Exactly. I tried for a while to stop using Google services, concerned by how much of my information they control, and I found that it was extremely impractical.

Exactly. I tried for a while to stop using Google services, concerned by how much of my information they control, and I found that it was extremely impractical. Google is no longer my default search engine (unless I'm using Chrome on my netbook) but I often need to use it anyways - it just gets better results than the competition for a lot of things. Gmail is simply the best e-mail solution for me - maybe it's just because I'm used to it but I was unable to get behind any of the competitors or open source options. I typically use Analytics on all my sites, although that might be changing soon. Same with AdSense. tl;dr I don't not trust them enough to stop using their services completely, which I simply found too extremely impractical to do.