What It’s Like To Stop Using Google Search

Most of the time I don’t notice a single difference

For almost twenty years, I used Google as my main search engine.

When it first appeared in 1997, Google was wildly better than the competition. You young’uns don’t remember this — shakes cane — but back in the ‘90s, search engines were a hot mess. You’d type your query into AltaVista or Lycos or HotBot, and behold! — a jumbled list of marginally relevant junk. Infoseek was slightly better because you could do a search, then do another search inside those results, and so on and so on (a cool technique that I wish someone would reboot today, tbh). But mostly you just waded through a swamp of irrelevant search results. You’d type in “best pizza in Toronto” and get, like, three web sites devoted to rollerblades, the CIA World Factbook entry for Albania, and a GeoCities page devoted to the German fansubbed rip of Battle of the Planets. They called it “surfing” the web because honestly, you might drown.

Then Google arrived, and the seas parted. It had a brilliant social insight powering its “PageRank” ranking algorithm (i.e. that a page with lots of links pointing to it was more noteworthy than a mere keyword match). Google did a bigger, huger “crawl” of the web than any other search engine, so they had the most complete results. If you…