Despite all the negativity here, Google is a decent choice. They take security seriously (TFA, PFS), offer clients for major platforms, and have the infrastructure.
Here's the reality of the situation:
- If the service gives me recommendations, that's not something you could easily roll yourself. There's always some sort of dependency, like Solr or ElasticSearch that you'd have to set up. I don't have the time or motivation to stand that nonsense up on my own VPS.
- I would almost guarantee that Keep or Evernote are more reliable than anything I could stand up on my own crummy VPS.
- Anything I could build probably doesn't have its own syncing app that works properly offline.
- Whatever I need to jot down probably doesn't even need half the security that the services out there provide. Do I really care if the list of movies that I want to watch on Netflix gets leaked to the public? Meh.
- It's unlikely that any home-grown or OSS solution would have the rigorous polish of Keep or Evernote.