Google search is still occasionally better than DDG, but it's never more than an !g away if I'm unhappy with DDG.
What are all these services Google provides people feel are irreplaceable? I don't get it. They're an advertising company with big bags of money to let smart people noodle around on their pet projects. Nice company to work for (if you aren't morally opposed to advertising), but I've never found the products appealing.
As for Gmail that was a recent switch. I'm currently forwarding all mail to my iCloud account and using that. As I rarely use the Gmail web app (I only use desktop/mobile apps to access mail) the switch has been seamless.
For me the final straw was looking at my 'activity' page on Google. Despite having turned it off web history was on. I presume they asked me to click something someday and I wasn't careful enough but that was very annoying. They've also changed the web history interface to make it pretty complicated to figure out how to delete everything. I then noticed they had location tracking on (which I also specifically disabled in the past). I couldn't find a way to delete all of that and had to delete each record individually.
Google wants to do some cool stuff with all this data but it certainly isn't doing anything that makes it worth it for me to give up my privacy.
Google search is a bit harder. I use DDG by default but will still use Google sometimes.
The only thing I can think of is the initial setup I had to do to get everything done, but that's a few hours of work and it's here now. Using it for years without having to do anything. Some friends of mine use it, and my family, and nobody complains. Ever.
