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Miguel Piedrafita
Miguel Piedrafita

Posted on • Originally published at miguelpiedrafita.com on

Moving away from Google

Concerned about Google's monopoly and approach to privacy, I've decided to take some steps towards ungoogling my life. Here are some alternatives to Google products:

Browser

This is the easiest part but also one of the most difficult ones. If like me you've used Chrome all your life, switching to Firefox may be super hard. Fortunately, there's an alternative. Ungoogled Chromium is a fork of Chrome that removes all the google stuff from chrome. It comes with a downside tho, you'll need to follow a specific procedure to install new extensions.

Google+

I was actually surprised by the reaction to the shutdown announcement. Turns out someone was using it! Anyways, if you were one of those people, I'd suggest you Twitter or Mastodon.

Google Search

Use DuckDuckGo. And if those "your data shouldn't be for sale" popups annoy you, use DuckDuckGo StartPage. Missing some results? Prepend !g to your query and you'll get the same results you'd get with Google.

Google Drive, Docs, Sheets & Slides

For Drive, you can use Dropbox, or Nextcloud if you have a server to host it on. The best alternative I've found for Google Docs is Notion. For slides, you can use slides.com, and Airtable is a good alternative to Sheets.

Gmail

Another tough one. The best alternative I've found is Zoho Mail (which also allows custom domains for free), but you can also try ProtonMail.

Google Analytics

I've been using Fathom for a while now on all my websites and I'm loving it, though I've been also hearing good things about SimpleAnalytics.

Other

Pieter Levels made a website listing alternatives to all Google products.

Top comments (1)

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Jonny Sherwood-Bowes

Instead of using "start.duckduckgo.com" I just use "duckduckgo.com/html". Ecosia is also amazing ;) :)