Assuming you aren't spending $$$ on a premium domain, I feel like $1/month on a domain is a pretty small price to pay for the freedom to move email providers as needed.

Honest question for people in this thread:

Would you pay a subscription to use Firefox, and if no, what would you propose as a means of sustaining Firefox's professional development budget if they lose Google's Monopoly money?

You guys know you don't have to follow businesses on social media, right‽ Like, it's all just different flavors of their own advertisements, and you can just not interact.

gestures vaguely in a direction

Ehh, people, you know?

harmlessdomain.com is available - I expect to see it registered by tomorrow or I'm never trusting a stranger on the internet ever again!

You're hired!

The roles I've hired for require formal presentation of work/studies with a certain level of attention to detail, and more internal politics than I care to admit.

So while its never the sole deciding factor in a resume I do put weight on spelling, formatting, and general professionalism. If your email is firekitten22@aol.com, or jon@sirfapsalot.net I'm not immediately binning it, but you are starting from a disadvantage. stephanie@harmlessdomain.com is always gonna be just fine though.

To add, not deleted stuff is what my favorite lawyers call "discoverable". Not sure how many lawyers Meta has but I'm betting at least one of them is reminding them deleting stuff is a good thing.

1. People don't like the idea of paying for stuff they're used to getting for free

2. Privacy Guides does not include Kagi in their recommendations because an account is required in order to search, despite it being against their privacy policy to log, and despite the fact that they allow "no-log" VPNs, messaging apps, etc. which all require accounts. They're starting to soften to Kagi with their new Privacy Pass feature, however they seem hung up on the fact you need an account to generate private tokens. Accounts can be made with burner emails and paid with crypto.

3. Kagi leadership has had some controversial opinions on search censorship (they're fairly blanket opposed to it) and other social issue in the past

4. In addition to search, Kagi offers AI tools, which is a turn-off for a lot of people

To me, none of these things are deal breakers, but some folks are eager for an excuse to complain.

OP has a poodle as well, which means either hair cuts at home or regular grooming. Many groomers keep dogs in crates between wash and cut, which is a lot easier on the dog if they consider crates safe.

And, 12h later, I checked back and the polar bear result is gone. Either it was a glitch in the matrix or the Kagi team has eyes everywhere.

I mean sure, if you ignore the first 20 or so relevant links before that, you're right, that one does show up when searching for monkey (proof)

You can add literally any other word to the search and that one result disappears. Even bear monkey. Regardless of the fact that no one searches for just the word monkey, I find Kagi's rankings consistently prioritize more quality and informative content.

Comparing to other search engines, Google is obsessed with the movie The Monkey, Bing really wants you to watch Monkey Baby Bon Bon live what looks like a nightmare life, Brave gives an OK mix of content, still with a The Monkey focus, and Kagi gives you a really solid mix of results across the monkey spectrum for such a vague query (plus one whole link to an article about polar bears).

If the polar bear result specifically bothers you, you can report it to Kagi and I'm sure they'll fix it. I'm still happy with my choice though.

Edit: decided to check DDG as well - I'd written it off in my head as just Bing, but the results were slightly different - the Monkey Bon Bon nightmare fuel was pretty significantly demoted, and for better or worse, DDG was blissfully unaware of the movie The Monkey. Not a bad result overall.