Friday, January 20, 2012

Your First Hit is Free, Kid

I like to think I'm not addicted to Google, but that might just be wishful thinking. Google influences how I experience the internet to a pretty large degree. I use Blogger (obviously) for blogging (once more, obviously), Gmail and Google Docs for email and schoolwork,  YouTube for stupid entertainment, and Google Reader to aggregate just about all the sites I follow, so Google has a hand in pretty much everything I do on the internet.

However, I'm really not sure if that makes me an addict. There are plenty of services that do exactly what Google's products do. I actually have a Windows Live email account, and if Google ever betrayed its customers' trust to the degree that I would no longer feel safe with giving them access to my personal information I could see myself switch to Live. Microsoft has a suite of web apps almost identical to Google Docs. There are other RSS readers that I could use. I don't really care if Google knows what YouTube videos I'm watching.

As to Google's flagship product, Google Web Search, I'm not sure where I stand. I checked my Google web history and went back through the past month, and on average I only actually use Google search about four times a day. I'm wary of Google in that way - if I'm looking for information, I'll usually go looking on sites like Wikipedia before I turn to Google. I think that's probably pretty unusual, but I suspect Google can get a better picture of me from my web searches than it can from the documents I'm saving or the emails I'm receiving. I still much prefer Google Web search over any competing services, though. But if worst comes to worst, I can always delete my Google account and use search without logging in.

But that might just be the equivalent of saying "I can quit whenever I want to." In fact, it's worse. It's saying "I can half-quit if I'm really pushed to."

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