Google Maps renames “Lake Ontario” to “Lake America” even faster than US government

Google rolled out the Lake America change on Saturday, while the official US government maps are still waiting.

arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/08/google-maps-renames-lake-ontario-to-lake-america-even-faster-than-us-government/

i wonder how many canadians that were sitting on the fence about de-googling are no longer sitting on that fence…

1. start by changing your default search, google ai overviews made it useless anyways. check out duck duck go or startpage

2. stop using google spyware browser (chrome and all chrome builds) and switch to firefox (or preferably a privacy focused fork, i.e. waterfox, librewolf

3. learn linux… quit windows

4. self-host your own server and run your own localized, private apps, immich instead of google photos, vaultwarden instead of password manager, jellyfin instead of netflix, etc.

5.???

6. profit!!!

Duckduckgo is backed by microsoft/bing which they have a contract with.

Startpage is the duckduck alternative that uses google, its unknown wether they have a contract.

These places are still better then google/bing themselves but people often wrongfully assume that they provide a privacy oriented service.

If you really want to go anticorporate you can host your own searxng, which still by default uses results from google and bing but can be configured to use any on your preference and its code open to verify that they do not give exclusive permission to certain paying corporations.

Using searxng it can happen that some google result could not be retrieved because of api limits… one has to wonder why Startpage does not have those limits.

qwant together with ecosia are working on establishing a fully independent search index but at this point it is really in its early days, with focus on France and Germany.