5/29/2024: More ways to fix Google


Three steps to a better Google

Plus: T-Mobile price hikes, a group Google Docs trick, and a record-low iPad price

Photo by Mitchell Luo on Unsplash

Hey there! I’m Jared Newman, a veteran tech journalist, and this is Advisorator, my weekly tech advice newsletter. If someone shared this newsletter with you, consider signing up to get it every Tuesday. Thanks for reading!

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If you feel like Google Search has gotten worse, you’re not alone and not imagining it.

Over the past decade, the company has allowed the ads business to influence product direction, made sponsored listings increasingly difficult to distinguish from regular search results, and—much more recently—inserted AI-written answers atop many search queries, sometimes with laughably poor results. All that’s atop the feeling of being watched that comes from having a tech giant keep an online record of your search history.

But while the default Google Search experience is deteriorating, a better way is possible with a few minutes of setup. Over at the Advisorator website, I’ve published a free three-step guide to getting an improved version of Google, with no sponsored listings, less bloat, and less invasive tracking.

Read the guide: “Three steps to a better Google” →

(Yes, this is a follow-up to last week’s tip on using Google’s new “Web” tab, with even more browser-specific instructions along with extra steps you can take to make Google more tolerable.)

The guide above is free, but think about becoming a paid subscriber! You’ll get in-depth tech features every week, plus bonus deals, more online tutorials, and access to every past newsletter. Subscriptions are a rather reasonable $5 per month or $50 per year, and you can get a free trial to start.


Need to know

T-Mobile price hikes: T-Mobile is raising prices on older plans by as much as $5 per month, per line. The carrier started informing customers last week, with Magenta, One, and Simple Choice plans all affected.

One complicating factor: Between April 2022 and and January 2024, T-Mobile offered “Price Lock” guarantees for some customers, ensuring that their rates would never go up unless they switched plans. While T-Mobile says it will honor that commitment, in years prior it offered a weaker “Un-Contract” promise that merely lets people switch carriers after a price hike without having to pay their final month’s bill. That’s also what it offers to anyone who signed up from January 19 onward. As a result there’s a lot of confusion around whose rates are safe from the latest price hikes.

Either way, the price hike underscores how T-Mobile has become less competitive with AT&T and Verizon, especially without a fourth major carrier to keep it in line. And now it’s acquiring U.S. Cellular as well.

Alexa’s paid upgrade: Sources tell CNBC that Amazon will charge a subscription fee for a more conversational version of Alexa that uses generative AI, similar to ChatGPT. The company previously hinted at charging something for this service, and said the existing version of Alexa would remain free.

The timing for the upgrade is still uncertain, but I’ll be getting out the popcorn when it happens. I’ve been using Google’s Gemini generative AI on a Pixel 8a phone in place of the old Google Assistant, and in my experience it’s worse at many of the things I want a voice assistant to do, such as dictating text messages, playing music, and looking up local business hours. You’d have better luck convincing me to pay to keep the old voice assistants around.


Tip of the moment

A group Google Docs trick: This is kind of silly, but I recently became aware of the Cursor Park as a source of calmer collaborative editing in Google Docs. The idea is to create a holding pen for everyone’s mouse cursors, so they’re not just strewn about the document, making you think that edits are incoming.

Now all we need is a way for me to compulsively highlight various blocks of text as I read without everyone else seeing it happen in real-time. (It’s the best I can do when my favorite fidgety gadgets are out of reach.)


Now try this

Quick text notes on iOS: If you’re into taking notes as plain text or Markdown files, Bebop is just perfect. The app automatically saves files to the folder of your choosing, making it a quick complement to more heavyweight apps like Obsidian. It reminds me of Drafting for Android or Drafts for iOS, but a bit more limited—not necessarily a bad thing. (Via Installer)


Further reading


Spend wisely

The price of Apple’s 10th-gen iPad continues to inch downward. Amazon now has it for $300 when you clip the on-page coupon, down from the newly-reduced regular price of $350. Let the iPad Decision Flowchart be your guide on whether this is the Apple tablet for you.


Thanks for reading!

For folks in the U.S., I hope you had an enjoyable holiday weekend. We’ll be back to the regular Tuesday publishing schedule next week. Got tech questions for me in the meantime? Just reply to this email to get in touch.

Until next week,
Jared

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