Breaking Up with Google Search

In June 2025, I recorded a conversation with Bill Fitzgerald about artificial intelligence. I ended up getting an earful from him about immorality within Big Tech and some of the aspiring oligarchs within the so-called “ed tech” realm. 

That discussion stuck with me. 

Bill drove home that AI is a form of surveillance. If you use ChatGPT or a similar LLM frequently, go into its settings and check its “memories” and see what it has retained on you. Then check the terms of service or EULA. What terms have they set around data retention?  Who can they sell or share your data with? What’s their policy around warrantless law enforcement data requests?

In some ways, that episode was a continuation of a conversation I've been having about AI and online privacy for over seven years. One of the final episodes of the podcast I recorded before moving overseas in 2019 was called Mommy, My Teacher Got Replaced by a Robot. In that interview and subsequent ones, I’ve noted the non-consensual nature of AI deployment. The major tech companies are hell bent on integrating AI into places where no one has asked for it and then retaining all the data from all the interactions you have with the models.

People aren’t asking for this. 

Specifically, when it came to AI in my day-to-day, I was bothered by the declining quality of Google's Search results and the insertion of AI slop into my queries and finally I had enough (see the example below, bleck!)

Put up or shut up, those were my choices. In June of 2025, I dropped Google Search and Chrome. I experimented with different browsers and search engines in various combinations trying to find what works best for me. My current set-up is Brave as my browser with DuckDuckGo as my default search engine. I landed on DuckDuckGo only recently (May 2026) after experimenting with some of the options described below.

A bit of context: Google’s Chrome browser is based on Chromium, which is an open source software program. Google adds a proprietary layer on top and packages it as “Chrome.” But since Chromium is open source, anyone can take that foundation and build their own browser — as Brave, Ecosia, DuckDuckGo, and many others have done.

Brave is a privacy-focused browser with some rigorous ad and tracker blocking built-in. They have a scorecard when you open the app showing the number of ads & trackers that have been blocked and how much time & data that that’s saved you.

Besides the privacy features my favorite feature of Brave is their cross device sync. Most browsers sync through an account you create, usually tied to your email address, and thus your personal info. You sign in, and the company stores (hopefully) encrypted copies of your bookmarks, history, passwords, and settings on its servers. Brave doesn’t require you to create an account. Instead, it uses a system called Sync Chain. When you create a Sync Chain, Brave generates a 25 word sync code, a set of cryptographic keys like a Bitcoin wallet, that allow you to sync across devices.

Brave also makes a search engine that I am less fond of. It’s really not great — but that’s the point. I’m not wedded or hostage to one platform or eco-system, subjected to the whims of its devs and management.

Ecosia’s offers a search engine and a Chromium based browser. You don’t need to use both, again you can mix & match. They lean into a social-capital gimmick: they pledge to plant trees based on the number of searches conducted. 

Ecosia doesn't run its own search index the way Google does. Instead, it acts as a search layer that gets most of its results from other providers. As of 2026, Ecosia says its search results come from three main sources:

• Microsoft Bing

• Google

• EUSP (European Search Perspective), a joint search index developed by Ecosia and the French search engine Qwant (more on Qwant in moment)

So it’s a do-gooder search engine that searches other search engines, providing you with the results.

Qwant is just a no frills search engine, with no AI integrations and a pledge to keep it that way. Qwant like Brave is privacy focused. It does not create detailed advertising profiles of users and does not track individuals across the web for targeted ads. It also positions itself as a European alternative to Google, an effort to break the continent’s reliance on US tech companies. To me, using Qwant feels how Google Search felt in the 2010s.

I expected some kind of drop-off in search quality when I moved away from Google, but it was the opposite. Google Search has degraded so much over the last few years that it’s nearly useless. The enshittification happened gradually, but it’s obvious to anyone who’s tried to look up something specific lately that Google Search is broken. I don’t remember who said it first, but it’s stuck with me: Google Search now basically operates in one of two modes. If it can serve you a volley of ads based on your query, it will. If it can’t, it hands you AI slop from Gemini.

