GoKawiilPankil Shah / Android Authority
My home screen has had the same Google widgets for as long as I can remember — Search, Weather, Calendar, Keep, and Discover. It’s easy to overlook, but every one of these widgets does two jobs — one for me, one for Google. The weather widget knows where I am. The search widget knows what I’m curious about. Discover knows what keeps me scrolling. You get the idea. None of this is accidental, of course.
So I decided to find out what would actually happen if I swapped all of them for privacy-focused alternatives. Spoiler: a few switches were painless, but a couple didn’t stick.
Which Google widget would you find hardest to replace? 67 votes Google Search 36 % Google Weather 12 % Google Calendar 19 % Google Keep 22 % Google Discover 10 % Other (let us know in the comments) 0 %
Brave Search over Google Search
Megan Ellis / Android Authority
Google Search is one of those widgets I’ve used ever since my first Android phone (HTC One M8, if you’re curious). Switching away, though, wasn’t nearly as difficult as I thought. I went with Brave Search because I was already using Brave as my default browser, and the short version is that it turned out to be better than Google Search in almost every way.
The most obvious win here was in what was missing. Unlike Google, Brave doesn’t personalize results, so the results I was seeing had nothing to do with my past activity. That also meant I wasn’t seeing ads about a product after searching for it once out of curiosity. Most importantly, none of this came at the cost of search quality.
Another big bonus was AI overviews, or rather, the lack of them. Yes, Brave Search has its own version, but you can turn it off from settings. I also like how Brave’s search widget isn’t locked to a single search engine. So if you prefer DuckDuckGo, Ecosia, or something else, you can switch.
Breezy Weather over Google Weather
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