A week without Google
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Experiment: A week without Google
In the coming week starting from the end of this class we will attempt to lead a whole week without using any Google service. Not Google Search, not Gmail, not Google Video, not Google Maps, not Google News, not Google Groups, not Youtube, notBlogger, not Google Calendar, not Google Docs… you get the point.
It’s not going to be easy and hence we will not attempt to create an unfeasible challenge. We will keep a promise to each other to follow some rules:
- Whenver we are passively exposed to Google content (an embeded Google video, map, and so on…) we post that link to del.icio.us using the tags ‘nmrs’, ‘weekwithoutgoogle’ and ‘ambushed’ (+whatever else you want to include)
- Whenever we break and use a Google service, we report about it to the blog, as a comment on this post.
- If we totally break altogether, we write a post about it as soon as we decide to pull out, summarizing the experience.
We will also try to support each other in the process by:
- Every time you are about to use Google, and find a way around it, try to propose the alternative to the class by tagging the alternative with the tags ‘nmrs’, ‘weekwithoutgoogle’ and ‘dodged’.
- Share tactics on the blog. Work together to try to make it.
This is trust based only, but the student who will manage to take this challenge on and make it through the week will win the class’s medal of honor.
Good luck,
we’re going to need it.
Comments
I definitely just used google without even realizing it. I was googling hair salons in nyc so that I could get my hair cut at a reasonable price and used the google tab on my web browser. Wow, I really thought I’d last longer. I’ll have to be more aware from now on.
It happened to me too.
I just realized I googled something this morning, as it was easier than tyoping the link. I have switched the default search in my Firefox to Yahoo now. Let’s see how that works for me…
I broke within the first 45 minutes last night… someone posted a youtube link to my facebook and i instinctively clicked on it and literally 3 seconds into the video, i x’ed out realizing that youtube is Google.
I’m at work right now and I must say, trying to work in the professional field without ANYTHING Google is very, very difficult. I have a RSS Feed off my Google reader which is how I research for work- perhaps I’ll take up twiddling my thumbs as an alternative.
Yahoo and Ask.com haven’t been too bad though….
I do research at my job and basically use Google to find anything at all that mentions our company in order to create a press file for that day. As soon as I remembered that I wasn’t supposed to use Google I started using yahoo, even though I don’t like it very much because I’m scared that it might not give me all the results that Google does. My boss literally passed by and asked why I wasn’t using Google to do the daily search. The boss looked angry so I just went back to Google.
Then I had to check my google alerts…
And worst of all I just used Google to find this website. I promised myself to use delicious next time.
Everyone should check out the Firefox Add-on LeechBlock, which I posted to our del.icio.us last night.
Steps:
1. Install
2. Restart Firefox
3. Go to Tools -> LeechBlock -> Options
4. Enter google.com, gmail.com, blogger.com, youtube.com, and whatever else (no commas, separated into lines) into the first field
5. Click “All Day” on the right, about halfway down
6. Click “Every Day,” a little bit further down
7. Press “OK”
WARNING: Do NOT check “Prevent access to about:config at times when these sites are blocked” or you will never be able to turn off the block again!
Alternatively, if you want to get fancy, follow those steps except enter only one URL for each Block (they’re tabbed at the top), then change the page to show instead. So for Block Set 1 enter “google.com” in the first field, then after clicking “All Day” and “Every Day,” enter “search.live.com” or “search.yahoo.com” in the field labelled “Enter the fully specified URL of the page to show instead of these blocked sites.”
Good luck everyone!
Great idea, would you make a post out of it so we can all share that valuable tip. Mine is already setup. I will not fail again. Thanks!
So I found a great search engine my friend told me about that’s goodsearch.com - you go to the page and enter a charity you wish to donate to and every search you perform donates to that charity. Just thought it was a nice alternative to google search in case anyone wanted to try it 
So far I think I’ve been pretty good. It hasn’t been terribly difficult because I don’t use Gmail and the only Google application I use on a daily basis is the normal Google search. However, a few minutes ago I absent absentmindedly clicked on a youtube link one of my friends sent me. Oops! Hopefully its the first and only time. I usually use youtube to watch silly videos but have turned to other silly video sites over the past few days (which I will tag on delicious).
Yes,
I am afraid I can confess in advance since tomorrow I will unfortunately have to use a website hosted under Google Code and have also given another class that I teach an assignment that involves using Google Maps. No way around it for me, but as far as search goes, I think I’m doing good so far with Yahoo. I wish it would correct me like Google used to… that is, when I used to use Google…
ok i need some help, i want to watch the documentary the Trap that i missed seeing because i just joined - however the only link on this site that i’ve found is a google video site…should i wait to watch it until next week or do I just break and use the site or is there another way to see the documentary?
uh oh…..I was looking up train schedules for nj transit, but i typed in the wrong url so it took me to google…..but i only looked for a second haha just to click the correct link.
