What happens when you can no longer 'Google it'

Several millions of users faced issues on Monday when a blackout at Google saw almost all of their services - Gmail, Maps, Youtube, Meet, and many others - disrupted. The blackout, which lasted for around three-quarters of an hour, had users across the world frustrated, with the outage preventing users from logging into their respective Google accounts.

Reports of disruptions on Gmail were reported on Tuesday as well, lasting for about 2.5 hours, following which services were restored.

Read | Gmail service disrupted in fresh Google mishap; restored after 2 hours

The recent disruptions to the world's largest cloud-based giant have brought to light users' overreliance on the platform's services, and with most using the Google search engine and browser, Google Chrome, they were left clueless when looking for alternate options.

It's always better to be prepared, so here's a list of alternate search engines, browsers, emails, and cloud platforms that you can use or potentially even switch to before Google's next outage:

Search Engines | DuckDuckGo, SwissCows, Bing

When it comes to privacy, very few search engines offer better privacy than DuckDuckGo. Unlike Google, DuckDuckGo does not profile its users, ensuring that every user gets the same results for a given search input. Back in July, internet service providers (ISPs) Airtel and Jio had briefly blocked the US-based search engine.

SwissCows is a Swiss search engine, that's also renowned for its data privacy. Given that they store no user data, there is no data trail left behind.

Bing, of course, is the most popular alternative and has been around since 2009. Bing, unlike the other two mentioned above, offers little in terms of privacy but is nonetheless quite popular.

Also Read | Google’s apps crash in worldwide outage

Browsers | Mozilla Firefox, Brave, Microsoft Edge

Mozilla Firefox, by far one of the most popular alternatives to Google Chrome, is an open-source browser that has been around since 2002.

Brave, a more private and secure alternative, is known for its ability to block ads and prevent cookies from tracking and obtaining data from search results and webpages that users visit.

If you're a Windows user, the sight of Microsoft Edge's icon pinned on the taskbar is nothing short of familiar. The browser since it's rebranding from Internet Explorer to Edge in 2015, is among the top five most used browsers in the world.

Email | Yahoo, Protonmail, Outlook

Look no further than Yahoo the next time Gmail is down. Yahoo was the most popular email service until the rise of Gmail but has declined in popularity over the years. Yahoo's offer of 1 terabyte's worth of space continues to attract users to their platform.

Protonmail was launched in 2013 as an alternative to Google, emerging as one of the first few mail services to offer end-to-end encryption. Being a Swiss-based company, they adhere to the country's strict data privacy laws. Protonmail, however, only offers 500 megabytes worth of space to new users, following which they will have to pay for more space.

Outlook, the Microsoft owned email service is quite popular among working professionals. When it comes to space, however, it offers only 5 GB to Gmail's 15 GB, although that's still better than some of its competitors.

Cloud | OneDrive, Dropbox, Sync

Microsoft's OneDrive offers 5 GB of space for free, with options to buy more space either separately or with an Office 365 subscriptions.

Dropbox has for long been one of the most popular alternatives to Google Drive, They presently offer 2GB of space free of cost and offer more space through paid plans.

Yahoo, as mentioned earlier, offers a whopping 1TB's worth of space for free, making it the best alternative to Google Drive. Yahoo, which doesn't have a cloud platform like Dropbox or Drive, offers this space to all Yahoo Mail users and allows you to connect your address to other cloud platforms and upload your files there.