Background: Google is an advertising company. They make the vast majority of their revenue by harvesting and selling your personal data to advertisers. They have become more and more unethical and sometimes illegal about this activity over time, and show no signs of stopping that trend any time soon. A list of events is well beyond the scope of this document, but I can confirm the trend is decades old now and the list is very long.
First I will list Search replacement, then Chrome replacements, then go through the other services you probably want to replace.
For the last item there are three major approaches available - switch to Apple iCloud, switch to Microsoft 365, and/or replace individual services.
Recommendations (and anti-recommendations) will have a short description of the company providing the service and then relevant links.
I’ll also be listing DO NOT recommendations because there are some options out there that I do not recommend due to being just as unethical or even more unethical than Google.
Most web browsers have a setting where you can select an alternative search provider. There are several options, but I only recommend one:
Note: If you are using Chrome to manage account passwords, please see Thorfi’s Password Manager comment for recommendations on replacements.
DO NOT recommend:
Apple is a for profit global mega corporation (HQ in the USA), most income is from hardware sales to end consumers. I do use Apple hardware and their iCloud services and recommend them. Almost the entirety of Apple revenue comes from end users buying their hardware and secondarily from icloud services, and as a result their motivation to keep your data secure and private is very high.
They have robust security and privacy embedded throughout their entire product suite as a result, including Advanced Data Protection for iCloud where they cannot access your data at all from their side, if you wish to turn that on.
Unfortunately that does come at a cost of being inside their walled garden, and their hardware is a long way from the cheapest option (although their hardware is also supported for the longest time after release by a factor of about two to three).
Microsoft is a for profit global megacorporation (HQ in the USA), most income is from software and services sales to corporations.
They are actually good about privacy and security but are very Enterprise/Corporate focused and not very good at writing documentation for non-technical people. Even their documentation for technical people is often not great.
However, their M365 plans are relatively affordable, and if you need the MS Office Suite (because they are unfortunately an effective monopoly) then this is one of the cheaper ways to get it as well as their cloud hosted services.
This is a list of other services with replacement recommendations that are not Apple or Microsoft.
This is genuinely hard to replace as a viewer because content creators do not always multi-platform their content due to time and money reasons. That said, there are alternative platforms where some content creators stream and/or upload their content.