I'm one of these people who have started to boycott some big companies including Google as I find the way they handle things, and specifically the privacy concerns to be too much to justify using their probably superior services to their competitors.
Same here. I've tried to get off google/chrome as much as humanly possible. If you haven't tried the Brave browser I'd highly recommend it. I switched to that recently and still use DuckDuck as the search engine. Google is hands down the best browser / search engine, so sometimes using it is a necessary evil though of course.
OP- the mods do a ton here. The amount of work many of them do here is insane (esp global mods like Hilarious). They deserve every satoshi.