I'm unable to pinpoint the year, but Yahoo! was my portal from the first day that I dialed into the web using a GUI browser. They were the cool kids at the time. One day "Powered by Google" appeared under their search box. It made search faster and better without a doubt. Parts of the web which I never knew existed now popped up in the results.
It wasn't long before I actually clicked on the link and found Google's search page. Gone were the categories and indexes. Just a simple logo and a text box.
The minimalist in me rejoiced and it achieved better results than any other search engine before. Google became my home page from that day on.
The beginning
I had no idea how they made money. I knew that most things online were free, yet I would read about these companies being valued in the billions. Media reports said that it came from advertising. I never noticed any advertising. To me that meant color and sound and hype. Garish banner ads and low-res gifs. I've always tended to ignore everything on a page that I didn't go there for specifically.
In 2005, I received an invitation to join Gmail (beta testing I think?) and jumped at the opportunity. Google was a household name by then and definitely the coolest company in the world. Yes please, host my webmail. And it was good.
Around the same time, a friend showed me a rudimentary version of Maps. This company was starting to give me the tingles.
He also introduced me to Google Earth later that same year. I couldn't believe what I was seeing. These guys with their "don't be evil" philosophy were bringing us these amazing products and services for free.
I was an enthusiast by now. They could do no wrong. I didn't even realise what role this company would play in my life within a few years from then.
Sometime during 2009, I switched from Firefox to Chrome. It was fast and once again, minimalist. It was my browser of choice until about a year ago.
By now the iPhone was well established and Android started showing promise at a very good price point, but no one had Wi-Fi because broadband was still very expensive at around $30 per GB on top of line rental. Mobile data was even worse at $0.50 per MB. Without Wi-Fi, there would be no point in me owning a smartphone.
2010 Saw me move into a place with uncapped ADSL and a Wi-Fi router. I took the plunge and got my first Android phone. I wasn't disappointed. This was an actual computer that you could access down to the core without breaking a sweat. You had a file manager and could copy and install whatever you wanted, at your own peril of course, while Apple's (superior at the time) hard- and software locked you out of anything not Apple.
The lack of a file manager in iOS was the most ridiculous thing to me. Having to do everything through the iTunes app on your computer was an exercise in masochism. I used iTunes with my iPod. Had no choice. It is one of the worst major pieces of software, ever. Luckily I found an app which made Windows see the iPod as an external drive and I was able to drag and drop my MP3's straight onto the device.
At the start, Android wasn't nearly as polished as iOS, but it was open and I knew that Google would catch up soon enough once handset makers upped their game in collaboration with the Big G. There were things like compass and GPS-linked street view which I waved in the faces of the haters. Or completely change the look and feel of the interface while all their phones looked identical. (I worked in advertising and the level of Apple/Jobs worship was intolerable. These people hated hard on anything that wasn't Apple).
I could copy any video or music to my phone simply by plugging it into my laptop. Or any file for that matter. I paid for this pocket computer and I would use it as such. It may be called a phone, but GSM telephony is the oldest tech on these devices and I hate making or taking calls. It's the most personal of computers. Calling these things phones is the same as calling it an accelerometer. My PC is not called a phone, even though I can use it as such with Skype or other VoIP services.
By 2012, Wi-Fi was ubiquitous. Mobile data bundles, although still a rip-off, now came at manageable expense if used with discretion. Google Drive and Docs, YouTube, Maps all starting to consolidate and learn more about me. This is of course done primarily in order to gather marketing intel, but you are rewarded with a lot of elegant, free and often mind-blowing services.
For the best experience, you have to be logged into Google permanently.
My Android phone was a Sony Ericsson Xperia Mini, so it was quite limiting, but my full integration into the Google ecosystem had started.
I soon became a Google fanboy. I saw the headlines about the antitrust case in Europe, but never bothered to read up on it. These tech behemoths each house their own internal law firm and they sue non-stop for every possible thing. I wrote it off as corporate politics.
The good times
By 2014, I had an LG G2 (a Nexus 5 in all but name and OS skin) and a Nexus 7 tablet. All the data that I have allowed Google to gather about me (always read the boring EULA!) working together on insanely fast servers, stacked in their thousands in data centres the world over. Google Now would pick up a mail from Flight Centre and without being prompted, presented me with an elegant card to remind me of my check-in time, which terminal and seat and then a card with the weather for my destination and more about the place with things to see and do.
Maps learnt where my home and work were. By itself. Even places I visited often like friends' houses. We used to have "boys nights" on Thursdays. It was always at one place. One day a Maps notification popped up about 30 minutes before the time I more or less used to leave for these get-togethers. It showed the quickest route to my friend's house with a traffic report and how long it will take me to get there. That wasn't creepy, it's what I signed up and hoped for.
