Life without Google?

I ran across this article in IEEE Spectrum recently and it really made me think. It posed the question of whether one could quit Google cold turkey. Think about it, given all of Google's services, could you do it? Don't answer until you take a moment to think about all of Google's services you might use.

From IEEE Spectrum:
"How I Learned to Live Google-free" by Joshua J. Romero
http://spectrum.ieee.org/telecom/internet/how-i-learned-to-live-google-free/0


Google Dashboard (find out how much YOU rely on Google):
http://www.google.com/aclk?
http://www.google.com/dashboard
I might not be the typical user, but I was shocked at how many Google services I use. And that's not even counting all the t-shirts and phones and chocolate! :)

Other key links:
Google's Data Liberation Front
http://www.dataliberation.org/
This is a site that shows you how to extract data from various Google services.

And the announcement of the Data Liberation Front, from Google's Public Policy Blog:
"Introducing DataLiberation.org: Liberate your data!" by by Brian Fitzpatrick
http://googlepublicpolicy.blogspot.com/2009/09/introducing-dataliberationorg-liberate.html


One final note. Even if you CAN quit Google, that doesn't mean that you should. :)