> .. the last thing I still use is the search, which still feels light weight and easy to use.

If you haven't, you should really give DuckDuckGo [1] a shot. I used Google's search for the longest time, and finally just forced myself to switch to DDG this summer. It was rough for a while, but either I've gotten used to their search algorithm / results, or the results have gotten better. I hardly ever have to use Google's search to find anything anymore.

[1] https://duckduckgo.com/?q=duckduckgo

DDG's search results are terrible for me most of the time.

Though DDG as a frontend is quite nice. I use the bang shortcuts all the time. It's actually a better frontend to google's search than google's search itself: I can easily switch between google France results (which emphasize french speaking pages) and normal google results, something that I haven't been able to do in years since google.com/ncr (no country redirect) no longer works when you're logged in with a user account.

Overall I love the idea of DDG's bangs. I've found many of them useful and you can infer those you don't know easily (if !a is amazon.com, then !afr is amazon.fr; !hn is very useful as well!)

I switched to DDG a year ago; it was painless. I think I have gone back to Google for a search maybe twice.

I still use Google Image Search, though that's kind of a different beast.

For me DDG is sometimes okay. Most of the time though, I want to be in the bubble google places me in. DDG gives me results for someone searching for X. Google gives me the X I want.

One thing that kills me is how terrible DDG is at parsing an address. If the street is misspelled at all you get nothing but real estate listings but if it's correct it shows a ghetto gif map from MapQuest :(

If you just want a map, "!map <address>" will send you to google maps with that address.

Yeah I switched my domain to Google Apps this year and somewhat regret it. It is pretty clear that Google Apps might work, but clearly it is made for the guy that is being paid to deal with its interface and can spend hours if not days just getting basic things working as he tries to figure out the docs (most all public discussions of course talk about the old control panel and link are busted etc) when he runs into a problem. And as a bonus anyone else notice how the POP interface fails to implement a core "feature" of pop. When using POP with google apps and you try to delete an email it doesn't actually get deleted. tricky tricky