Well:
All it would take is a website which works well, is not complex and overcrowded, and an e-mail service that allows significant amount of storage without ads at the bottom of each e-mail and a clean interface to boot.
There is a bunch of them out there (comfortable free mailers and well-working searching engines), that's why I was asking. Which alternatives did you actually check?
-Tuxman
Well, I'm not necessarily required to report to you, but I will gladly provide some examples of places I've checked.
Here is a list of providers, in the following format
Name Clutter Relevance Formatting Privacy Notes (scale of 1-5, 1 being bad, 5 being good) also note that not all fields will be populated
Google 5 5 5 2
Yahoo 1 4 3 ?
Dogpile 3 3 4 n/a
altavista 4 4 4 3 "There are, however, a few instances where we do collect personally identifiable information in order to fulfill your request. Click here for examples of these instances."
bing 3 5 3 4
mamma 5 3 4 ? -- doesn't really work very well (video search completely broken)
I'm sure there are more, other search engines are improving vastly lately, so I have high hopes a great replacement for google soon enough.
I'd prefer it if there were different search engines with specialized content, that grouped it well. Google attempts this with certain custom searches, but ultimately no content control makes it so that most results are still crap. It's also difficult for a search engine to be able to determine which links are good/bad, since people searching for something don't generally know what is best and what isn't.
Of course people seem to be forgetting that this is just what capitalism is all about. It's not really surprising behaviour
Of course, and this is why the ground is ripe for a good competitor, all in the nature of good, healthy capitalism.