100% not true.

And controlling content, via control of search results; as well as selling trend data, etc....

Don't forget telemetrics of the masses. You want to know traffic, don't you?

Google thinks BIG. ...Orwellian Big.

Yes but the USPTO overhaul changed from "first to invent" (i.e. personal notes and intent to file) into "first to file".

A small inventor doesn't stand a legal chance against a large corp who mysteriously begins implementing an idea.
Coincidences..

Then there is attorney-client privilege and doctor-patient confidentiality.
But those already went out the window with the NSA.

Linux Mint 18 was released last week, that is the upgrade path I went.

At home I lived dangerously and did it live via apt-get, at work I took the opportunity to totally redo my machine, same with the laptop I use for teaching and doing my own homework

If your use case doesn't demand windows, why not really upgrade and Switch?

https://linuxmint.com/download.php

Actually Google's is based on selling your information to people who then target you with ads, obnoxious pushy marketing and spam - and selling ads.

I specifically block all Google domains using Little Snitch. I'm not saying there aren't others out there just as bad if not worse, but they're particularly obnoxious to me - they more or less invented "big data" as it has come to exist today.

+1 for Little Snitch.

Takes a day or two to train but after that it becomes very unobtrusive and does what it's supposed to do.

If you want to do it the geek way edit your hosts file.

But then you need to monitor for new domains.

Little Snitch rolls both into one neat little gui.

I installed win 10 on my desktop and it slowed it tremendously mostly because it was constantly reading and writing swap file to my Hard drive. I reverted to win 7 but I ordered a 64 gig micro sd chip for about 15 bucks. When I plugged it in it asked if I wanted to use it for readyboost so I did. I presume that it's the new swap file location. Very crisp computer action the way it should be.

I'm probably behind the curve on this but if you havent tried it's well worth the effort. Maybe W10 would have been tolerable using this setup.

That brings up an interesting point. My laptop has a 32g ssd, that appears not to be used by the operating system.

You may have to turn it on by finding the dialog box in properties. Maybe some of the geeks here can give better instruction...