Mourning Google

And now, in Anno Domini 2024, Google has lost its edge in search. There are plenty of things it can’t find. There are compelling alternatives. To me this feels like a big inflection point, because around the stumbling feet of the Big Tech dinosaurs, the Web’s mammals, agile and flexible, still scurry. They exhibit creative energy and strongly-flavored voices, and those voices still sometimes find and reinforce each other without being sock puppets of shareholder-value-focused private empires.

I touched on my general feeling of Google’s decline when I talked about the Gemini demo a few weeks back, but this article does a better job of encapsulating the general feelings I get when using Google properties in 2024.

My default search engine is Ecosia because I feel like at least my ad revenue goes towards something noble, but since the engine is backed by Bing, their search results are also relatively hit or miss.

I used to fall back on Google when I felt like I needed a more correct answer. Nowadays, that fallback routinely falls flat.

I’ve mostly untangled my life from the Google universe these days. I use Fastmail for virtually everything, including my calendar and notes.

I use Safari for most of my browsing needs, only moving to Brave when I need Chromium. I’m considering Firefox again, though.

I use Apple Maps 60% of the time and Waze the other 40%. I enjoy Waze because of its social features like reporting police or bad traffic, but that’s also a Google property, and really, I should just drive slower, safer, and less often.

YouTube is hard to quit, I’ll be honest. My brother-in-law pays for Premium and it has spoiled me. But it seems like a lot of my favorite YouTubers are leaving the platform, so who knows what’ll happen.

I enjoyed this pull quote because it shows to me that we shouldn’t just lament the loss of what we had. If anything, all this flurry of IndieWeb activity should be an indicator that something less terrible will inevitably emerge.