Your search bar has a gossip problem
During a call yesterday, someone asked me what an easy first step was on the path to getting off big tech. They lead a smallish organisation of 14 people which is pretty much married to Google: email, docs, video conferencing, storage…
I’d say the first and easiest step isn’t migrating your email or moving all your files. It’s simply switching search engines.
Google gathers an obnoxious amount of data about you through your searches and, to make matters worse, their results have been (deliberately) declining over time.
There are some European search engines out there but, honestly, I don’t think they’re anywhere near the top of the rankings yet. They’re improving day by day though.
My top recommendations would be:
- Kagi if you don’t mind paying, it’s privacy-focused and miles ahead of even Google. I happily pay for this one myself.
- DuckDuckGo is probably the second best option. There are ads but they’re contextual not behavioural (based on the search terms, not on profiling you).
Next up, if you haven’t already, quit using Chrome as your browser and switch to something like Firefox or Vivaldi.
Colin