Last Updated on April 15, 2022
Google has a firm grip on the desktop. Their products and services are ubiquitous. Don’t get us wrong, we’re long-standing admirers of many of Google’s products and services. They are often high quality, easy to use, and ‘free’, but there can be downsides of over-reliance on a specific company. For example, there are concerns about their privacy policies, business practices, and an almost insatiable desire to control all of our data, all of the time.
What if you are looking to move away from Google and embark on a new world of online freedom, where you are not constantly tracked, monetised and attached to Google’s ecosystem.
In this series we explore how you can migrate from Google without missing out on anything.
Google Search is a hugely popular web search engine with more than 92% market share. But there are many who are concerned about how the service tracks them. If you believe that Google invades your privacy, what alternatives do we recommend?
Let’s start with Startpage. They are a Dutch-based Google search alternative that stakes its reputation as a privacy search option. The service actually retrieves its search results from Google, paying them to get a feed of links for any search. Startpage submits your query to Google anonymously, then returns Google results to you privately. Google never sees you and does not know who made the request; they only see Startpage. Obviously using Startpage doesn’t break away from Google’s ecosystem.
DuckDuckGo is another privacy search option. Their service collates data from hundreds of sources including Wolfram Alpha, Wikipedia and Bing, with their own proprietary web crawler, to surface the most relevant results. Google does exactly the same, albeit on a somewhat larger scale. The main difference is that DuckDuckGo does not store IP addresses or user information. There isn’t storing or tracking of a user’s search history. Therefore there is no profiling of users, and all users see the same search results for a specific search term. Some of DuckDuckGo’s source code is open source published under the Apache 2.0 License, but the core is proprietary.
Qwant is another search engine that sets its store by claiming it doesn’t employ user tracking or personalize search results. As Qwant is based in France, users gain some protection due to tighter European privacy laws.
All articles in this series:
| Alternatives to Google's Products and Services | |
|---|---|
 | Analytics is a platform for both website and mobile app analytics. This hosted web analytics software remains the mostly widely used analytics service. |
 | Bazel is a fast, scalable, multi-language and extensible build system for building both client and server software. |
 | Blogger is an online content management system which enables its users to write blog with time-stamped entries. |
 | Calendar helps manage your busy life with a digital calendar. It offers tons of features and makes it easy to keep track of life’s important events all in one place. |
 | Charts lets users visualize data on their website. It offers a wide range of ready-to-use chart types. The most common way to use Google Charts is with JavaScript that’s embedded in a web page. |
 | Chat is communication software which provides direct messages and team chat rooms, together with a group messaging function. |
 | Chrome is application software for accessing the World Wide Web. It's the most popular web browser but has a chequered track record from a privacy perspective. |
 | Chrome Remote Desktop is a remote desktop software tool that allows a user to remotely control another computer’s desktop through a proprietary protocol. |
 | Classroom is a learning platform for educational institutions that aims to simplify creating, distributing, and grading assignments. The main aim of the platform is to streamline the process of sharing files between teachers and students. |
 | Contacts is a contact management service. It's available on the sidebar of Gmail, a web app, and for Android. |
 | DNS resolves a particular domain name to its IP equivalent. There are many free DNS providers. A few stand out from the crowd. |
 | Docs is a web-based productivity office suite. The suite includes Google Docs, Google Sheets, Google Slides, Google Drawings, Google Forms, Google Sites, and Google Keep. |
 | Drawings is diagramming software included as part of the web-based Google Docs Editors suite. Create and edit flowcharts, organizational charts, website wireframes, mind maps, concept maps, and more. |
 | Drive is a file storage and synchronization service. Want a solution that also includes the online office components available in Google Docs? |
 | Earth Pro maps Earth by superimposing satellite images, aerial photography, and GIS. Fly anywhere to see satellite imagery, 3D buildings, 3D trees, terrain, Street View, planets and much more. |
 | FeedBurner is a web feed management service. Feeds are a way for websites large and small to distribute their content well beyond just visitors using browsers. |
