> There are a handful of good alternatives. Use one. Use multiple.
For search at least, unfortunately, the alternatives are pretty questionable. I've been using DuckDuckGo experimentally for a few months now, which is mostly Bing as the backend, with some DDG-specific add-ons and tweaks. I find myself having to use the !g command to rerun the search in Google somewhere around 40% of the time. Some of this is site owners causing the problem: a surprising number of sites block all crawlers in robots.txt, but then whitelist Googlebot and only Googlebot. But even leaving aside those sites, DDG seems to miss a lot of results, and the quality of the first-page results, at least for how I search, is consistently lower.
If you try searching in a language other than English the differences are even larger. I suspect that's because some of the infrastructure and datasets used for Google Translate are also used by search in some form, while Bing doesn't have a similarly solid multilingual stack.
I'd like to see more competition in search, but the barrier to entry to produce a good full-web search engine seems quite high.
(Disclaimer: I'm generally biased in favour of Google)
This logic absolutely doesn't work. The whole "vote with your wallet" attitude only works when a majority of consumers have a concrete choice in the matter. In the current case, even if the entire tech sector decided to "vote with their wallet" and stopped using Google, a phenomenally large amount of users would still be on Google due to partnerships with internet browsers, manufacturers, OEMs and so on.
You need to be honest with yourself. When you say "If you don't like x, don't use it", it doesn't give the person a vote/voice. It's to get them off your back (as if they were on your back in the first place).
There are a handful of good alternatives. Use one. Use multiple.
Until people stop saying "yeah, but those other sites don't give me the same result as Google" then it's going to always be Google.
It's really up to you.