AKA the day I stopped using Google. I don’t like the new policy of Google by pushing other services, like Google + to any Google account. It seems that I have a Google website now as well.
The day I started Google I can’t exactly recall, must be back in the 90’s, at least it feels that way, a friend asked me which site I normally used for search the internet. AskJeeves, Lycos, Hotbot or AltaVista. He said, try Google it’s clean and very fast. I tried it, liked it, and started it using form that day on.
Since then I tried Yahoo a couple of times, but no good. Yahoo doesn’t seem to have heard of the Levenshtein function, so it never corrected my typo’s which is , considered my bad typing, invaluable for any search engines. I always wondered why only Google implemented it.
MSN, Live or Bing has never been an option to me, since Microsoft started accidentally / deliberately blocking competitors.
This year Google broke my spatial keyboard navigation in my Opera browser. Google made a kind of key-logger from their homepage, every key I accidentally hit on my computer is sent into the search box and up to the Google servers. I can’t move focus of the search-box, so the walk through the several links with Opera’s superb keyboard handling is borked.
And I got sick of all that Javascript running, I got sick of all the cookies that personalized my search results. I live in Amsterdam, but I prefer to have the same view on the world as someone in London, Moscow or New Delhi.
Is DuckDuckGO the way to GO? At least their privacy policy is better.