I dropped the use of pirated copies of MS Office and forgot about Libre. Everything I needed were there under Docs. Google Photos came and now I had a safe alternative backup of my collection while all photos and videos I take on mobile, automatically sync with no plugging in and manually retrieving. Drive mirrors my most important work and backups. I collaborate with others in Docs and Sheets. My location history helped me a few times with placing the time or date of certain events. It also works together with Photos to create neat albums, reminding me of nice days I had forgotten about.
I was permanently signed into all Google services and it was all going really well.
What happened?
Probably the birth of Alphabet. I have some experience in corporate restructuring and the results are rarely good. I have no proof of causality, but it correlates chronologically with my personal experience.
The first disturbance appeared in nothing less than Google's core service, Search. I did some SEO a few years ago and there was this relevance thing. Some words have many different meanings and often also serve as brand names or part of it.
A search used to include in its top results at least the Wikipedia entry, thesaurus and links to academic material where applicable. Many terms had their definitions summarized at the top of the page, but now that's starting to disappear. Now, if the word or term is in any way similar or identical to a brand or service, all results are commercial or pop culture related. WTF?
I just now typed in a random word, "flash" to see what Google would bring up with regards to this physical phenomenon...
By page three, there is still no mention of the most important definition of the term flash, an observable and measurable physical event that permeates our universe, probably at a rate of trillions upon trillions of times per second.
Google has stopped returning proper results. This isn't knowledge, this is a billboard. The machines responsible for this were programmed wrong. Four pages consisting of a comic book superhero and Flash Player. I know very well that one could type "flash definition", but it has never been necessary before, why now?
A summary of things that have changed and left a bitter taste in my mouth:
Search has gone to shit as far as my experience is concerned. I have to now try various combinations of words like it's 2002 before I hopefully get served quality results.
Chrome: I switched to Firefox last year after a Chrome update left if hanging all the time while grinding my laptop to a halt. It took months before it worked again. Now it's faster than Firefox on my machine, but all images are rendered in low resolution. No suggested fix has helped.
Google image search has now removed the "view image" button, making saving even public domain images very difficult. Alphabet: your new moral police force. Which brings me to...
Destroying the work and livelihood of thousands of YouTube vloggers and producers who have spent all their time, energy and money on creating content. Because Alphabet is also now the official censor board and nanny of the web, lest a brand's ad is shown on channels that doesn't follow the current politically correct narrative. Even alternative thinkers need deodorant or the occasional Big Mac.
Google gave me 100GB of Drive Space for a year in return for rating and reviewing places for Maps. The way I understood was that after a year, you wouldn't be able to add anything and your space would shrink if you deleted anything. One day, without warning I got the message that my drive was full. It wasn't quite, but obviously that year came to an end, but now for the god-tier bullshit: My Gmail stopped working as it uses part of the Drive Space. I had to copy and delete more than 100 GB for my account to work again . It took me a full day to get Drive to under the free 15 GB just in order to receive mails. When Gmail worked again, I found that 90% of my sent and received mails were wiped. Because I'm the product and not a customer of Google's, tech support is non-existent.
Amongst the mails were incriminating statements which would've have made the current criminal and civil cases against my two assailants a short and inexpensive win. Now it has cost me 4 months of being crippled and broke because my lawyer and theirs are trading punches. The state attorney now insists on medical evidence that their assault aggravated my autoimmune disease. Something which is almost impossible unless I find thousands for CAT and MRI scans, a neurologist and a rheumatologist. It's an "invisible disease" and can't be measured by a general practitioner. Thank you Google.
- Google has finally overstepped my very loose and liberal privacy threshold: They are in my household now and I'm not talking Google Home. I live with my brother who obviously has his own account and our TV is connected to a PC, both belonging to him and logged into his account. He is into cooking slow, big breakfasts in the mornings while watching vids on YouTube. Since a few months ago, I've noticed that he'd be watching some of the same videos that I watched the night before. Many times over. This is still not creepy as I know what an algorithm is, but it's unacceptable. They are now "inside" my home network and making suggestions based on my consumption of content to other devices and accounts behind my router.
- I actually familiarized myself with that decade-long antitrust case. Don't be evil?
Google, you have changed. For the worse and emphatically so.
A soft Gexit is the only way
Unfortunately, I have a lot vested in Google products, especially under my main account, the one I've had since I started using Gmail. I need to access my main email address by which I've been known for 13 years. I am registered with too many services and commercial accounts in the name of my Google ID.
All those photos and documents are also important and it's a good cloud service.
I have created a Proton Mail account for all new registrations and communications. Also a new anonymous Google account with privacy settings turned up full. I could do with some extra cloud space, but it's not connected to my person as with my old account. I have started using this as my Google account for my Android devices.
Never again will I be logged in to any services while browsing the web. Gone are the days of them knowing exactly where I am or mining my preferences and tastes. Log in, get it done, log out.
So yeah, Apple's business model sucks and now you've joined their ranks Google. I'm moving into the spare room because I don't love you anymore.