Users Pledge to Turn to New Search Engine After Google Calendar Scraps Heritage Events Like 'Black History Month': 'Pathetic'

Google Calendar users are furious after discovering events like Black History Month, Pride Month, Indigenous Peoples' Month, and Holocaust Remembrance Day have been quietly removed from default settings.

Now many are pledging to abandon Google altogether.

"BOYCOTT GOOGLE," wrote one outraged X user.

"Time to find a new search engine," Another declared.

Others pledged to switch to Yahoo and Bing instead.

"And this is why I f*** with @bing," one person tweeted.

"Pathetic," another simply put it.

Google defended the decision and explained that the company previously added cultural moments manually but found the process unsustainable.

"For over a decade we've worked with timeanddate.com to show public holidays and national observances in Google Calendar," spokesperson Madison Cushman Veld told The Verge. "Some years ago, the Calendar team started manually adding a broader set of cultural moments in a wide number of countries around the world.

"We got feedback that some other events and countries were missing—and maintaining hundreds of moments manually and consistently globally wasn't scalable or sustainable. So in mid-2024, we returned to showing only public holidays and national observances from timeanddate.com globally, while allowing users to manually add other important moments."

Despite Google's explanation, the move is being seen as part of a broader rollback of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives. The company has removed DEI hiring goals and scrubbed related mentions from its annual report amid Trump's crusade to dismantle DEI programs in both the federal government and private sector.

In his first week, Trump signed executive orders that placed DEI employees on leave and eliminated related programs across federal agencies. He also directed the Justice Department to identify companies engaging in "illegal discrimination and preferences," including DEI efforts.