@ Stephanie: tricky question, but solvable…
I have uploaded the mp4 files to my site, so you can download them without going through Google @ http://www.mushon.com/xtra/thetrap/
the link appears on the blogpost with the videos too.
enjoy.
M.
P.S: So far, life without Google is hard at the begining but totally doable after a while.
I’ve been pretty good and have managed not to use google yet, but yesterday I had to do some research and it was very difficult to resist the urge. Even though I got some hits with Yahoo I found myself unable to trust them. I kept feeling like if I had googled it I would have gotten better results.
ok so i have to break and i am really sorry but I kind of have no choice in the matter. I am filming a documentary for another class with two other girls and one of them just set up a joint gmail account for us so we can keep contact info for interviewees and logs of what material we have gotten etc. So I have to use it and it’s not for email so i can’t forward it to my email address - plus i am sharing the account. I can promise that that account is the only thing i will use google for but I have to do use it for this, it is out of my hands because another girl already set it up with her info from her shoot today and I have to go on to edit and make my comments to her. I am sorry but I don’t think there is anything I can do to avoid it - if you have any suggestions please let me know, thank you
I totally feel the “not being able to trust Yahoo” thing. Its like buying the rite aid brand aspirin instead of Tylenol..something just doesn’t feel right
So I needed to get somewhere and Yahoo maps was totally off and could not locate where I wanted to go. In desperation I unblocked google and with in seconds I got just what I was looking for. Conclusion- there is no life without google
Alright, so I have pretty much failed horribly. In the last year, I have slowly picked up on tons of Google stuff, and not just because it was Google, but I would always try competitors products and always come pack to Google Products (first I switched to gmail, then found a online calendar I like [ended up with GCAL] then tried to find some online office suite (I liked Google Docs better than Zoho, plus I found some really good neighboring apps sync docs on my computer with my GDocs account. So when the assignment was first posted, I knew I had to give myself an extra 24 hours, because I had to hook up all of these things that I rely on everyday to at least not be going to a Google owned site. I switched my gmail and GCal to Thunderbird ( http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/thunderbird/) with and Lightning (http://www.mozilla.org/projects/calendar/) calender and email clients from Mozilla, who brought you Firefox (although heavily funded through Google) and that worked out pretty well. I couldnt check my email from not at home, but I got over it. I tried using Live Maps (microsofts map application) and it worked well enough for my own needs. For Chatting, I have always used AIM, and although Google owns 5% of AOL, I wasnt going to give this up, cause I couldn’t.
I already use pidgin ( http://www.pidgin.im/), and open source application that links up to AIM MSN JABBER SAMETIME or whatever protocol you use, and I WOULD RECOMMEND ANYONE WHO STILL USES THE REGULAR OLD AIM CLIENT TO SWITCH TO THIS PROGRAM. IT IS NICER AND USES LESS MEMORY! For mac users, ditch ICHAT for Adium , a branch of the same libpurple project.
//end digression
However, I was broke by the bread and butter of Google: search. Being a mega nerd, I was spending some time this weekend trying to fix a little bug with the trackpad of my little green olpc. I needed to search for some answers online, and since I am a pretty lazy linux user, I normally just Google everything and copy and paste my fixes back to my system. However, when i searched for “How to edit mouse sensitivity in xfce” I got this in Yahoo http://search.yahoo.com/search;_ylt=A0oGkmX0UK9HsD8B8IdXNyoA?p=How+to+edit+mouse+sensitivity+in+xfce+&y=Search&fr=moz2&ei=UTF-8
Nothing helpful! What was I to do? Panicky, I tried a Google Search
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&safe=off&client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla%3Aen-US%3Aofficial&q=How+to+edit+mouse+sensitivity+in+xfce&btnG=Search
Success! Now, maybe the ubuntu forums lets Google index its forums, but once again, I feel like people were validated by the search results from Google, as they truly (in this one case) gave me what I was looking for in the first place, while Yahoo doesn’t. So even if I may be a slave to the GOOG, at least I feel like as of right now, they also have the best technology that lets me do what I want to do.
After that, I felt demoralized, and I just had to go back to my old way of doing things. It sort of makes me mad Google is the best at so many things, but I guess it makes me happy too.
- max
I’ve been in Detroit at a conference since our class meeting without much internet access. Thus far, I haven’t used Google at all, but that’s because I’ve been living in a bubble.
