While Google has expanded their business to offer countless products, the main powerhouse of Alphabet (Google’s parent company) is the web search platform google.com. They serve an estimated 13.7 billion searches per day, a number which seems to still be growing despite generative AI taking a bite out of their total market share.
You may have found that you’re using Google to search the web without even thinking about it. Clearly, Google must be the dominant search platform since it has become the de facto verb for searching on the web since 2006. But there’s also a lot of money being spent to keep it top of mind. For example, it’s estimated that Google spends around $18 billion per year to be the default search engine for Apple products. It’s also obviously going to be the default search engine on Google Chrome, which itself owns roughly 70% of browser usage across the internet.
Moving away from Google search isn’t just a case of rooting for an underdog in a monopolized market. Google has been mired in countless privacy concerns. They have been found to share users search history with law enforcement agencies and have also been ordered to share search data with its competitors. They also have been pushing towards the use of Generative AI to summarize their search results. This has resulted in some funny, if benign answers, such as a dog playing in the NHL or recommending users add glue to their pizza sauce. However, it has also recommended dangerously incorrect health advice, only disabling auto-summary for specific searches once the news started covering these mishaps.
Rather than try to navigate a web landscape where your data is being sold to advertisers and given to law enforcement without due process, and where you can’t trust the results being returned, you could change a few settings on your phone or browser and move away from Google entirely. Here’s a few alternatives to consider when making the switch:
Google (Search) Alternatives
DuckDuckGo
DuckDuckGo is billed as an anonymous search engine, claiming that they don’t track users or search terms. It has the feel of Google circa the 2010s with a simple UI and minimally invasive advertisements. There is an auto-summary ability on DuckDuckGo, but it will often require clicking a button to generate these results. They also offer a chatbot service, Duck.AI, storing conversations on your machine rather than on their servers.
I’ve been using DuckDuckGo for the last few months and have mostly had no complaints. Honestly, the only thing I’ve found lacking so far has been the ability to search music lyrics. If I have a song stuck in my head and only remember a few lines, Google is usually pretty quick to find the song (after some digging) while DuckDuckGo just latches on to some of the terms in the lyrics instead. That being said, these are minor complaints for a great service.
Brave Search
Brave is mostly known for their privacy-focused web browser, but they also offer a search engine that claims to be free from any ad-based cookies or trackers. In fact, my ad-blocker comes up empty when I use the search engine. Their layout is similar to most modern web search engines, and they offer a premium subscription for a few dollars a month to remove ads and support their cause. The main difference between this browser and DuckDuckGo is that DuckDuckGo still has trackers on their search engine, though most of the results are anonymized.
Ecosia
Going in a slightly different direction, Ecosia claims to be the most environmentally friendly option for web search. They show ads alongside search results and use their profits to plant trees and donate to climate action projects. They also claim to run their web servers on renewable energy and are net-carbon-negative, producing more renewable energy than they use to operate their search engine. Under the hood, they’re using a variety of search engines for their results, including Google, Bing, and Yahoo, so you’re not entirely free from monopolistic tech companies, but it seems to be a pretty decent compromise for the claims they’re making. If you want to give Ecosia a try, you can use their search engine or try out their own web browser as well.
Bing
Have you tried a few alternatives and can’t quite replace the feeling you got searching on Google? Maybe just try to use a competitor instead. Microsoft’s Bing search engine is still a very competent search engine, and it slowly siphons off some of the traffic to a competitor of Google. Auto-summary is on by default, and trackers and ads are a-plenty, but they appear to sit slightly better on the privacy/security front than Google. For whatever that’s worth.