Stop Using Google Search for a Day

TL;DR: stop using Google search engine for a day. Try an alternative for a day.

I suspect that you are using Google for searching online. Google search engine is a very high quality piece of software: it is generally accurate, and the results are relavent. It is in fact so good that most of us give up on the search and rarely visit the second page of these results, and instead refine our search query, at least I am guilty of that.

But I wonder how dependent we are on Google, thinking that it is impossible to live without using its services directly. We use Google search, Gmail, Google Photos, etc. as defaults these days. Google Chrome is very common among internet users, and Chrome has made it easy to think that we cannot live without Google services with all the out-of-the-box integrations that come in it. I suspect, also, that many believe that they cannot live without Google because that is what they are used to for a long time.

If you think that, I have a proposal for you: try not to use Google search engine for a day. Just Google search engine. And just for a Day. Use an alternative: DuckDuckGo, SearX, and many other alternative search engines are available and will do at least a decent job.

I believe many of us can make the switch permenant without major drawbacks.

Google search engine might be superior to the alternatives: Google might be better at finding relevant posts in StackOverflow, or finding relevant sections in some documentations. But some of the alternatives are not bad at all, and some provide extensive query features, and few can display Google results for you.

All I am asking you is to use an alternative, for single day, and see if you prefer something else over Google search engine, or can live with something other than Google search. If not, you can go back to Google.

My main concern is that Google is already a monopoly on search. Google can use (and probably is using) its influence to de-rank results it does not agree with or does not like, or results that are in direct competition with Google. For example, Google pushing AMP has an impact on pages that do not use AMP (it might be a good or a bad things, but it is controlled by Google), and websites' revenue. Google Ads for a competitor when you search for a service. Obviously, Google is free to do so; this is a business that generates money, and they want to stay as a leader, and they believe these strategies will benefit them.

And it is true that you cannot break such monopoly by inviting users to use an inferior alternatives: but why think these alternatives are inferior in every case? They might meet what you need them for and exceed. Maybe they are better than Google for the type of searches you do. Maybe people are not aware of the progress made in this space by compatitors. And maybe, if more users became regular users of alternative platforms, these platform will close the gap and become much more competitive.