| I did a small inventory of my online accounts the other day and got surprised by how little I depend on Google. A few years ago I figured Google was just a necessity of living (online) these days. I first migrated to Fastmail a couple years ago, mainly to just have more control and use my own domain etc. Contacts and calendar shortly followed. I switched to iPhone last year, not because Android is bad or anything, it's just what I had had for a long time and I wanted to try something else. No regrets there. I switched to Chrome many years ago because it just worked better than other browsers, but recently I went back to try Firefox and it's really good now. I never really used cloud storage.. (Photos/Drive) Google is still the vastly better choice for Search, hands down. But just for the hell of it I decided to stick with DuckDuckGo and it's good enough for most things. Only occasionally do I head over to Google to get better results. It's not optimal, but I can live with that. Google also has very good store/location info etc in Maps, and the photos to go with it. Apple's maps is far from the joke it used to be, but when you just want to get info on a store or something and you get redirected to TripAdvisor, that's a huge bummer. Finally Youtube, there's just no competition out there. All in all, of course Google has a presence in my online activity, but it's not the end-all be-all internet hub I thought it was. |