I’ve been ambiguous about Google for quite a while now. What started as an amazingly innovative and efficient search engine, grew up to be quite a monster of internet services and advertising tools. That, in itself, isn’t a bad thing. A big company isn’t necessarily a bad company.

Yet, bit by bit, Google services seem less and less appealing. First – the flagship – the almighty Google search engine. Gimmicks like Google Suggest and Google Instant became annoying rather quickly, and didn’t add much to the search efficiency – rather the opposite. Then, there’s the fact that Google seems to think that it knows what are you looking for – even without you asking for it. When you search certain keywords, Google will give you results which include many “related” keywords, but a lot of the time it just interferes with the search process.

To top it off, the amount of data and info Google’s gathering about us is frightening. And finally – the results are useless, still full of spam and too mainstream in many cases (That’s why I use DuckDuckGo in most of my English searches) .

Gmail is still great, but then there’s always that nagging fear that one day you’ll try to login and find that your account have been closed, canceled or hacked into, and no one in Google will lift a finger to help you with that. I have regular pop3 mail and many backups, but that’s not enough for me. I eagerly await a webmail that supports Hebrew in an efficient way – when I find that, I’ll switch immediately.

And then there’s Google+, which so many rave on and on about. Yeah, it’s cool and slick, it’s fast and you can have a nice social media experience with it. Yes. So? That’s also true for Twitter, Facebook and reddit. Oh, and hey – everyone is on Google+, too. Again – so? “Everyone is doing it” has never been a good reason for anything.

I have several websites and blogs, accounts on LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter and reddit – there’s no reason for me to maintain yet another data-sucking account, even if many other people think it’s cool.

So, I deleted my Google+ account. I find that having one less Google service is a good idea. I think it’s time for me to limit my Google exposure. Where there are substitutes – I’ll happily use them. Where there aren’t any – I’ll tread carefully.

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TL;DR: I deleted my Google+ account. Why? Because FUCK YOU, that’s why.