Search After Google

By Erin Crandell

The way people search for knowledge on the web is changing, but if we stop "googling" it, what will we do?

My search strategies depend on my mood and what I'm looking for. For example: sometimes I want to figure out the hours of my local coffee shop. Other times I want a map of every café in a two-mile radius, or a directory where I can see the menu before I go, or a real person who can describe the ambiance. Sometimes I don't even mind getting into an information rabbit hole that leads me away from coffee entirely. While these are all acts of searching, they are not the same act, so do they require the same tool? 

This is the question that the decline of Google Search is forcing us to reckon with. Not just where we go when we stop googling, but what we actually want when we go looking for knowledge in the first place.

Why We Search

Research into online search behavior has revealed that why we search is more expansive than simple questions and answers. We search to verify, to accomplish, to learn, to explore, to be social. Search is deeply personal; each of us use different techniques, intentions, and behaviors to achieve what we are looking for when we enter a query. And those can change. Perhaps one single search tool cannot provide for all of that? 

Google still dominates 90% of the world’s search, but other big tech companies are moving in on that space and people report using generative AI tools like ChatGPT for many of the queries they previously turned to Google for. Meanwhile, a robust market of search tools and applications is also percolating: privacy and ad-blocking plug-ins, alternative search engines, and de-Googling movements. Some mimic Google’s interface while promising better privacy protections and fewer ads, while others offer users a chance to live their values or vision of an open web.

All of these strategies and choices are techniques to reckon with the tension between privacy and convenience that is central to knowledge seeking in a technologically-mediated world. But for those of us who have been living uncomfortably under the corporate search model set by Google—aware that our data is being surveilled and siphoned but not seeing a viable alternative—this is a point to reconsider what we want search to look like. Is it a delivery service for fast facts? Or is it more like a library where you can browse? Do you want a librarian there? Or would you prefer to just have a relevant expert on speed dial?

What Google Promised and What it Became

While “Google Search is dead” is practically a meme at this point, Google changed the rules of its own game more than once.

First, Google moved away from the PageRank algorithm toward models that collect even more user data and use machine-learning to ascertain searcher intent and provide direct answers. Then in 2023, they started directly integrating Generative AI into Google Search by adding AI-generated text boxes at the top of the search results page. And in 2025 it launched its own question answering chatbot.

Google claims this model is the future of online search and that users like it! If you believe Sundar Pichai’s claim, people are actually clicking out from the AI overviews to a more diverse set of websites, and spending more time there. (Of course, website owners are reporting the opposite.) This is a trend Google promises will continue when search is then folded into a chatbot interface, so just trust the process! Regardless of whether you believe this, many other companies are following their lead and offering their own AI chatbot integrations. 

In the paper outlining this strategy, Google’s researchers championed the further integration of Generative AI into online search in the name of reducing the “cognitive burden” of online searching. Essentially, having an expert on speed dial. 

Now, The Opportunity

A moment when the ground is shifting is the best time for rethinking the status quo. When Google announced AI mode, Corey Doctorow said, “Google's about to do something that's going to make people really angry. My first thought is 'Okay, great. What can we do to capitalize on that anger?' It's a chance to build a coalition”. 

While the coalition that Doctorow is envisioning may still be yet to come, people are moving to or building other platforms and tools for different forms of knowledge seeking that it seems like Google no longer provides. Whether it is because they believe that Google Search is no longer as reliable—as evidenced by the popularity of the “+ reddit” query hack to help filter through the onslaught of SEO-manipulated content and advertising on Google’s main search result page—or because of growing unease with Google’s broad apparatus of surveillance and data extraction, “googling” is no longer the only way people search. 

What People Are Doing Instead of Googling

For now, what this may look like in practice is people embracing different tools for different purposes like a social media platform like Reddit or TikTok for advice or information from a real person, a Generative AI chatbot like ChatGPT for fast facts, and a more traditional search engine for everything else. For those traditional searches, a robust marketplace of alternatives is developing.

Privacy as Product and Search as Subscription

Most people so far haven’t been looking for complete opt-outs, but work-arounds, especially when it comes to privacy. A search on Google’s own App Store uncovers dozens of plug-ins, VPNs, browsers, and search engines promising to—at various technical levels—keep your searches private. The model has shifted from profile-for-service to privacy-as-product.

