"I will not use Google during October and will join a mailing list to discuss/build alternatives but only if 50 other addicts will do the same."
— Francis Irving
Deadline to sign up by: 30th September 2005
1 person signed up, 49 more were needed
More details
I love Google, and they've made the web a better, cleaner, quicker place. But I'm also too dependent on one corporation, which has nice people running it now, but it won't forever. This pledge is to find alternatives.
The pledge is to stop using all Google services during the month of October. Not just the web search engine, but also Google maps, Froogle, Usenet search, GMail and so on. You can, however, continue to use other web sites which are supported by Google adverts (AdSense).
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Francis Irving, the Pledge Creator, joined by:
Comments on this pledge
Or do you mean *non-evil* alternatives?
I used yahoo before I used google, multimap before I used google maps, yahoo mail before I used gmail. Simply reverting to these would work for me, up to a point, but it would be painful to go back to using them knowing that a better alternative exists...
The idea is to discuss this on the mailing list, and find all the best alternatives. Or ways to build them, or organisations that could build them. This could be anything from a simple script to give MSN a lighter interface, to a community run search engine project.
Ive always thought the 'decent' thing for google to do would have been to become a w3c style trust.