with “OR” and “AND”, as well as looking up a specific phrase. They have nice options to look for images, including filters for colors, transparent images, or certain sizes, although you can’t specify exact dimensions for the images, as Google lets you do. Qwant has a license-based search to look for free to use images, which is a big plus that Duck Duck Go doesn’t seem to implement for now.
As per results, Qwant has its own indexation engine, which means they don’t rely on other engines to provide results for them, whereas Duck Duck Go is more of a meta-engine, sourcing results from Yahoo, Yandex, or Bing. I must say I don’t really see any difference in the quality of results, but I like the fact that Qwant has its own independant indexation. Both engines actively try to avoid a “filter bubble”, which is Google’s main problem: it will tailor search results based on what you looked for before, which means that two different individuals will be served different results. This guarantees that you’ll end up seeing articles and links that are in accordance with your opinions and beliefs, which is definitely a bad thing.
In the end, I like both just as well, but I find myself using Qwant more and more, just because I like its look and feel (no, the fact that I’m french has nothing to do with it). They both are fast, accurate, and, most important of all, do not store or share any data on my websearches.
Web Browsers
Ok, but what’s the point in using such privacy-focused engines if you’re still using Google’s browser ? While I was very excited when Google released its first iteration of Chrome on Linux, as time passed, I resented the ram hungry giant that ate everybody’s lunch. Targeted ads in Google search results touting Chrome as faster, specific developments that made Google owned properties run slower or not at all on other engines, and a general monopoly ended up causing a full-on rejection of Chrome, and I switched to Firefox about a year ago.
While there are plenty of web browsers available on Linux, most of them run on the same engine, or are completely based on Chromium. Brave, Vivaldi, Opera, even Falkon are using Blink these days. I’m absolutely against letting this engine, and its main contributor, Google, decide how websites should render, which technologies they can or can’t use, and how the web will work in the end, so I did what I could, and moved on to Firefox.
The Mozilla browser is, to me, the only credible alternative these days. While Epiphany, and other webkit-based browsers can be efficient for simple tasks, they are often slower, and since no-one is testing against them, render some webpages incorrectly. Firefox, on the other hand, is still losing market share, but has a nice, powerful engine. It’s fast, a bit more lighweight than Chrome, and widely themable, even through a custom UserChrome.css file, which allows you to totally change the way it looks.
Firefox has evolved a lot since they started on the Quantum project. It supports a ton of extensions, syncing to any device, has a mobile app that uses the same engine (on Android at least, since Apple doesn’t want to let other browsers play with their own tools), and does not collect personnal data. Some usage data collection is enabled by default, but you can uncheck that in the preferences. Its Linux version is widely available on all distributions, it is updated frequently, and I like Mozilla’s efforts to guarantee an open web. Switching from Chrome to Firefox is a breeze, and I bet many people wouldn’t even notice the difference.
So, in the end, how hard was it to get rid of Google’s services for web browsing and search ? Not very. The alternatives are more than solid, and should fit anyone’s needs without even thinking about it. Firefox is at least as competent as Chrome, if not better, and I highly encourage you to give it a spin if you haven’t in the last months.
As satisfied as I am with this first foray in a world where Google’s grip on my digital life has slackened, I want to go further. Next steps: trying to get rid of Gmail.
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