Apart from Google's Instant Answers. Which have, in the past, captured misleading or flat-out wrong information.
> predatory pricing etc
See Firebase's recent price hike. [0]
Not all Google products are free, Google is not just a search engine. Some start off reasonable, you get invested, and then they suddenly become ridiculously more expensive.
How exactly is what I think is best summarized as "we had a bug in our pricing system that was undercharging a miniscule number of users by an order of magnitude, and when we fixed the bug, they were informed of the price increase and we even gave them ways to mitigate, but their app architecture was terrible which made it difficult or impossible, and then after they raised a stink about it we reduced the cost/credited them enough to be mutually agreeable" as predatory?
That just means you've got to proactively seek out new ideas you're uncomfortable with, and be mindful that not everything can be found on Google. It's not a reason to use a crappy search like Yahoo or Bing (which only indexes 1/10 of the pages Google does: http://www.worldwidewebsize.com/).
> a for profit company becoming the arbiter of truth
Wikipedia is more of an arbiter of truth than Google; so far Google has limited itself to indexing information rather than summarizing or categorizing it.
> predatory pricing etc
Free is predatory? I guess they should be paying users to search, like Bing? http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/get-paid-search-bing-rewards-pr...