This is what non-consensual AI deployment looks like. I didn’t ask for these garbage Gemini results, and I didn’t ask for my searches to be flooded with barely readable articles churned out by AI content farms. It is a death spiral for the open internet, and I want no part of it.

I want to be clear here, this isn't some sort of big moral crusade. But we have to start asking ourselves at what point do we start pushing back against the monopolistic practices of big tech and should we really trust them with all the personal, medical, and financial data we do? You’d be shocked what some people put into Chat GPT.

Meaningful regulation isn’t coming in the near term, so it’s up to us to help ourselves.

* A version of this article originally appeared in my newsletter Takes & Typos

I Refuse to Share Space With Neo Nazis and White Supremacists

A quick note: For the last year or so, I have written a newsletter on Substack. For a period, I crossposted those here but as the subscriber base for the newsletter grew I stopped doing that. However, due to choices by leadership at Substack, will no longer use the service. However, you can continue to follow the newsletter here.

---

I don't have a lot of redlines in my life. But one redline I do have is that if an institution or business says that “Nazis are welcome here” I will take my business elsewhere. In the case of Substack, the leadership of the company has made their choice and now I am making mine. It's not a particularly difficult decision. No, this isn't about freedom of speech; no, it's not about censorship. It's simply my choice.

Here is the statement that necessitated my decision from Hamish McKenzie, co-founder of Substack.

I reject the school of thought that the response to people who would wipe me from existence is some sort of constructive debate in the “marketplace of ideas.”

The Nazi Bar analogy is instructive here: if I found out my favorite bar welcomed Nazis, I would stop going to it. If I found out that a social club I belong to welcomed Nazis, I would stop being a member. I shouldn't even have to explain this, but here we are in the year of our Lord 2023, having to have this silly conversation.

“We’re going to keep Nazis and other white supremacists on our platform because we believe that limiting them is censorship” is a stupid, infantile argument. It's so clownish I'm not going to waste my time explaining.

Here is Chat GPT with a simple breakdown:

Denying monetization and access to services for Neo-Nazis and white supremacists is not a violation of free speech because private companies have the right to set and enforce their own content policies (emphasis added). Free speech protections typically apply to government actions, not private entities

Platforms have the authority to establish guidelines to maintain a safe and inclusive environment, and restricting content that promotes hate speech or violence is within their prerogative. This is not censorship in the legal sense, as individuals are still free to express their views elsewhere on different platforms or through other means.

ChatGPT 3.5: December 22nd, 2023

Choosing to carry and monetize the speech of Neo-Nazis and white supremacists is a commerce choice this company has made and it's a choice that I disagree with, and I'm taking my business elsewhere.

Given that, this will be the last edition of the newsletter sent from Substack. I will spend the next 48 hours transitioning to a different service. I'm trying to figure out if I want to use Buttondown or Ghost. If you have thoughts about either platform, shoot me an email. Both services have drawbacks and are more difficult to use than Substack, but that’s the cost of having taste and boundaries.

There will be a regularly scheduled edition of the newsletter on Sunday. I’ll talk a little about the verdict in the Ellis trial and reviewing the books that I read this year. If you follow the newsletter solely via the Substack App you will lose access to it. But you can get it via your regular email inbox by changing a setting in the app.

Again, you can subscribe to the next iteration of the newsletter here.

The Lack of Housing is a Generational Crisis

I've been baffled by the housing market in the United States for my entire adult life. It’s a lesson in unintended policy consequences like no other. While much of the media attention  goes to fluctuations in prices and rising mortgage rates, the deeper issues are those of supply and demand.

On the demand side, we have Millennial home buyers—the largest birth cohort in US history—emerging onto the housing market seeking to buy homes, followed quickly by Gen Z (the oldest members of Gen Z were born in 1997 and are now in their mid 20s). 

