Alternatives to Google

That are less evil

source - https://meme.aho.st/the-evolution-of-google/

As eny fule kno, Google seems to have updated it’s original mission statement “Don’t be evil” to something more, ahh, brief. Where by briefer I mean removing the “Don’t”.

Evidence for the new shorter mission statement is all over the place, my friend Tom Knighton has a pretty good recent example

Heads. Should. Roll.

But there are other issues too.

In addition to being less “not evil” Google is also very much less competent. I’ve noticed this in a whole number of areas, but the most blatant is the enshittification of Google Maps and (related) Google Search. Cory Doctorow in the link above defines enshittification as

First, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.

Google is firmly in the “claw back all the value for themselves” stage. They aren’t alone in this, the Meta Bork of Feces and Amazon are in a similar place, and even current darling Tiktok is also in that general area as the Doctorow article points out.

But Google may be more vulnerable than may others because from a revenue point of view it isn’t really a destination but more an assistant to get you to your desired end point. It makes about three quarters of all of its money from clicks ($237.86 billion out of $305.63 B) and if people no longer click on those links in a useful manner Google will lose revenue swiftly as advertisers decide to stop using google’s ad platform.

Interestingly Google seems to have noticed this and appears to be plotting a way out - use an AI chatbot to answer your question for you. As the writer of that article points out this approach is actually 100% not what you want when you google something

Since Google is looking for feedback on SGE, let's give it some! SGE never feels like a useful addition to Google Search. Google Search is a tool, and just as a screwdriver is not a hammer, I don't want a chatbot in a search engine. Putting a chatbot in search seems to come with the bizarre expectation that every search query is a question that has an answer. To me, Google Search is often the first step toward navigating somewhere on the web. Most of my queries aren't questions with answers; they are navigational. I'm leaving and want to go somewhere. I want to go read a news article or Wikipedia entry. I want to go to a manufacturer's website to read a spec or click a buy link. I want to order some food, look at a map, or download an application and install it. A chatbot can't help with any of these things. I'm not saying the chatbot isn't smart enough and I want it to be better: I don't want the chatbot. That's not what I'm here for.

If google does indeed roll out the chatbot, I anticipate a lot of people looking for alternative search engines. Which leads us to the first category in our list of alternatives to google

Alternative Search Engines

The easiest (IMHO) search engine alternative is DuckDuckGo aka DDG. I’m not 100% happy with everything they say or do but overall they don’t seem to bias results or otherwise break things. The DDG website has various downloads as well as hints and tips so that you can use it instead of Google search. In my extensive use of it over the last few years I can say it does exactly what the rant above says you want a search engine to do - present links to sites that answer your request. It (like google) will often highlight a summary from the top answer and it does smart things when you ask it “convert 5678JPY to USD” or “55 hectares in acres”. But it isn’t at all intrusive and if you want to go to a real FX site or conversion page that’s probably the first or second link.

Brave search is a second strong contender. I have not used it beyond a few test queries, but I know people who do. They like it. It is associated with the brave web browser (see below) but you can use it with a different browser just fine. Brave seems to be even more forceful on the privacy front than DDG and offers an ad-free premium pay version. DDG just makes money via (IIRC bing provided) ad links. As far as I can tell from limited testing brave search (the non premium version) has similar conversion etc. utilities as DDG and works just as well. I like the concept of paying for a service instead of having it be ad supported.

The bing homepage with copilot AI everywhere

Bing is the other obvious competitor. It is owned by Microsoft. That has some good things and some bad. On the good side there is the fact that Microsoft has the resources to support the server farms needed to run it when used by billions of people (DDG and brave may not) and the fact that Microsoft competes with Google in many areas and so is motivated to keep a search product going even if it isn’t making masses of money simply to be a check box in some bidding war for corporate email. On the bad there’s the fact that Microsoft also seems to have imbibed the AI koolaid (see image above) and that Microsoft, while not as evil as Google has become, is not precisely good and is in many ways at best a mostly reformed sinner that occasionally backslides.

There may be other search engines to recommend, please comment below with suggestions

Maps and directions

Here we’re on tough ground. But note that there are different solutions for different related use cases. Given that I find google maps to be quite poor at tasks like searching for nearby businesses of a certain type (e.g. breweries, bakeries or coffee shops) switching to something that specializes in this sort of thing like tripadvisor or yelp might be good. I can’t comment on US alternatives though because I don’t live there. Here in Japan there are various services like Tabelog that meet this kind of need. Both Yelp and Tripadvisor (and Tabelog) use google maps for the map parts of their service so you are giving google information even if you are not directly using google.

If you have an iDevice then Apple maps probably works. Probably. Except when it doesn’t.

If you don’t then you have problems because there really aren’t many options.

DDG has a map option. It appears to use apple maps as an underpinning along with integrations with tripadvisor and perhaps some other services. This is OK for some things but horrible for others (e.g. a search for convenience stores in a part of Tokyo gave me 5 restaurants before I got to the actual stores). I may try this more because of my irritation with Google Maps, but so far it seems to be a work in progress. One thing that I do like about it though is that it gives you a choice of whether to search near your current location or in the area currently displayed. This is a thing that google appears to have broken in google maps.