Initially, I thought living without Google wouldn’t be a big deal. The only hiccup I anticipated was reconfiguring my forwarded emails to my Yahoo account instead of my Gmail account. I have grown very fond of Gmail’s mail filtering app. where you can assign your forwarded email colored labels for easy referencing and cataloging. Since I already use MyYahoo as my primary rss feed portal, it was easy to use Yahoo’s search engine with no issues. The major headache I anticipate is reconfiguring my forwarded email back to my Gmail account. (Thx a lot, Mushon).
However, I was ambushed by embedded google search features on a number of sites I visited. And I suspect that there were a number of other ones affiliated with Google that I hadn’t realized (Facebook?). Also, I obviously experienced breaks when reading and sending email from my Gmail account (albeit forwarded).
This exercise serves as a reminder that while we are always initially seduced by the promise of invention, we ultimately (and insidiously) become slaves to it.
Damn you Googe, damn you!
- egor
At the beginning, I thought I was doing OK for this task. The reason is that there was some Internet connection in my laptop so that I was not able to access to the Internet for three days. After those three days, I totally forgot google.
However, later when the Internet started to work again, I wanted to do some research on my Las Vegas trip on the President’s Day long weekend. At the beginning, Wikipedia and Yahoo served my need pretty well so I though it was a piece of cake. Later I found the information they provide is far less than Google’s. So I didn’t want to bother any more. I gave up and broke the law to use Google–because the trip is approaching!!!
I had to write a research paper this past weekend and after a brief love affair with google again (I needed it for work on Thursday and Friday) I was so tempted to use google scholar search. The yahoo main search page was overwhelming and the search results were confusing and not what I wanted. I also read up on all of my trashy websites (family members blogs, the latest youtube videos, etc.) and kept getting ambushed by links and the like. I gave up yesterday but am maintaining it again until class. I’m mildly embarrassed that I am so addicted to google. I’m entirely dependent on it. I can’t decide whether or not a week without the google search engine or a week without youtube would be worse.
An update from me- I did well Friday-Sunday without Google because I was out doing work or actively avoiding Google and realizing how much better it is than Yahoo and Ask combined. However, I still failed pretty miserably because of work Thursday and today. I’ve had to youtube some people that we’ve gotten briefs from and doing pitches for. Though I set my homepage to Yahoo.com, I instinctively searched for contacts by typing in name/corporation into the Google magnifying glass tab by the url bar - without realizing it was a Google search (ambush?!). I am going to have a hard time coming up with the second assignment since all of the design blogs and pages I browse in my spare time (that are devoted to new media and technology reporting) are in my Google RSS Reader and I didn’t have a chance to get to a computer before 8 pm last Tuesday…
I have to be totally honest. I completely failed at a week without google. I started out by allowing myself an extra day to get my things in order since I loathed the idea of forwarding my email and having to set up another RSS reader and/or write down all the blogs and sites I check daily. Then after a particularly boring Friday I found myself wandering back to the Google Reader, got lost in a youtube wormhole, and all my resolutions completely fell apart.
What I’m trying to say is that I read most of your responses to how you accidentally used google maps once this week on my google reader. That I am unabashedly addicted to my google media and that I failed miserably at a week without google.
I do find the fact that you all found other search engines so inferior, to the point that they did not even bring up the proper search results for simple queries. It seems that with the way in which google ranks results by popularity it needs to be a popular search engine in order to function. And as the most popular search engine (particularly in our age demographic) it only makes sense that it would return the kinds of results that we and our peers would be looking for. I wonder, then, if google search results become less helpful the further you get outside of google’s target demographic. Maybe your parents still use yahoo for a reason. Just some thoughts.
I was about to use Google (Youtube) earlier today unwittingly when I needed to research for a paper. I needed to get a video recorded speech of president Eisenhower and was about to sign onto Youtube when I realized that would be cheating!! I also almost used google on saturday when I was trying to find the location of a restaurant. Google’s text messaging services works when you send over the name and city of the place you want to (you text to GOOGL) go and google automatically sends you a text back informing you of the restaurants location. Unfortunately I did not get to use the service and ended up using menupages.com to find the location of the restaurant. What a headache!!
I guess I broke the seal of a Google-free week.
It’s a complicated story, but basically someone I had just met was telling me something and I wanted to see if it was true. My gut instinct was to just go on Google and type it in. The second I pressed search after typing in the words, I yelped because I realized what I was doing.
I think I might need to put a post it or something on my computer to remind me about this experiment.
Also, I have work tomorrow and they make me do a lot of research on the net - so it will be interesting to see how that works out.