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DeGoogle 8/2026

Introduction

I have been on a degoogle and de big tech journey officially now for about a year. However, it goes back further than that. I'm going to share some of what my journey has looked like in this post. I want to go through some of the why, some of my early steps before I was doing it officially, and my more recent actions. As you read, please keep in mind that this process is a dial instead of an on off switch. You don't need to do everything here. You don't need to completely stop use. Any reduction is of benefit to you. I say that because a lot of things you will see on the web will be either or, yet when you start to look at it, the steps can easily become overwhelming. Think of everything you might have through google and other big tech. Email, maps, youtube, smart phone, facebook and other social media, drive, windows, and so many other things. Just do what you can for now. The rest can come later, or not at all. You will still be way ahead of most people.


Why?

The first question I usually get, is why? Why go to all this trouble? The answer will be different for everyone. I'm going to go through my reasons and some of the most common ones I hear. This will be a short description of the why, I might do a more in depth analysis in another post sometime. One of the most common reasons I hear is political. There have been many stories about governments using information from big tech to track down dissenters, whistle blowers, immigrants, and similar. While I'm not the kind of person to make all of my decisions for political reasons, this is certainly a valid reason to do it and I consider it a benefit for me even though it isn't my primary reason. On a related note, one of my primary reasons is more general privacy. Not just from governments, but also from the companies themselves. I don't need google knowing who I'm talking to and why, or where I'm driving to, or what my home life is like, or what my family looks like. I know so many people who are perfectly fine giving all this information and more to big tech, but wouldn't be happy if someone was peeping in their windows at home. To me, it's the same thing regardless of who is peeping into my life-google or the creep from down the street.
My other primary reason is control. I can control my own data. I own what I use. No company can remove my data due to some arbitrary reason buried in a 10 page agreement in size 1 font. I can do what I want, when I want, how I want with my data. The feeling of control is great. I can access my data anytime at home, even when the internet is out. I don't see ads anymore. Even on youtube. I get better search results when doing a web search.
Finally, I can avoid AI. I am not going to get too deep into my feelings on AI in this post, as I could probably do an entire paper on it, but I'll give my basic rundown. I accept that AI can have some uses and I'm okay with people using it if they choose. I am not okay with the way it is getting shoved down our throats, how everything computer related is coming with it, how it always seems to be difficult to disable, how it is opt out instead of opt in, or the significant environmental impacts of the data centers. In short, I don't like how I feel like I'm being told what to do. If I don't have a use for it, I shouldn't be forced to use it. If I should ever choose to use it, it will be a self hosted model (probably will do a future post on that). This site will never use AI generated content.


Bookmarks

Now that we know some of the why, let's look at first steps. These are the low hanging fruit, the things most people can do with a few minutes of time and not much impact on online life. Let's start with the most simple thing that I started with. Bookmarks. Here is what I used to do, every month when I would pay all my bills, I would google each individual company I need to pay to get to their paying page and go to it from the link in google search. Silly, time consuming, and giving ad revenue and searches to google when they really don't need any more revenue. So, my very first step was to gather all the sites I need on a regular basis, mostly bill pay sites, bank and credit card sites, my online timecards and email for work. All that kind of stuff. Every single site login page got it's own bookmark on my browser toolbar. The less used ones got saved in the menu. I probably cut my google searches in half just by doing this. It also made my bill paying much faster without all the useless web searching. I know it sounds silly, but it was a simple thing with a huge impact on me. Please, if you are someone who googles a site every time you need to log in to it, make this change if you do nothing else.

Language

Okay, you have your bookmarks set and fixed? Good. Let's talk googling things. Stop saying I'm going to google that! Seriously, stop it! Please, don't say that anymore. Start saying almost anything else. Web search, internet search, website search, information search, even just search. Anything. This will start to get you into the mode of google not needing to be the default. Google wants to be the default, they want you to use it as a verb. They count on being the default. It's free advertising for them. They aren't paying you to spread their name, at least not with money. So stop helping them. A funny story on this, I grew up in the early internet age. My brother, let's call him Tim (fake name), had this habit of every time someone asked a general knowledge question (such as who is that actor in a movie we were watching, or what was that book name, that type of thing), he would run to the computer and look it up. This was mid to late 2001s-early 2010s. He did it so much, that we started calling it tim it instead of google it. My entire family, and my now wife, use tim it whenever we are talking about a web search now. I even have some of my co workers using it since I use it so much. They haven't even met my brother. This is just to show, you can get creative and have fun with it.

Search

Have you stopped saying that you googled it? Now we can drop google search. I'm just going to list some of the main ones I have used. I have used the following other than google: DuckDuckGo, Brave Search, Startpage, self hosted searxng, self hosted yacy. I will talk self hosted search engines in another post as it's beyond the scope of this post. DuckDuckGo gets results from bing, startpage gets them from google, bing has some of it's own indexing but also gets most of its results from the likes of big search. I have had the best luck with rotating between them. All have their pluses and minuses. None of them are perfect, so my best advice is to try a few of them and see how it goes. I find that startpage does the best if you're used to google and want the easiest transition. Brave is a good middle of the road solution. DuckDuckGo has some things that neither other one has. I have them all bookmarked on my toolbar. What these more private search engines do is act as a middleman between big search and you. They send the search request to google or bing and the results get sent back to them to show to you. This isn't a perfect solution, but it's a start that will put you ahead of the average person.

Browsers

Now for the browser. Delete chrome. Really, get rid of it. It is one of the biggest pieces of spyware there is. Even in incognito mode. So much of what you type and view goes back to google. While you're at it, might want to avoid microsoft edge as well. Now what to replace it with? If you search this, you will find a million people with two million answers. This is a beginner guide, so I'm going to give the beginner answers. They are simple. On desktop, use LibreWolf.net (a firefox based browser) or Brave browser (same as the search company-based on chrome). You could also use Vivaldi, another chrome based browser. The big difference between vivaldi and brave is that brave includes ad blocking even on youtube by default, vivaldi doesn't. Vivaldi has some better privacy protections. Both are excellent for beginner degooglers because they have removed all the google nastiness but have all the compatability with websites that you expect. Pretty much anything that works in chrome works in them. Either one will also work well in a smart phone as well and are available in the android app stores. Now, let's talk firefox and related. Overall, Firefox is my favorite ever browser. It has its issues like all programs, but is an extremely private browser with the right settings. That's why I like Librewolf. It is firefox with privacy modifications. It isn't compatible with as many sites as the chrome based browsers, but I have found very few that don't work. I use both LibreWolf and brave on my personal computer. I use brave and firefox on my phone, as I haven't found a LibreWolf equivalent that I like on android. My workflow is to use the Firefox based browsers for everything and only switch to the chrome based ones if something doesn't work. I also install Ublock on Firefox based browsers to block ads. Brave browser has built in ad blocking and doesn't need it.

Conclusion

You do these things, and you will be a ways ahead of the average person. You will have freed yourself from search, browsers, and the language of google. This post is getting long, so on to the Next where I will go into some midrange things you can do-VPNs, email, maps, some of the more difficult things.