Constricting supply, we have a lack of construction of new residential housing, in particular in urban areas where job growth is highest. From the year 2000 until 2021, we went from 120 million housing units to 143 million nationwide, an increase of eighteen percent. But the total nationwide increase isn’t aligned with local demand. Here's Ann Lowrey in The Atlantic on the "underbuilding gap."

The National Association of Realtors compared the issuance of housing permits with the number of jobs created in 174 different metro areas. It found that only 38 metro regions are permitting enough new homes to keep up with job growth; in more than a dozen areas, including New York, the Bay Area, Boston, Los Angeles, Honolulu, Miami, and Chicago, just one new home is getting built for every 20-plus jobs created. The NAR estimates an “underbuilding gap” of as many as 7 million units.

So yes, even though we are building more housing, we’re not building nearly enough where the demand is highest, further driving up costs. Supply is further constrained because the Silent Generation and the Baby Boomers are living longer lives—Bismillah on that one—I am stoked to have the elders with us. However, further constricting supply is just plain bad local policy: insanely difficult permitting processes, overuse of single family zoning,  NIMBY-ism (masquerading as historic preservation), and good old-fashioned racism (masquerading as "concerns about preserving neighborhood character").

In Seattle, in my beloved Cascadia, over the last decade there was never a year when new housing growth was even fifty percent as high as job growth, meaning more dollars chasing relatively fewer homes.

Median mortgages and median rents in many housing markets nearly outpace the median monthly income. The old guidance used to be that no one should spend more than 30% of their income on rent or mortgage, anything beyond that was considered to be "rent burdened." But according to Pew in 2020 "46% of American renters spent 30% or more of their income on housing, including 23% who spent at least 50% of their income this way." Sometimes you can run by a stat and not really process it but I think it's important to pause on this one: nearly one quarter of American renters are spending 50% of their income on housing with no relief in sight.

Nowhere is this mess more apparent than in the Bay Area but the problem is likely coming soon to a metro near you. The classical definition of inflation is “too much money chasing too little supply.” This is the situation that has unfolded in the Bay. There’s ample demand because of new arrivals and job growth but because of the factors above, there isn’t enough housing being built, leading to soaring costs. The average new mortgage in San Jose is now a staggering $11,000 per month. This week I read a piece in the San Jose Mercury News that I think is worth quoting a length:

While some people choose to rent—and forgo building home equity—because they don’t plan to stay long-term, others can’t afford a down payment or qualify for a mortgage, a “situation that has become increasingly common due to rising mortgage rates and elevated home prices,” Redfin economist Taylor Marr said in a statement.

Nowhere is that more obvious than in the Bay Area, where deep-pocketed buyers competing for homes amid a severe shortage have sent the median single-family house price soaring to $1.25 million, a 28% jump over the past three years, according to the California Association of Realtors. At the same time, average mortgage rates have doubled to more than 6%, spiking monthly payments by thousands of dollars.

Those rising costs mean that just one in five Bay Area residents can comfortably afford to buy a median-priced, single-family home, according to a recent report by the association. Nationwide, 40% of people can afford a typical home at the national median price of around $371,200.

A 1.25 million dollar median home cost, $11,000 mortgage payments. Those numbers are insane and will only accelerate houselessness.

What’s happening in the Bay is happening in the Puget Sound, with a few years lag. Here’s homesales in Oakland (red) versus Tacoma (blue).

It’s easy to dismiss what’s happening in the Bay as a “California problem” but all the same inputs and many of the same bad policies are in place elsewhere. Above is data from the Saint Louis Federal Reserve. Home prices in Tacoma track the movements in Oakland but we’re headed where prices are there sooner than later. While the recently passed Middle Housing Bill in Washington State is a step in the right direction, it’s a drop in the bucket compared to the total demand that’s out here. We are essentially facing the comeuppance from forty years of bad policy and need a generational solution.

But I am not optimistic that we’re going to get one.