Google has detailed more of the changes it’s implementing to comply with the European Union’s Digital Markets Act. We already covered the changes to linked services, but Google is also changing how results related to shopping and booking results are displayed.
We will introduce dedicated units that include a group of links to comparison sites from across the web, and query shortcuts at the top of the search page to help people refine their search, including by focusing results just on comparison sites. For categories like hotels, we will also start testing a dedicated space for comparison sites and direct suppliers to show more detailed individual results including images, star ratings and more. These changes will result in the removal of some features from the search page, such as the Google Flights unit.
Oliver Bethell
Google is also releasing its promised Google Takeout API, allowing developers to programmatically deal with users wanting to take their data out of Google to another service. This one in particular I’m interested in, since I’m curious if, say, a competing email service will make it easier and automatic to move away from Gmail.
People overestimate how difficult it is to move away from Google.
About 5 years ago, I moved to Fastmail (+- 60 usd per year on medium plan). Fastmail already had a utility that could slurp Gmail and within a few hours I had all my emails since the beginning of when I started to use Gmail back in Fastmail.
Not sure about how difficult Google Photo is but if you have a local copy (your should of course!), there is no problem.
I decided to jettison my Android purchases over the years (about 30 euro? who cares) and only use third party stores.
No Google search since 10 years, no problem at all! Openstreetmap for maps. No Google SSO of course.
Only issue sometimes is Google Translate but Firefox is actually offers a translator that doesn’t need a server connection.
I try avoiding google accounts for personal stuff too. Google’s app monopoly on android makes life more difficult to install many apps. For work I’ve been forced to use google accounts on my mobile device for works apps. These had a dependency on google play services, which I didn’t want on my phone. I complained about this,to the employer, but it ultimately fell on deaf ears. Their expectation was for workers to fall in line and get with the apple/google duopoly.
If you don’t have to be available online all the time, maybe you can use an old phone as your workphone? I’m in the lucky position that I don’t have to be on Teams on my phone and the 2FA authenticator app works with an open source version without having to install MS authenticator.
Google takeout is trash, it limits bandwidth to 6.84, concurrent downloads just halves the allotment, no resume function, a lot of times the downloads fail 2 hours into a 50gb file sometimes its an authorization errors, sometimes no reason, you reach the limit of times you can download 1 Chunk of data then you have downloaded 150gb just to delete it. It took me a good two weeks with remode desktop sessions from my phone to get it done. Good bye google One and good riddance, been a customer for way too long.