I've switched to
www.duckduckgo.com for my home page. The thing about Google is that it's a habit thing. It's a world known service and most people use it and we even say "google it" when searching. But honestly, the switch has not really been that hard. I just switched my home page to DDG and naturally I use it. For images they have the bing images on the side. I'm not a huge MS fan, but my guess is they don't harvest data as much as Google does.
I also blocked all Google cookies. Though I'm sure they still track by IP. Whenever you go to a website that has adsense ads or other google products on it, they've tracked what site you went to. Really what I should do is block the actual google hosts right at my firewall. I still use Google adsense on my website though, I should probably switch to something else as it would be hypocrite of me to block adsense on every site I visit when I'm actually using it on my own sites.
I have no issues with sites logging certain activity, but Google is taking it way too far, and what makes it scary is how everything is linked together, and the fact that they just threw us into google+ without asking and now everyone we know can probably see what you search for etc... If not, I'm sure they'll just randomly throw in that feature eventually.
I also cannot stand the Google instant search crap they added a while back. I actually wanted to switch a long time ago but never really bothered till recently. You can turn that shit off, but you have to be logged in to your google account for that setting to stick properly. That means logging in on very PC you use, thus enabling even more tracking. No thanks.
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