Privacy concerns aside, a bigger problem for me was the declining quality of the overall search experience. Search engines had become overly commercialised, cluttered with far too many ads, and just weren’t delivering the information I wanted.
A year ago, I stopped using traditional search engines like Google and Microsoft Bing to find information. Over the years, I have written about my concerns around privacy, and how Google and Instagram’s parent Meta Platforms handle data from you and me, and their other users.
They track our activity across the internet, store our personal information and, indeed, even misuse or expose our private data to boost their own bottom lines. They see us merely as a product that helps them boost their ad revenues, yet until now, we have used them only because there just wasn’t a better alternative.