DuckDuckGo is probably the most well-known of the alternatives, which uses Microsoft Bing, (he second most-used search engine in the world, as its base model, while adding additional user privacy protections. Going a step further, search engines like Brave or the European Search Perspective are building their own web indexes outside of Microsoft and Google’s infrastructure entirely. All of these engines position themselves as a familiar alternative to Google Search, offering very similar interfaces and affordances—even their own AI chatbot.

Many of these companies also offer elevated privacy protections through a subscription model, which helps distance them from the profile-for-service model—while reinforcing the uncomfortable fact that search is always just one part of a network of services and technologies that collect data and surveille users. For $9.99 per month, you can not only use DuckDuckGo’s browser and search services, but you’ll also get access to email, VPN, Identity Theft restoration, and the advanced version of their AI chatbot. So, even if you opt out of Google Search (or even Google Search and Google Chrome), if you still use Gmail or YouTube or even a different website that partners with Google on the back end, your data is still in circulation.

Is Opting Out an Option?

Google has reshaped the political economy of the internet to the point that opting out is genuinely difficult, if not impossible. The company’s services are so embedded they are basically internet infrastructure—you don’t even have to visit the Google Search landing page anymore, you just type your query into the browser bar on browsers most of us use. Google’s terms and conditions are vague, constantly shifting, and fundamentally geared toward maintaining the status-quo—leaving even the most tech-savvy users and website managers playing catch-up. It is worth noting that the courts may also intervene. In the US, the Department of Justice's 2024 antitrust ruling against Google has put structural remedies on the table, including the possibility of a publicly accessible search index that could open the market to even more competition.

So, perhaps under these circumstances, opting out and other practices of active non-participation gain more weight. 

Seeking Alternatives Based on Values

This brings us to reconsidering Google Search because of values, in the context of other movements against Big Tech. In recent years, Google employees began organizing against the company’s contracts with ICE and the Israeli military, prompting users to consider the choice of search engine as a decision that reflects their values rather than just their needs. But beyond politics and a personal interest in privacy, there are other values that might influence someone’s choice of search engine, and the market seems ready to deliver.

• Ecosia runs its search on both Google and Microsoft Bing’s architecture, but promises to plant a tree for every query.
• Kagi offers an option called “Small Web” within its subscription model that displays entirely non-commercial results, connecting users back to the early days of the internet.
• Sublime calls itself “an inspiration engine” where you can collect content from around the web and find related content through association.

Some of these models may appeal to nostalgia for the “old internet” that people perceive as less polluted by commercial interests, when Google was simply a search engine that pledged to “not be evil” and helped us explore the vastness of the world wide web. The Reddit hack tapped into the same instinct: it promised to deliver you to people who could give you information that was shaped by their experiences,or at least articulated by themselves rather than an SEO strategist.

Where Do We Go From Here?

As we are evaluating the alternatives, it may be useful to return to the question of why we value search. In addition to promising convenience and reliability, Google Search promised to deliver, in essence, highly personalized access to knowledge. 

While Google may think that the future of search is experts on speed dial, people are fundamentally more intelligent and more curious than one single search engine can anticipate and provide for, and now is the time to re-evaluate.

Erin Crandell is a researcher and strategist working at the intersection of human rights and technology. She is currently completing her Master's degree in Digital Culture and Society at King's College London, and you can find more of her work and get in touch with her on LinkedIn.

Related Story: IX contributor Robin Berjon launches Funding The Web: a covenant for browsers, search, and people

Browsers and mobile operating systems are complex and expensive, yet we universally get them free. This is because they are funded by a levy on search engines, and the amount of funding is huge: Apple alone gets over $20 billion per year. But if we just got free browsers that would be fine. The real problem is that the levy system is privately governed and has severe consequences.

It maintains an artificial monopoly: the biggest search engine can pay more, which drives more traffic, which generates more money, which lets it pay more. It's the forever Google experience. Much worse, this system defunds the whole of the web, and notably the media. Thanks to its monopoly, Google charges far higher prices for ads than it normally could, and gets a much higher share of web marketing channels than it should. That's money, in the tens of billions, not flowing to the web. Browser vendors get a direct cut of those inflated prices. Google, Apple, Mozilla, Samsung, Opera: they all make money defunding the web says Robin.

The levy system may not have been initially intended as a cartel, he wronte on Bluesky, but today it is maintained with full knowledge that it is monopolistic. The US courts have said so unambiguously. The web is slow-motion collapsing, and this is at the heart of it. But it doesn't have to be. Berjon's report documents the problems and offers a range of solutions to fix them.

Want to appear here? Sponsor a newsletter.

This Week's Links