 | Finance is a website focusing on business news and financial information. It provides real-time market quotes, international exchanges, financial news, and analytics. |
 | Firebase is a platform for creating mobile and web applications. It's currently their flagship offering for app development providing an all-in-one cloud service. |
 | Fonts is a computer font and web font service. It offers font families and an interactive web directory for browsing the library. |
 | Forms is a survey administration software included as part of the free, web-based Google Docs Editors suite. |
 | Gboard is a virtual keyboard app developed for Android and iOS devices. It features Google Search and predictive answers. |
 | Gmail is a hugely popular email service. You might not like the automated scanning of email content. |
 | Groups is a service that provides discussion groups for people sharing common interests. Part of the service is similar to mailing lists. |
 | Jamboard is a digital interactive whiteboard developed to work with Google Workspace. Sketch your ideas whiteboard-style while benefiting from the access and connectivity of an interactive canvas, on mobile or directly from your web browser. |
 | Keep is a note-taking service. The app offers a variety of tools for taking notes, including text, lists, images, and audio. |
 | Maps is a web mapping service offering satellite imagery, aerial photography, street maps, and interactive panoramic views. |
 | Meet is a video-communication service. It offers enterprise-grade video conferencing built on Google’s global infrastructure. |
 | News is a news aggregator service. It offers a continuous flow of links to articles organized from thousands of publishers and magazines. |
| Password Manager is a password manager built into Chrome and Android devices. It's published under a proprietary license with little information about security used. |
 | Photos stores your images in the cloud for convenient access from anywhere. Lots of useful tools, but it’s difficult to shake the sinking feeling that Google is analysing your pictures. |
| Search looks at privacy-focused alternatives to Google Search. If you believe that Google invades your privacy, what alternatives do we recommend? |
 | Sheets is a spreadsheet program included as part of the free, web-based Google Docs Editors suite. |
 | Sites is a structured wiki and web page creation tool. Build internal project hubs, team sites, public-facing websites, and more—all without designer, programmer, or IT help. |
 | Slides lets you create pitch decks, project presentations, training modules, and more. It's part of the Google Docs Editors suite. |
 | Tasks is a task management application which lets users manage, capture, and edit their tasks. It's included with Google Workspace. |
 | Translate is a multilingual neural machine translation service that translates text and websites from one language into another. |
 | YouTube is an online video sharing and social media platform. It's a hugely popular service but has encountered a number of privacy issues. |
It’s crazy the amount of information that companies are collating about us. Many countries even lack a basic legal framework to protect privacy.
For example, the UK does not have a written constitution that enshrines a right to privacy for individuals and there is no common law that provides for a general right to privacy. Instead you get a wishy-washy national law based on the European Convention on Human Rights enacted through the Dara Protection Act.
I have use DuckDuckGo and Startpage (Ixquick) for years. I will not use google
Whenever I need to use Google, I turn to Whoogle instead. Whoogle is a self-hosted, ad-free, privacy-respecting metasearch engine. Whoogle gets Google search results, but without any ads, JavaScript, AMP links, cookies, or IP address tracking. It’s easily deployable in one click as a Docker app, and customizable with a single config file. Quick and simple to implement as a primary search engine replacement on both desktop and mobile.
Search engines in the US offer no privacy at all – jump to Europe where privacy laws are stronger.
Qwant (FR) – mentioned above, is decent, but seems to have some availability problems w/ uptime; sometimes.
Look into the SearX / SearX-NG instances: do your due diligence here, as anyone can run one of these (including you.) Try
searx [DOT] space
for a list of instances.
Metager (DE) is also good, along with Mojeek (UK), if you believe their privacy policy.
Marginalia (NU) is also an interesting search engine w/ some security features.
You should also be running a hardened browser with sane defaults, like Seamonkey — and for further security, push your browser binary & related files to RAM. This way, when you close the browser, you don’t have EMCA-Script (Javascript) still running on your system – doing whatever the hell it wants – like identity theft.
Pushing to RAM also makes the browser ephemeral & you can set your own ACLs.
One more thing, you have absolutely NO privacy on M$ Doze. Use a secure OS on a dedicated box if privacy is mission critcal. Something like qubes or better yet, OpenBSD.