On a computer you can try openstreetmap but while the maps are great (in fact some of the map display options are superb) I find the directions and search to be less good.

And of course Microsoft has Bing maps which seem pretty good for directions but are also horrible at finding businesses by category. As with any of them if you know the name and rough address it will find what you want. If you just want “gas stations” or “hotels” it is more likely to omit some.

Google maps used to work. It still sort of works. But it is worse than it used to be and I can no longer trust it to give me the most accurate search results, unfortunately there doesn’t seem to be a competitor that is clearly better. If you have something in this space that you really like please leave a comment

Web Browsers

The Brave browser is probably the best. It (and almost all other browser alternatives) are based on Google’s sort of open source Chromium browser. The good bit about that is that we can be fairly sure that it won’t unexpectedly break critical websites because the rendering engine is the same as that in Chrome and everyone checks that. The bad part is that of Google embeds something nasty in Chromium you can’t avoid it unless/until the Brave developers find a way to remove it. As with Brave search you can sign up to pay for a premium version

A table from the Brave.com site comparing browsers

On Windows (and possibly other platforms?) there is a DDG browser. Obviously brave think they are superior. I suspect they are right but I haven’t tried either enough to be certain.

Mozilla Firefox is the other obvious alternative. Mozilla has become depressingly woke and it only survives because Google gives them money, but Firefox is a pretty good browser and it has extension capabilities that Chromium based browsers lack. That and the fact that it is cross platform with excellent sync capability are probably the main reasons why I still use it instead of brave. In particular Firefox supports the Noscript plugin (I’ve had problems getting this running on Chromium browsers, plus Chromium doesn’t allow some of the features) which allows for a level of javascript etc. control that I can’t get anywhere else.

Noscript running on my substack editor page

Noscript is magnificent at killing ads and trackers but it does require a certain amount of knowledge to run effectively. If you don’t have that, then use brave which does almost all of the same thing automatically.

Videos

Rumble. Many people post on rumble and youtube. Always go for the Rumble option if it is available. If there’s no rumble choice maybe spotify or another podcasting app. If there don’t seem to be alternative hosts then use a service like invidious to bypass the ads. There’s a constant war going on between Youtube and the groups who want the ad-free versions so it is not uncommon that you will fail to find a bypass service that works.

If you have to visit youtube use an incognito/private browsing window and be sure you are not logged into google. Ideally use a different browser (which is tricky on phones) and consider using a VPN. Why? because Youtube has (admitedly under pressure) ratted out to the feds with the details of viewers of some videos.

Email

I’ve used Gmail ever since it was a beta in the 2000s and gmail is yet another google service that has been improved to make it worse so it is worth migrating all the critical emails to some other provider. There are other reasons to move too, such as the fact that google reads all your email and may use it to train its AIs as well as sling you ads.

I use Proton mail and I pay for it because I like the additional features you get with the pay version but the free one also works. If you don’t like the Swiss, there are plenty of other places to get an email account that are not associated with google. Microsoft is the other big player in this space and, as I said regarding Bing, while I’m not sold on Microsoft being perfect they are better. In fact they have had a good decade of being less actively evil than Google and I find most of the things people hate about them seem to be caused by incompetence rather than malice. Culturally I think I have more trust in Microsoft as a user of their products because they make their money by selling you things. That is to microsoft you are a customer. To google you are (even if you pay for some things) the product they sell to advertizers. Which leads us to

Office Applications

If you want to use a browser to create documents, spreadsheets, presentations and so on then your two choices are Google Docs and Microsoft Office 365. As I mention in the email section Microsoft wants your subscription here and doesn’t abuse your data so if you have to use an online document editing thing use O365. If you can work with apps and local storage then consider something like LibreOffice or even a local copy of Microsoft Office.

Many places (proton, Microsoft, Amazon, dropbox …) will offer you cloud storage for documents and files that you back up from one computer and potentially access from many. If you have an O365 subscription then use Microsoft. If you have proton mail consider proton drive. If you want something different go subscribe to that service.

Blocking google trackers

Finally, to return to the way google makes money, it is useful to block the key google tracking domains for your computers, phones and everywhere at a lower level than a browser ad blocker so that it applies to all apps everywhere.

These domains are listed in various places, though often somewhat obscured, and blocking them from resolving stops all the tracking without usually harming anything else. There are various ways to do this. If you have your own DNS server on your home network (or are willing to run one on a raspberry pi or other computer e.g. pihole) then it is easy to get a list of google (and other) ad /tracker domains to import. Then any device on the LAN will fail to communicate with the tracks and ads.

If you have a laptop that travels around you can edit the hosts file on that laptop to add the relevant domains.

I’m not going to get into this here because a) this is already a long post and b) it depends heavily on your environment. I recommend pihole as a good start and doing your own research. I may write a follow up how to post on this though.

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