I wrote many times in the last year that i really don’t like the direction Google is going to. So from a fan of the company i became more of a Google sceptic. Among the things i don’t like using their search engine is living in the so called Filter bubble, the shameless promotion of their products over much better alternatives and their positive bias towards themselves.
For a long time i’ve been looking for an alternative to Google Search. I considered using Bing and Yahoo but they are not what i want. Unfortunately Google is hard to beat not because other search engines wouldn’t be good engines, it is because Google searches very well in certain languages. For example if you search in German it will return relevant links for that language. Other search engines don’t do this because its quite hard to do such a broad search engine.
Anyway i gave up the thought that i will find a search engine that its good at local languages. I found a search engine named DuckDuckGo. Yeah, i know they have a funny name. But their search is working like a charm. I’m using it for almost a week now and i wasn’t missing Google.
So i decided that i do a 30 day challenge. Like an irony of fate i was inspired by Matt Cutts (Google’s anti spam team) to do 30 day challenges. This will be the first.
What is a 30 day challenge ? Actually a 30 day challenge is when you decide that you will do something for 30 days in a row. And 30 days seems to be enough to build a habit out of your challenge.
My first 30 day challenge is not to use Google Search. No matter what i need to learn there are different search engines and there are different ways to learn things. No Google Search for me until the 11th of May. And i will see after that.
I will keep you informed of my progress in the following weeks and i will also write a more thorough report on how can you search the web without Google when i finish my challenge.
Laszlo Bodor
