Google is the first place I go to ask a question. It influences all aspects of my life. It is the service that keeps me productive, helps me communicate, synchronizes my information, answers my calls, reports my web site visitors, and entertains me. Without Google I would be lost and I am not just talking about Google Navigation. I rely too much on Google.

The question of Google tracking me is ill relevant. They can see everything I do online, and I have nothing to hide. What I am worried about is relying too much on a single company’s services. Being dependent on Google has made me blind to alternatives. I see competitors as inferior merely because they are not Google. I propose going a month without Google will open my eyes to what the rest of the web has to offer, and these are the services I plan to use in Google’s absence.

GMail

As a MobileMe subscriber I put off joining the GMail public beta, and because I didn’t get thomasbrand@gmail.com I never fully adopted GMail as my primary email. It wasn’t just my choice in address that distanced me from Google’s email service. The whole concept of keeping everything forever, and searching years of correspondence never appealed to me. I like to sort my archived email in mailboxes and delete the rest. GMail’s labels and filters are a poor substitute to my isolation and minimalism. The less you have to search the less you have to find. Worst of all I never got comfortable with the ads Google served up based upon my email’s content. It is not that I am opposed to a computer reading my email and prescribing ads, it is that I am opposed to ads of any kind in my email.

It is not hard to see that GMail was the easiest Google service for me to find an alternative too. All I did was go back to Apple’s MobileMe a yearly cloud based personal information management service that costs me $69 annually and offers a lot more than just email. MobileMe may cost more than GMail, but it has reliably kept me connected since 2001 and it is hard to put a price on that.

Chrome

As a tech enthusiast I use multiple browsers. Not all at once mind you, I tend to switch every couple of months. Google Chrome is the fastest browser I have tried in a long time. Combined with its simplicity, security, and stability it is easy to see why Google Chrome is an ideal choice to search the internet. One of my favorite Google Chrome features is its ability to not only isolate session states between tabs, but isolate tab processes as well. This means what you do in one tab will not affect the others, and if one tab crashes it will not bring down the entire browser. I could care less about the themes, Chrome web store, and built in translation, but Google got it right by combining both web addresses and searches into a single address field.

Giving up Chrome would have been a tough sell if there weren’t so many good browser alternatives. On the Mac, Firefox and Safari are the obvious choices. Safari is the fastest of the two, and its OS integration and minimalist appeal are its strongest selling points. Firefox has more plugins, and its greater customization allowed me to choose an alternative search engine I was willing to live with for a month. In the end Firefox won not only because of its versatility but because of the Awesome Bar that combines web addresses, search, bookmarks, and history into a single field.

Search

For most people search is the most difficult Google service to find an alternative to. It is what Google does best, and it is integrated into so many browsers and site searches that it is almost impossible to avoid. I could have started off this entry by listing search first, but I was reluctant to begin my essay with a Google service I have still not found an adequate alternative for. The problem is Google search does so much more than just search.

It can…

• perform simple and complex calculations
• perform up-to-date conversions between currency
• perform unit conversions
• get the local time anywhere
• display the weather for U.S. and worldwide cities
• define words with a built-in dictionary
• show a map of anywhere in the world
• track flight status
• track packages
• act as a free proxy for cached pages
• find related information about any website
• and much much more.

While trying to find an adequate alternative to Google search the usual suspects come to mind, Yahoo! and Bing. Instead of using a second rate search engine everyone knows about I thought I would try a first rate search engine on its way to the top.

I learned about Duck Duck Go from Ben Brooks. I choose it as an alternative to Google because it provides fast results with less spam and clutter than even Google itself. Thanks to Wolfram Alpha, content detection, and various external mined data sources Duck Duck Go performs many of the special searches Google provides without recording my search history. Duck Duck Go may not be as fast or as comprehensive as Google search, but it is hard to knock the little duck for so much it does right.

Reader

Reader is another Google service that is hard to beat if only for its dominance in the RSS syncing arena. Almost every RSS client syncs with Google Reader, and the mobile versions go so far to exclude native subscription management altogether. It is becoming more and more common that the only way to get subscriptions into an RSS client is through Google Reader.

I have never been a fan of the Google Reader web site, and have always relied on NetNewsWire to read RSS subscriptions on my Mac. NetNewsWire is the premier RSS client for the Mac, and its subscription management is the best on any platform. Unfortunately NetNewsWire switched from MobileMe to Google Reader for syncing in version 3.2, and that makes it unsuitable for my month without Google. As an alternative I am reading my RSS in Apple’s Mail which does sync the read status over MobileMe.

On the iPad it is hard to find an RSS client that doesn’t rely on Google Reader for subscription management. I ended my search with the Early Edition which manages its feeds natively, but presents RSS articles in the form of a daily newspapers. I could care less about the paper, but once you open the articles individually it is not that bad.

Analytics

Google offers an enterprise-class web analytics service that I dabbled in for a number of years. If you maintain a large website with complex advertising campaigns Google Analytics might be for you. Luckily for me Google Analytics out grew Egg Freckles years ago and switching to a more approachable analytics package was long overdue.

Mint is a far more friendly way of breaking down who visits my site, what they are reading, and where they are coming from. Mint gives me the graphs I love without Flash, and has a extensive list of plugins called Peppers that make its reporting even better.

Voice

I have been a Google Voice user for the last couple of months. I find it invaluable for separating my business callers from my personal callers and allowing me to try out numerous phones on multiple carriers without porting my number. In addition Google Voice screens my calls, transcribes my messages, and allows me to send text messages from any internet connected computer. It will be tough to find a suitable alternative for Google Voice.

After searching the internet for suitable substitutes I gave up. I am sure there are some good ones out there, but I am not willing to abandon my prized Google Voice number for a one month experiment. If I do anything it will be to deactivate my Google Voice account, or just let it forward my calls with all of the bells and whistles turned off.

YouTube

Since removing Flash on all of my computers YouTube has been less of a problem. I don’t post videos to YouTube only watch them, and when I do it from my computer I use Safari and its iPad User Agent string to trick YouTube into displaying its video using H.264.

I suspect for my month without Google I will just ignore YouTube altogether. There are better sites out there for video, and my busy schedule allows me to be choosing about my distractions.

Docs

Google Docs allows you to create, edit, and share popular office document formats on the web. As a person who does not use Microsoft Office I found Google Spreadsheets to be an acceptable alternative to Excel for basic number crunching. Unfortunately anything I uploaded to Google Docs loses its formatting and can no longer be shared with people expecting an updated version of the same document.

Giving up Google Docs means turning to my iPad where I have Apple’s Numbers installed, or using OmniGraffle Professional for simple table manipulation on my Mac. Neither may be a true Excel replacement for the spreadsheet elite, but the spreadsheet elite would not be using Google Docs in the first place. If there is one feature I will miss about Google Docs it is the collaboration that come with sharing a document with anyone who has a Google account.

So there you have it the services and applications I plan to use to replace Google for one month. In all honesty I have already started replacing Google in my life using many of these alternatives before I even began writing this article. Google is great company, and I am sure I will go back to some of their services when my month away is over. Until then consider me off the Google Grid.