In principle, I can't contradict anything in this article with my own experience. The coup de grâce for me came with a cell carrier switch, after which Google

In principle, I can't contradict anything in this article with my own experience. The coup de grâce for me came with a cell carrier switch, after which Google began constantly nagging me to complete captchas when I searched. That annoyance started amplifying all of the other piques I'd had with Google (including progressively less-relevant results as time went on). I found myself constantly using quotes and minuses to get the results I wanted from Google, and appending keywords like "wiki" to prefer specific sources. The day that the realization hit me- that I was really just using Google as an unnecessary entry point for other search engines, all of which had their own perfectly good search interfaces- was the day Google ceased to be my default across all of my platforms. My default "generic" search engine is now Qwant, and if I specifically want Wikipedia or Amazon or eBay or Reddit or anything else, why, it's just a simple drop down away. Level of abstraction removed, and as a bonus, the blasted captchas are gone.