© 2026 Gregory D. Weber
Activities leading up to 2024. Published March 17, 2026. Revised March 18, 2026.
At first I loved Google. Then I loved it more. Over the years, I got myself so entangled in Google’s services that I began to feel like a pig in the embrace of a hungry anaconda. I am now liberating myself from Google by hosting my own services.
I fell into Google’s coils one at a time.
The first step was Google Search. This was Google’s original product—and it was good! Google far outperformed previous web search engines, such as Yahoo! and AltaVista, using an ingenious algorithm to find better fitting and better quality pages. The basic ideas of the Google PageRank algorithm are: (1) more links to a page increase its rank; (2) links from higher ranking pages increase rank more than links from lower ranking pages. Why does this work so well? The PageRank algorithm harvests and amplifies human judgments. The more a web page or site is esteemed by other web site owners, the more they will refer to it and link to it. And of course a reference from high-quality or authoritative site, such as MIT for engineering and scientific matters, is more valuable than a link from an average quality web site.
The next step was probably GMail. I happened to open a GMail account for the following reasons. I was teaching an AI course using Stuart Russell and Peter Norvig’s textbook Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach. The book contained some Python code illustrating AI algorithms; I made some improvements to the code. I wanted to share them with the authors, and their code was housed on Google Code, so I opened an account there. To do that, I had to create a GMail account. I used the GMail account to tell Norvig that I had some contributions to share, but I didn’t hear back from him. A week or so later, I emailed him again, this time from my Indiana University account. (If one channel doesn’t work, it’s often useful to try another.) His reply told me that my GMail message had landed in his spam folder, and he hoped that, by his replying to it, that would not happen again. So I contributed my revisions to their code for a while. This collaboration ended when our curriculum changed, the AI course was dropped, and I no longer had any reason to improve their code.
GMail was a very interesting product as well. Google was not offering another run-of-the mill email service; they were, in a sense, re-inventing email, making it better.
One of the improvements was that you could “tag” your emails. Before this, people classified their mail by putting it into folders. But each piece of mail can be put into only one folder. What if it belongs in many folders? With tags, you could apply as many tags as you like, and you could search for them easily.
The other feature was that you got advertisements. At first it was very interesting for me to see, beside the email I was reading, an ad for some product that was somehow connected to the content of the mail I was reading. It was an amusing and pleasant sight. (In a later iteration of GMail, the ads would not be displayed side by side with the mail, but would appear, if you looked, in a separate tab called “promotions”.)
And that is how Google makes money: from advertising. Although primarily reputed as an information technology company, the majority of its revenue comes from advertising. In 2020, over 80% of Google’s parent company, Alphabet, was from Google advertising.1
Google ads appear not only in Google/Alphabet products and services, such as Google Search, GMail, and YouTube, but on countless other web sites through their AdSense network, which enables non-Google sites to display advertising managed and controlled by Google on their web pages.2 These ads, as well as those on Google’s own sites and services, are “personalized” based on what they know about you.3
And what do they know about you? They know what terms you entered in Google Search, what you watched on YouTube, what pages you have visited that use AdSense, where you have been (if you navigate with Google Maps or Wayze), how you moved your mouse over an ad, whether you interacted with a page on which an ad appears.4 And of course, they have all of your email, calendar, and contacts, if you use those services from Google.
To be fair, I must note that Google does not sell your information, takes care to safeguard it, and provides ways for you to control what information they store about you.5 But how well would GMail work for you, for instance, if you deleted each email after reading it?
Google and YouTube’s issues with privacy are nothing new, and you can read all about them elsewhere.6
After Google Search and GMail, I gradually got involved with more and more of Google’s systems and services, including Google Maps, Meetings, Chat, Calendar, Contacts, and YouTube (acquired by Google in 2006).
After a while, I found myself so entangled in Google’s services, I began to feel like a pig in the embrace of a hungry anaconda.
One day I was shocked to find YouTube suggesting to me a video about erectile dysfunction. Why was I seeing that? Did YouTube know something about me that even I didn’t know about myself? I clicked on the link that asks “Why am I seeing this?” and was told that it was because of my—geographic location. So nothing personal. But really? I live in a neighborhood full of men with erectile dysfunction? “A likely story!”
Though Google knows nothing about me that I should be ashamed of, it knows too much for any one company to know. I therefore resolved to free myself from Google as much as I can. That is why, in 2024, I began self-hosting my personal services: email, contacts, and calendar. I will be telling about this experience in the Journal of System Maladministration.
That’s my story. Well, what about you? Are you entrapped in Google? Or perhaps in one of the other info-technological giants? What are you going to do about it?
Next: Choosing the software