Absolutely. Anyone who doubts Google killed web surfing should try the Marginalia search engine [1]. Unlike Google, Marginalia presents novel and interesting results.
Is Bing not viable? It looks pretty ok to me. DuckDuckGo and Ecosia also lean pretty heavily on Bing and they work fine. If you know how to change your default search engine (and want to), you can pretty easily be Google-search-free nowadays.
Of course the problem is that most people just use the default search engine on their device, and Google has paid big money for being the default. And if you're not interested in tech, why would you bother setting up an alternative one?
> The problem is Google having 90% dominance on the search, without credible competition.
In my experience it gives really bad results for anything remotely specific. If it's just general popular stuff it's fine. But when searching for a very narrowly scoped query, it just gives back generic popular results.
Google basically just surfaces content marketing these days. It killed the blogosphere. Anybody who isn’t promoting their crap full time is invisible now, and so corporations basically generate almost the entirety of the content we get to see now
The problem is Google having 90% dominance on the search, without credible competition.
The problem is that Microsoft Bing never became a viable search engine.
With more diverse Internet, like it was 15 years ago, issues caused by one provider were inconvenience, not a death blow.