I think the first search engine I used was Magellan. Until AltaVista happened. Loved AltaVista, until Hotbot/Inktomi, which was the only one I had trouble letting go of, I think only because of their really clean and minimal UI. Even when Google came along I was one of the few that had a finite number of web sites I used to use that made Google virtually useless to me. The only search engine I use now is DDG.

It was as insane marginalising Google back then as so many other tech fads since then, including IOT, Bitcoin, XP/agile, Netbooks, 3D TVs (remember those?), and so on.

There is an upside to not having used anything Google - to this day I have zero reliance on any single product of theirs.