Here in the UK Google has about 90% of the search market, with Bing and Yahoo taking up the majority of the remaining 10%. Why is it so high? Probably because people have Google toolbars installed and many people seem to think that Google is the internet. many people access everything on Google. I recently designed a new site for someone. They said it wasn't yet live when it was. Why? Because it had not yet got indexed by google and the client thought the only way to access the internet via Google (the site was indesed a few days later and everything was fine) So anyway I tried before to get out of the habit of doing my personal searches with Google and tried to use Bing or yahoo instead. Trouble was I kept defaulting back to the Big G. However when I recently updated my computer, upgrading to Windows 8 I decided this was my big chance - no Google toolbars and i'll go back to using Internet Explorer. How has it gone? Fine. I discover I don't hardly miss Google at all. I've only used Google search when checking on search rankings and then I do it in a separate browser (opera) with no cookies being saved (did I say - one of my reasons for wanting to get away from google search was to try to stop them tracking me!) Have you tried to wean yourself away from Google search? and if so with what results?
I've never tried to necessarily wean myself away from using Google Search but I've used Bing quite a bit lately and I'm in the same boat as you. If I don't find what I need using Bing in a matter of a minute I end up back at Google to perform my self. I can't decide if I actually find Bing inferior to Google or if it's just that I'm a creature of habit and Google is what I'm used to.
yes, I quit google search a couple months back. I also changed it on the family kindle and laptop We all love the bing pictures, and find bing every bit as good as google for every day searches. Very complicated (long tail) searches are not always so good, so then I use duckduckgo. I know what pages are on my sites, but google, either deliberately, or by accident can't seem to place them where they should be. My sites are not banned, but the scrapers always seem to get the higher listings. Until google sort this out, they won't get my families search traffic.
What's funny hearing you say that, my wife and I got some virus online that corrupted our Google Search engine, but then we started using swagbucks.com. I have had just as good searches from that and I get paid to search the net. So after the virus was gone, we never looked back at Google. Only reason why I rely on it is for my website to be optimized. But I am strongly trying to focus my business on the social network and less on SEO.
If I search for something important, I use all three major search engines. However, I definitely use Google more than others. I don't really mind the "they are tracking us" part. It's not for some kind of an evil purpose, but to better their search engine.
Man I feel your pain... Here in America, I think it's 70% of search traffic. A few months back, I used Bing for a while and even earned a bunch of points for using them... But their search engine is weird and doesn't always show the stuff I need. Google puts just what I need on the first page... I even have them as my home page.. SMH.. I just hate that we've allowed them to become the monster that they are. They provide great services but they control the internet.. I'm even more anti-Google because they recently deleted my youtube account
If you don't like the tracking part you can use dogpile which will give result from all 3 search engine.