How to get rid of Google in your life - The Google case
Par cubytus le mercredi 28 août 2013, 18:46 - Lien permanent
There is no mistake in the title. I am talking about Google, the original product bearing that name, which is the search engine itself.
Difficulty: depends on your usage. Most likely, quite difficult when you grew accustomed to how results are generated.
That is a tricky one. Many alternative, updated search engines do exist to big G's. First, you'll surely experience some withdrawal symptoms, as G's search engine is the default one in most major browsers, Firefox, Opera, Safari, and of course, Google Chrome. Most people don't even care about changing the default settings, an habit again fed by wifi captive portals, where, after accepting the conditions and clicking on "connect", many pages will redirect you to G's search engine, and not the page you came from in the first place.
So, here are a few other search engines.
Duckduckgo
Doesn't track your every move on the Internet, built on a model revolving around user privacy.
Bing
It may seem somewhat ironic to put forth the search engine from a company that, for years, denied customer's right to privacy (who remembers the StopPalladium campaign?), and more recently, collaborated with US authorities in their nationwide spying of all communications, but it remains a decent search engine to try.
Yandex
Russian search engine, available in English. Has an interesting concept built going further than search results, toward an actual, integrated solution to a problem. Ok, from what I skimmed it doesn't seem that respectful about privacy, but nevertheless I found their foundations to be quite interesting. Ever wondered how people in the East find their seemingly unfathomable inspiration when it comes to computer science?
Exalead
Search engine built by Dassault Systèmes. I don't know how this strategic company is related to the French scandal where a few of them sold spying systems to antidemocratic countries, but results are pertinent. Still, even knowing Franc does spy heavily on datacenters, the default law protecting privacy is much more restrictive than the US, plus, you probably won't get as much results skewed toward US websites.
Seeks
A completely different model of decentralized search engine, peer-to-peer, curated by humans, allowing a somewhat anonymous search on publicly-accessible nodes.
Ixquick
Search results are actually partly provided by Google (a process they call "Google enhanced"), but your requests are first completely anonymized by Ixquick before being sent to G. This search engine won an award from the European Privacy Seal for the lengths it goes to minimize data collected from users. The exact opposite of what G does. German quality, probably the best one out there.