I'm searching elsewhere

I’m increasingly distant from Google. Aside from the privacy issue, which is no small concern, and the intrusiveness with which it attempts to distill every movement of my finger to serve me targeted ads, I’m doing much less due to the increasingly insignificant nature of its search engine in my life and online searches.

For weeks now, I’ve been using DuckDuckGo and Qwant almost exclusively, the former as my default and the latter as an alternative. Both are privacy-conscious and don’t collect or share personal information.

The results are more than satisfactory. I don’t miss Google at all, and in fact, I’m saying it’s a bad thing; sometimes it almost seems like Google is overrated.

Its searches are often superficial and decontextualized, sometimes so focused on current events and news that they fail to uncover more historical and structured content. Somehow, since they’ll enjoy significant revenue, it always displays results for similar topics drawn exclusively from the same sources.

Beyond the two search engines I use, others are gaining ground more or less rapidly: there are those that plant trees, open-source, paid, secure, and encrypted ones. And then there’s Bing—which, however, doesn’t solve some of Google’s interference issues.

It’s not over, mind you. Google’s market share is still immense compared to the others, but the percentages are declining. I’m not gloating, but I’m not googling either. I’ll just sit back and watch, but in the meantime, I’ll look elsewhere.