I’m always offended when people use “that search engine that starts with a G” as a verb, like there isn’t another option. Yes, that’s the generic term “search engine”.
There used to be several specialized search engines that you could use for specific tasks. I’ve hated G since they bought out Altavista and made usenet virtually unsearchable.
DuckDuckGo, Startpage “the world’s most private search engine” according to them, Dogpile (which is a search aggregator and probably does use the G as part of their search function) , Ask (which used to be “ask Jeeves”) and many more.
I never utter that word. If I must speak of it directly (shudder) I use the term “Gargoyle”.
As in “Gargoyle is Evil”
;’}
It’s not that there isn’t an alternative, it’s that they’ve captured the mind space. Like when we used to Xerox things no matter who made the copier. Of course that also shows that these conditions are temporary. Xerox fell. Google will at some point.