Why?

In today’s surveilance society google knows an awful lot about you. A lot. It knows what you’re searching for, it knows who your contacts are, it know what your emails contain, it knows where you are and where you are going at all times.

In the shadows, it’s constantly gathering information about you.
You have zero privacy. The surveilance machine is watching you.
Today it’s showing you ads based on the vast amount of info it has on you. Tomorrow? Who knows.

I believe it’s an worthy goal to minimize, and if possible remove big brother google from your life.
It may sound overwhelming and you may need to do this in stages, but it’s achievable and IMHO a worthy goal. Below a list of how to get rid/replace all big google Services that you might use.

This one is simple: Use DuckDuckGo
You may think that the google search results are better (and this may have been true at some point in the past) but for most intents and purposes DDG gets the job done. And it won’t spy on you.

Browser

Chrome is part of the big brother surveilance machine.

Use Firefox.
On top of Firefox, as plugins, use: Privacy Badger, HTTPS Everywhere, Cookie Autodelete and uBlock Origin

Since we’re here, also use a VPN to protect youself from another big brother, your Internet Service Provider. Good VPN services: Mullvad or Proton

Phone

Get rid of your Android phone. No seriously. Throw that thing in the trash. An iPhone is marginally better, but only marginally and it’s a spying machine.
You can go with a dumb phone (a Nokia 225 or 6300 should be close enough) or go with a phone that supports GrapheneOs or CalyxOS.
Also keep in mind that AOSP is different from Android (and usually what’s bad about Android phones is all the crapware and spyware that gets installed on them - by vendors and by google directly or indirectly).

Keep in mind that even with a dumb phone the big big brother (ie the government) is going to know where you are at all times though the cell tower network (your phone constantly talls to the cell towers, and big big brother logs everything). If not having a phone is something you can realistically get away with go for it. As a stategy for being reacheable in case of emergencies, a one-way pager should work.

Maps

An OpenStreetMap based app, AppleMaps or a dedicated GPS Unit (eg TomTom). As with search, there used to be a huge difference between google Maps and other maps solutions. Not anymore.

Operating System

Just use Linux. Don’t bother with experiments like ChromeOs

Mail

Gmail is the hardest service to replace, not because of how hard it is to switch but because how hard it is to transition everything to a new mailbox and to update all the places where you gave them your email address + let everyone know about your new address.

For backing up: you can use Thunderbird with ImportExportTools to dump all your mail from Gmail via IMAP. Depending on how old your account is this is going to take a while but it’s doable.

With the emails locally you can write a small python script to extract all the domains that you’ve ever sent or received emails from. Use this to go ahead and update your email address. The same way you can extract all the email addresses you’ve ever chatted to and send them an email informing them about your new address.

It’s also recommended that once you start using a new email address you still forward all emails that hit Gmail to your new address for a while. Just to make sure you didn’t miss anything.

As far as where to host your new email address, use a reputable privacy focused service like ProtonMail - easy option, host it yourself - hard option or use something that allows you to host it yourself but does most of the legwork for you (eg AWS Workmail). Hosting it yourself had the advantage of maximum flexibility in the future with the big downside that it’s a lot of work and it’s sort of hard to get right (ie to deliver and receive email from “big” email providers and not be marked as spam)