One Week Without Google

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One Week Without Google

To reduce Google's share of my web clickstream and my blog real estate.

So on New Year's day I replaced Google with Yahoo! in the Firefox search field at the upper right of my browser and I've been searching the web with Yahoo! for the past week.

I must say that my life hasn't changed for the worse. The results seem fine.

I am sure there are many people who think that if Google search went down for an extended period of time, they'd be lost on the web.

But its not true. Yahoo! does a fine job with search and I am happy to be rid of Google.

Now onto my blog real estate. I need to figure out how to replace the Google blog search field with Yahoo! or Microsoft. If anyone knows how to do that, I'd love a comment or an email.

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Posted January 7, 2006 in Venture Capital and Technology

Comments

why not roll your own?

Posted by: Jeremy Stein | Jan 7, 2006 6:54:59 PM

Fred,
You can try signing up in Yahoo publishers program at http://publisher.yahoo.com/
they offer alternative to the search and to AdSense.
but changing one with the other doesn't make real difference, is it?

Posted by: Rogel | Jan 7, 2006 7:25:30 PM

The instructions are here: http://search.yahoo.com/info/ysearchbox_introduction.html

Thanks for giving us a week long test. :-)

Posted by: Jeremy Zawodny | Jan 7, 2006 8:12:23 PM

Thank god you stopped talking about Google now. Its getting ridiculous. New estimate GOOG=$2000/share.

http://www.thestreet.com/_googlen/tech/internet/10260522.html?cm_ven=GOOGLEN&cm_cat=FREE&cm_ite=NA

I went off on it on my blog.

http://btwohig.wordpress.com

Posted by: Brad Twohig | Jan 8, 2006 1:57:21 AM

fred,

I am about one year ahead of you. I became frustrated with google long ago, with what I thought was their "biased" search results.

The reality is, anywhere you go you get different search results, customized to the needs of the search engine. I was happy with Yahoo, but dogpound and other do a good job also.

I have since returned to google as a start page becuase of the less distracting homepage, but I also have a yahoo toolbar for searches and msn setup as my default search engine.

Posted by: nono | Jan 8, 2006 2:04:16 AM

I have been using jux2 for my searches lately (especially when I want to dig real deep). They aggregate 4 major search engines and list first the results that overlap between the results on different engines. You'd be surprised how many good results you'd get that are only available on one engine (and can I just say it's not always google!).

jux2 plugin available for Firefox as well.

Posted by: malviina | Jan 8, 2006 5:45:58 AM

(Nice comment spam on this post, btw.)

What about Google Analytics? You never gave us a review. Or can you not use it now, due to the above-mentioned resolution?

Posted by: Rick | Jan 8, 2006 10:27:37 PM

I never really saw the attraction of Google.

I started using Yahoo back in early 1997, when it was a mere shadow of what it's become, and it always got me what I wanted. In fact, it was the only search engine we used at the Daily Show for a few years.

Google is streamlined, but Yahoo seems so much more organized.

Posted by: Chrispy | Jan 9, 2006 9:42:32 AM

Fred, why the vitriol for Google? It's weird. You seem very level headed for 99% of your posts. Then you take shots at Google as if they were an arm of the Republican party.

What gives?

Posted by: Anonymous | Jan 9, 2006 11:33:35 AM

I just saw Google search box on your blog. Was it because you didn't switch or you switched back to Google? Please let me know

Posted by: Nishit | Apr 12, 2007 3:42:25 AM

A VC

Musings of a VC in NYC