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There's an interesting article on Gizmodo (so please take it with a grain of salt) about trying to cut Google out of your life - long story short, it's surprisingly hard and some things you wouldn't expect will break.

https://gizmodo.com/i-cut-google-out-of-my-life-it-screwed-u...



YMMV. I mostly moved off Google for my own usage last year and deleted my paid Google Apps account (let’s ignore work usage as that’s out of my hands). Remaining services I use are YouTube (no competitor), books.google.com (occasionally, when Hathi is proving too slow) and groups.google.com (the project I mostly contribute to organises there). Of those three I could dump books.google.com without too much effort and I only interface with groups.google.com via email; moving to another provider would be totally possible if needed.


True enough. I found the things mentioned in the article interesting because you also lose things like Google Web Fonts and a number of services which depend on the Google Maps APIs for mapping.

Unfortunately, I won't be able to completely disconnect because I've got a number of friends who share photos through Google Photos (and I would like to keep access to those), a number of friends who only use Hangouts (not sure if that's better or worse than FB Messenger), and YouTube doesn't have any real competitors.


it's hard to compete with YouTube's network for content discovery, but if you're uploading/distributing video Vimeo remains a great primary service.


One of my largest problems with ridding Google from my life has been dealing with their Captchas.




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