As per an admission from Google executive Jen Gennai, this is because Google is trying to draw a line in the sand and tell people what’s right and what’s wrong in our world. You can learn more about her statements here.
The day we are shut down from questioning, and forced into measures and information against our own will is the day everybody should know something is very wrong.
Being a researcher myself, the amount Google has changed over the past 10 years is pretty crazy, and it’s not longer a useful neutral search engine as many sources of information have been completely blocked by their algorithms.
Here at CE, we don’t use Google anymore for pretty well any of our searches. We are also in the process of moving away from any other Google products we use like Gmail. Currently, most of us use DuckDuckGo here at CE.
Here is a great list of alternatives you can try instead of Google. It’s interesting to compare search topics and see what comes up compared to Google:
Here are ten alternatives to Google search:
- StartPage – StartPage gives you Google search results, but without the tracking (based in the Netherlands).
- Searx – A privacy-friendly and versatile metasearch engine that’s also open source.
- MetaGer – An open source metasearch engine with good features, based in Germany.
- SwissCows – A zero-tracking private search engine based in Switzerland, hosted on secure Swiss infrastructure.
- Qwant – A private search engine based in France.
- DuckDuckGo – A private search engine based in the US.
- Mojeek – The only true search engine (rather than metasearch engine) that has its own crawler and index (based in the UK).
- YaCy – A decentralized, open source, peer-to-peer search engine.
- Givero – Based in Denmark, Givero offers more privacy than Google and combines search with charitable donations.
- Ecosia – Ecosia is based in Germany and donates a part of revenues to planting trees.
