[kiran-rao]

Have you found any inconveniences in day to day life? Google provides so much information in everyday life (weather, restaurant reviews, calendar, who was the president in 1936, etc) that I would be significantly slower living my life.

[Aromasin]

Not anything significant to be honest. There are alternative applications and hardware for almost everything nowadays. Convincing people that we need devices all running in the same ecosystem was one of the lasting legacy's of Steve Jobs that I realised wasn't really true in reality.

For searches I occasionally might have to check Google for a niche search term, but Duck.com returns the right thing for 95% of my queries. In terms of hardware, a Pixel phone, Fire tablet, Surface Book laptop, and Windows desktop fulfil all my needs, with only important docs synched with Dropbox and the rest stored on a couple of flash drives I have on me 24/7. For home automation I made my own using a Raspberry Pi and a bunch of ESP8266's, which does basically everything that big brand alternatives do and more (I can water my plants from my bed!) For software I use Outlook for emails and calendar, OpenOffice for word processing, Prezi for presentations, and admittedly mainly Google Sheets for that kind of data handling, as it's good for collaborating which is the only thing I ever use it for. Trip Advisor is great for reviews. BBC weather is all I use for checking that.

Nothing is slower I've found. I just had to experiment with what worked for me, and get the right 'flow' of using them, which I suppose took a few weeks to iron out. The great thing is that doing it this way means I can adapt to my needs, not be forced into using a suite that might not cater to them. It also means most importantly that, for the most part, I don't get snooped on!

[addicted]

Honestly, I wonder if that slight delay in finding out who was President in 1963 would have a material negative impact on my life. I suspect not. At the same time, I have a feeling that slowness may have an actual measurable positive impact on my life. A lot of what I do now is frankly pointless and jt may help me focus on more useful things.

[everdrive]

The weather problem has been a surprising one. It seems that most weather websites are really terrible. All I ever want to know is the hourly temperature, and hourly precipitation. Google does this easily with a query against "weather [zipcode]". Other services do technically provide this information, but it always seems to be obfuscated, or otherwise hard to obtain.

[edit]

Here is a very amateurish graphic depicting the difference.

https://imgur.com/SofeKKN

[keawade]

I'm not sure what the problem is as DDG does that as well.

I just tried searching "weather [zipcode]" on DDG and the first result is a card with current weather info for that zipcode from DarkSky. The feature is very similar to Google's weather card.

[asdff]

You can bookmark that weather.gov page and once you start glancing at it regularly you know what to look for quickly. For instance the Google precip graph and the green graph towards the bottom are the exact same, google's is just cuter. You can also turn on and off graph elements and bookmark that version of the page if you didn't care about sky cover or whatever.

For mobile I use darksky. Gives you hourly precip chance as well as a detailed look at the hour ahead (specifically, the intensity of the rain not whether or not it will happen), but importantly it will push a notification if it's going to rain in x minutes. There are a couple other handy features, and since it's paid it's free of ads. Pretty nice if you bike or walk regularly for commuting. It's scary accurate in my experience; if it says it's going to rain in 8 minutes and stop 13 minutes later, that's exactly what's going to happen.

[everdrive]

I'll check out darksky.

And, I concede all your points about bookmarking after turning off all the configs. I just wish the pretty, simple, and easy to retrieve version were more common.

[tsomctl]

Check out www.weather.gov. There should be a link for the 3 day history on the forecast page of your location.

[PenguinCoder]

https://www.weather.gov/ and enter your zipcode into the search box on the left. Book mark the resulting page.

Simple, no frills, accurate information.

[NikkiA]

ddg'ing wundergound [zipcode] seems to be about perfect for me:

https://i.imgur.com/NfXUOf4.png

[godshatter]

If Google shut down operations tomorrow, do you really think you would be unable to find information on the weather, restaurant reviews, use a calendar, or find out who the president was in 1936? Other than the calendar, it's not like they actually keep this information anywhere. Just links to it. I'm guessing that three years or so later you'd be hard-pressed to remember why you thought Google was the only choice for this.

[jjulius]

>... I would be significantly slower living my life.

Is that a bad thing?