Mayhap you should give DuckDuckGo a try. Just a try.

On a local mailing list devoted to open source, I linked to an article called Why I Left Google:

The Google I was passionate about was a technology company that empowered its employees to innovate. The Google I left was an advertising company with a single corporate-mandated focus.

Technically I suppose Google has always been an advertising company, but for the better part of the last three years, it didn’t feel like one. Google was an ad company only in the sense that a good TV show is an ad company: having great content attracts advertisers.

Under Eric Schmidt ads were always in the background. Google was run like an innovation factory, empowering employees to be entrepreneurial through founder’s awards, peer bonuses and 20% time. … Maybe the engineers who actually worked on ads felt it, but the rest of us were convinced that Google was a technology company first and foremost; a company that hired smart people and placed a big bet on their ability to innovate. …

It turns out that there was one place where the Google innovation machine faltered and that one place mattered a lot: competing with Facebook. Informal efforts produced a couple of antisocial dogs in Wave and Buzz. Orkut never caught on outside Brazil. Like the proverbial hare confident enough in its lead to risk a brief nap, Google awoke from its social dreaming to find its front runner status in ads threatened.

Google could still put ads in front of more people than Facebook, but Facebook knows so much more about those people. Advertisers and publishers cherish this kind of personal information, so much so that they are willing to put the Facebook brand before their own. …

Larry Page himself assumed command to right this wrong. Social became state-owned, a corporate mandate called Google+. It was an ominous name invoking the feeling that Google alone wasn’t enough. Search had to be social. Android had to be social. You Tube, once joyous in their independence, had to be … well, you get the point. Even worse was that innovation had to be social. Ideas that failed to put Google+ at the center of the universe were a distraction.

Suddenly, 20% meant half-assed. Google Labs was shut down. App Engine fees were raised. APIs that had been free for years were deprecated or provided for a fee. As the trappings of entrepreneurship were dismantled, derisive talk of the “old Google” and its feeble attempts at competing with Facebook surfaced to justify a “new Google” that promised “more wood behind fewer arrows.”

The days of old Google hiring smart people and empowering them to invent the future was gone. The new Google knew beyond doubt what the future should look like. Employees had gotten it wrong and corporate intervention would set it right again.

Officially, Google declared that “sharing is broken on the web” and nothing but the full force of our collective minds around Google+ could fix it. …

As it turned out, sharing was not broken. Sharing was working fine and dandy, Google just wasn’t part of it. People were sharing all around us and seemed quite happy. A user exodus from Facebook never materialized. I couldn’t even get my own teenage daughter to look at Google+ twice, “social isn’t a product,” she told me after I gave her a demo, “social is people and the people are on Facebook.” Google was the rich kid who, after having discovered he wasn’t invited to the party, built his own party in retaliation. The fact that no one came to Google’s party became the elephant in the room.

My remark was “Good piece. I think his analysis is sadly correct.”

One person responded, “There’s always Ask, DuckDuckGo, and Yahoo!”

My reply: “Yahoo is just Bing, & I know how most of us feel about Microsoft. That said, Bing isn’t too bad, actually. However, I’ve been using DuckDuckGo & it’s pretty dang fine.”¹

D. H. replied:

Sorry, but it’s going to take close to an earthquake to get me to switch from Google.

And that proverbial “cold day in hell” before I use Bing and / or Yahoo.

I have spent my life since 1994 to eliminate as much of MS world as I can. …

Google - live long and prosper!

My final reply, which focuses on reasons to try DuckDuckGo:

Choosing not to use Microsoft is understandable. And I can even understand going completely, totally MS-free. In my case, I use Windows to play games, & I use Microsoft keyboards because they’re the best, cheapest ergonomic keyboards I can find. And every once in a while, I’ll use Bing if I’m not getting good results from Google et al.

But Google is increasingly problematic, you have to admit.

So it might be smart to investigate alternatives. Just investigate. For that, I’d check out DuckDuckGo. As Wikipedia says, “DuckDuckGo is an Internet search engine. It uses information from crowd-sourced sites (such as Wikipedia) to augment traditional results and improve relevance. The search engine policy emphasizes privacy and does not record user information.”

DuckDuckGo has a whole site on how it protects privacy, at http://donttrack.us. And there’s more at http://dontbubble.us.

From DuckDuckGo’s site (http://duckduckgo.com/privacy.html): “DuckDuckGo does not collect or share personal information. That is our privacy policy in a nutshell. The rest of this page tries to explain why you should care.”

It’s got pretty darn good results. And the “bang” syntax is pretty awesome. Check it out here: http://help.duckduckgo.com/customer/portal/articles/215625 & then https://duckduckgo.com/bang.html.

That said, I still use many of Google’s services. I’m just trying to investigate alternatives to various things.

Give DuckDuckGo a try, at either http://duckduckgo.com or http://ddg.gg. After you get a feel for it, try out the !bang syntax. For instance, to search Wikipedia directly from DDG, you’d enter this: !w scott granneman. To search Amazon from DDG, try this: !a scott granneman. There are literally 1000 others just like this. That is reason enough to give it a whirl.