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Comment by enterabdazer | Hacker News Reader

I felt the same about Google alternatives up until about 3 months ago. Google's results have been declining in quality for a decade, with much more rapid decline over the past year or three.

Google's results are uglier and blatantly revenue based. They have now lapsed behind DuckDuckGo in usefulness for me. I fall back to Google a few times per week, with inconsistent results when I need a "second opinion."

I'd suggest giving DDG another try.

I plan to remove Google from my life this year, at least as a central dependency. Search is already behind me. Mail, calendars, docs, and drive will be taken care of throughout the year. And my Android phone will be replaced with an iPhone.

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Do you (or anyone else) have any recommendations for an email service? I've cut pretty much everything Google out of my life, minus Gmail, mostly due to not wanting to go through all the trouble of transferring everything over to a service that I end up not liking. I've heard ProtonMail is good, but other than that, I'm not sure.

I've used Fastmail for many years now, and I have nothing but good things to say about the service. In particular, it's insane how well notifications work in Fastmail, especially compared to Gmail (which I use at work). (Honestly, you'd think Fastmail was the giant multi-billion-dollar super-advanced tech company, if you look at the quality of their email experience vs. Gmail.)

However, some folks are a little spooked by the privacy implications of it being ran out of Australia, so be sure to research that if you're interested in Fastmail.

I'm leaning toward Tutanota, but I can't claim to have experience with them yet.

Proton has appeared somewhat bumpy to me -- I can't say for sure why, but they give me some spidey tingles.

Migrating / transferring is indeed a problem. I would suggest using Google Takeout, their data export tool, and permanently archiving your data with a third party service and / or physical backups. See https://takeout.google.com/. You probably won't be able to import into your new provider.

Thanks for this, I didn't realize you can actually export all your data from Google.

If you own a domain through Gandi (possibly others) you get email included for free. This is what I use. I don’t know why I don’t see this recommended more often?

I would do this through bluehost but it just straight up doesn't work. No matter the tutorials followed or time spent with support, I can't receive emails at my domain.

Migadu is great because they bill based on emails sent rather than billing by how many accounts or domains you have.

ProtonMail isn’t supported by iOS’s default mail app, which for me personally meant I hardly used it. It’s just too much hassle for everyday email.

I ended up trying fastmail and found the transition much easier.

Google always says x many results and when you click page 5 6 or some it is usually empty... not as many results as displayed on first page

Done. Let's see how it works out.

Er, who do you think Apple pays for search on iPhones?

Pretty sure google pays them for search

Google pays them to be default search engine. Users do have option to switch.

My bad, thanks for the catch.

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