Switching from Google
An use case for our data.
Privacy, how do we measure its value? It seems as time goes by the internet nibbles away certain parts of it. This ability to establish clear boundaries as individuals with the people that sorround us has become somewhat of a complex and shallow dilemma. There is a compromise we (implicitly) agree upon once we decide to use services on the web, it is mostly given. This is specially true on the part of free services, like Google, Twitter, Facebook, Microsoft, to name a few of the more familiar ones. I also point out specifically Apple, who has made, in the past, headlines in their ongoing legal fight between our data and the ability for third parties to utilize it (Exhibit A). Apple as a corporation has an incentive to fight through, being a hardware company first; their capital is derived from other tangible products.
This brings me specifically to the case of Google. As a service, they provide wonderful tools, insight and potential to connect with those that sorrounds us, in more meaningful ways. But if we are not careful, strangers too can tap this wealth of information. Google, as a service, brings unique behaviors and patterns over the conglomerate of my data as collected by them. This is done with the consideration that the corporation will offer me a benefit that would otherwise require an extraordinary effort from my part, but also providing this data to the corporation. This is pretty much true of all their products and/or services. A trivial use case would be YouTube. I see relevant videos from the sources i keep consuming (History, Music, Tech, etc…), from sources that i wouldnt possibly be able to get to know while being thousands of miles away. This provides tangible value to the fact that i give up certain information to use the site.
After considering all this with regards to Google the search engine, ive been sporadically favoring using DuckDuckGo for the past years. Comparing the results from one system to the other, in terms of the advantage sticking with Google brings. After 2 years A/B Testing and comparing and contrasting the results, i feel ready to make the transition, while acknowledging the benefits that i will lose with using Google Search Engine, and that those could be mitigated. This can be substantially seen on searches of breaking news. My guess is that Google’s crawler is way faster and potent, it is after all a gigantic corporation with billions of dollars at their disposal, for this their flagship product.
Steps to gradually move away from using Chrome
By default Chrome uses google, of course, A simple remap of the default values of Chrome will suffice. The search engine edit bars just require some simple keybindings that could be done in minutes. In my current setup writing google foobar would correspondingly Google that topic. Therefore, only providing a redefinition to search using duck duck go, did the trick. The major problem was with the lookup of pages and of past searches. I constantly use Instapaper to keep the articles that im interested. And of course chrome keeps my history per user.
Enter Firefox Quantum \o/
It has been a great challenge for me to stop using Google Chrome in my daily routine mainly because of 3 things:
- Customizable Search engine bar
- Ram usage and overall performance
- Chrome Dev Tools
But i got to say, with the addition of the CSS Grid tools, Firefox has been gaining a huge chunk of my attention. I still need a bit of getting used to, specially on the unified searching bar, but i can sacrifice the learning curve over being a part of the direction Mozilla has taken, at least for me as a user.
For the specific sites i frequent (mainly, StackOverflow, HackerNews, Feedly…) Firefox has me covered, and since those are mostly portal for more articles and information, i dont see the need to keep searching places since content arrives on their end (This is work examining in a few months).
Going Forward
The next steps are to gradually move my work environment from Chrome to Firefox, at least for usage with their Dev Tools + the reconfiguration of my searches. And this was specially true after installing the multi account containers for Firefox which was an amazing discovery for me, at least.