I'll be honest. Google Search is better for certain things. For example it's nice getting those little boxes at the top of the page that answer your question without you even needing to follow a link but I can afford the extra few seconds it takes to click a link every now and then in exchange for better privacy and results that aren't manipulated based on data the search engine holds on me.
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.
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.