Moving away from Google

Marco and Gruber shared last week that they both use DuckDuckGo and Fastmail(referral link) instead of Google search and Gmail. Since I just started using both services, here are a few of my thoughts on them.

I previously had Google Apps set up for my domain email (adam@adamsimpson.net). By far the best thing I can say about Fastmail is that I haven't noticed anything different since switching. Fastmail's spam protection, speed, and reliability all seem on par with Google's and I appreciate the superior incentives of Fastmail when it comes to privacy.

It's the same story with DuckDuckGo, I haven't noticed a drop-off in the quality of the search results. One of my favorite features is the ability to send search queries as POST requests instead of GET requests. I love this because it prevents my history from getting polluted with DuckDuckGo pages that have terms in the URL; a little thing for sure, but one I appreciate.

I was skeptical about how happy I would be with things outside of Google's ecosystem, but I've been pleasantly surprised. Fastmail and DuckDuckGo offer a great alternative to Google's apps.