A Week Without Facebook, Google & Youtube?

Google, Facebook and YouTube. These three (ok, technically two) companies have been so successful in what they do that they’ve become synonymous with the services they provide. But can you live without them?

LIFE WITHOUT GOOGLE SEARCH

You know you have made it when the name of your company gets added into the Oxford dictionary as a verb. According to StatCounter, Google has a whopping 92.19% of the global search engine market share. Bing is a distant second with 2.61% and Yahoo is third with 1.85%. That’s how dominant Google is in the search engine market space. There’s no competition.

However, concerns over privacy and Google’s business practices have left many wondering if it is really possible to ditch Google Search and use alternatives like Bing and Yahoo. Wonder no further, for I have braved the unknown and have used Yahoo, Bing, and DuckDuckGo exclusively for a week. This is my verdict.

THE VERDICT

It is after this little exercise that I realised how important and overlooked search engines are. For many of us, when we open our web browsers, we either launch our favourite sites or we start searching. The search engine is, therefore, our window to the Internet. Change your search engine, and by virtue of the wildly varying search results, you might just experience a different version of the Internet. It’s refreshing but also scary. It makes you wonder what you are missing out on just because your search engine of choice is Yahoo and not Google.

Google, because of its size and massive umbrella of services, makes the Internet seamless in a way most of us don’t think about. Take, for example, searching an address such as “183 Jalan Pelikat.” Google will automatically show you a map courtesy of Google Maps along with relevant search results. Thereafter, you can hop straight into Google Maps and get directions, estimates of travelling time, and even visit the locale with Google Street View. None of its competitors is as powerful or seamless.