Last week, rapper Cassper Nyovest released a new music video which trended on Twitter all day.
Like the social media-savvy millennial I am, I immediately wanted to watch the video so I could catch up on what everyone was going on about. But I couldn't head to YouTube to watch it because I was on a Google ban. Just what does Google have to do with YouTube? Google owns YouTube.
This Google ban was a challenge from my editors: can you survive a week without Google products, they asked. I didn't need to even attempt it to know that the answer was a clear "no". So a week was negotiated down to two days. I barely lasted one.
Part of the problem is that many of us don't realise just how reliant we are on certain services until we can no longer use them. My web browser of choice - on my work and personal computers as well as my smartphone - is Google Chrome.
This is mostly because it's a sophisticated and easy-to-use browser, but also partly because I've used it for so long I couldn't be bothered to form a new bond with a different web browser, be it Microsoft's Internet Explorer (not even if you put a gun to my temple and forced me to use it) or Mozilla Firefox (only an option when I've run out of free articles to read on my favourite websites).
Plus, Chrome has all my passwords and login details, which is as convenient as it is creepy. On Apple devices, the in-house web browser is Safari, but search for anything and you'll find the default engine is - you guessed it - Google.
Bloomberg may have reported last week that Microsoft's search engine, Bing, is no longer seen as a joke in the tech world, but it definitely lacks the "cool" vibe of Google. And when it comes to the business of web searching, Google owns that space - the product name is now also recognised as a verb by dictionaries.
As someone who drank the Google Kool-Aid many years ago, I didn't even bother to try a different search engine. Instead, I just did what some of our parents do - I asked other people to google things for me. Google gets about 63,000 searches a second, so pretty much anyone with internet access is using Google to verify or find information. Problem solved.
Avoiding Google Maps and Waze (the Israeli navigation app was bought by the US giant six years ago for almost $1bn) wasn't difficult for me because I don't have a car and Uber almost everywhere. Another thing to avoid was Gmail, but that worked in my favour because it gave me a legitimate excuse for not responding to e-mails.
Because Google isn't the only US tech superpower that owns my soul, avoiding the company's cloud service, Google Drive, was easy. Had I been asked to stay off Apple's iCloud service, you would be reading my short little obituary instead.
It wasn't as easy to stop using Google Home, a smart speaker that connects to your Wi-Fi and uses Google Assistant to do simple things for you faster than you can do them yourself, such as playing music, adjusting speaker volume, setting alarms, making phone calls and googling information. So instead of saying "Google, switch off my 5.45am alarm", I had to pick up my phone and do it myself. Hard work.
The biggest challenge about a Google-free diet was in managing my diary - I put everything in my Google calendar. And as we know, days can get so busy that it's easy to forget important things. For those who can't afford assistants, Google Calendar and services like it are the closest we can get.
What did a day without Google teach me? Nothing I didn't already know - tech companies and services have far too much information on us.
It's as though we are voluntarily living in a Black Mirror episode or in George Orwell's 1984. For some, however, the convenience outweighs the pitfalls (privacy isn't what it used to be) - but at what cost?
• Boshomane Tsotetsi is editor of Lifestyle.
