Leaving Google has actively improved my life

What “leaving Google” means in practice

• Most commenters interpret it as reducing or eliminating use of Google services (Gmail, Search, Docs, Photos, Android), not quitting Google as an employer.
• Several people partially “de-Google”: YouTube, Maps, and Books/Scholar are commonly cited as the hardest to replace; search and email are the main things people actually move.
• Some keep a legacy Gmail account as a spam sink or for account recovery while using another provider day‑to‑day.

Email after Gmail

• Popular alternatives mentioned: Fastmail, Proton, Soverin, iCloud Mail, Tuta; a few self‑host.
• Many argue the author’s improved inbox is mostly from getting a fresh address and stricter “digital hygiene,” not from leaving Gmail specifically.
• Several say Gmail’s spam filtering is far superior to Proton, Outlook, and iCloud; others prize privacy more than spam quality.
• Frustrations with alternatives: Proton’s search is described as slow and unreliable; migration becomes hard once aliases are widely used.
• Some use their own domain to stay portable while swapping providers.

Gmail behavior, privacy, and “smart” features

• Confusion around “algorithmic sorting”: some refer to Priority Inbox; others to the default Promotions/Social/Updates tabs. These can be turned off, but many users never do.
• One commenter notes Workspace’s setting to disable “smart features”; others say it also disables category tabs and can flood the inbox.
• Disagreement on whether Gmail scans content for ad targeting: one cites Google’s claim to have stopped in 2017; others distrust this or note Gmail still analyzes mail in some way.

Search engines: DDG, Brave, Kagi, Google, others

• Strong split on DuckDuckGo:
  • Critics say it’s fine as a “go-to-site bookmarker” but bad for deeper queries, local results, images, recipes, small forums, and non‑English content; many end up appending !g to most queries.
  • Supporters report acceptable quality with fewer ads and less “AI slop,” and say Google now often returns the same SEO‑spammy pages.
• Kagi receives the most consistent praise: faster, fewer or no ads, better relevance, per‑user domain boosting/blocking, and reduced need to ever check Google. Some say they’d keep Kagi over Netflix; others object to its use of Yandex or to paying for search at all.
• Brave Search and Qwant/Ecosia also get positive mentions; several run meta‑search like SearxNG to combine engines.
• Many agree Google is still best at:
  • Local/business queries and maps.
  • Very long‑tail technical content.
  • Near‑real‑time indexing (especially Reddit).
• There’s repeated frustration that all major search engines have degraded due to SEO spam and sheer adversarial scale.

AI layers over search and personal data

• Some disable AI features (autocomplete, summaries, grammar) and feel happier. Others now find Gemini/Gemini Flash or DDG/Kagi AI summaries genuinely useful, especially for:
  • Quick answers about APIs, library functions, or docs.
  • Searching across their own long histories of photos, email, and events.
• One view: big‑tech AI over personal data is finally delivering obvious user value, even if it raises privacy and centralization concerns.

Non‑search Google services

• YouTube is widely seen as irreplaceable; most rely on ad blockers or accept it as the “last Google thing” they can’t quit.
• Google Books, Scholar, and Ngram are also cited as monopolistic but extremely useful niches.
• For Docs‑style collaboration, people mention Outline, Nextcloud+Collabora, CryptPad, OnlyOffice, and Typst; others simply don’t need live co‑authoring.

Critiques of the blog post itself

• Several readers found the title misleading (expecting an ex‑employee story) and the content light: mostly a personal victory lap with little concrete comparison of features or tradeoffs.
• Detractors say many benefits described (cleaner inbox, fewer sign‑ups, going directly to specialized sites) are independent of provider or could be achieved by changing settings, not by “leaving Google.”
• Others defend the piece as a subjective lifestyle report rather than a technical case study.

Ads, money, and the structure of the internet

• One major subthread argues the core problem isn’t Google alone but the economic model:
  • “Free” services are actually funded by advertising and data harvesting; if we reject that, we must accept either paying up front or some form of public/collective funding.
  • Counter‑arguments note even paid services increasingly add ads; and that large platforms extract significant rents from this system.
• Some advocate:
  • Treating email and search as public utilities or subsidized services.
  • More robust antitrust enforcement, especially against vertically integrated ad/hosting/search giants.
  • Simply running ad blockers and letting ad‑dependent, low‑value sites die.
• Others stress that users already pay substantial sums for connectivity and subscriptions, and are willing to pay more for high‑quality, non‑exploitative services (Kagi, Fastmail, Proton, etc.), but network effects and defaults keep them on Google.

Psychological and cultural aspects of “de-Googling”

• Several note the hardest part isn’t technical migration but habit and identity: changing default search, removing Chrome, or giving up the sense of convenience.
• Some celebrate self‑hosting or multi‑provider setups as a way to feel more independent and less locked into any one ecosystem.
• A few compare anti‑Google narratives to a kind of status‑seeking or conspiratorial mindset, where “quitting big tech” becomes part of personal virtue signaling rather than a carefully reasoned tradeoff.